NARA San Bruno

I spent most of the afternoon yesterday at NARA's Pacific Region archive in San Bruno. At the outset I'll say that I think I'm more confused now, having gone to the archive, than before, but we'll get to that.

NARA San Bruno is a windowless space in an obscure federal building, sandwiched between a park and a newly developed housing complex. The first thing that shocked me about the site was the lack of security - no one checks your bags. They do require you to put your stuff in a locker, but really all I had to do was sign in and sign out, and no one really paid attention to what I was doing. (Even the New York Public Library searches your bags when you leave, not to mention every time you enter or leave a reading room.)

So why was I in San Bruno? Well, one of the collections I need to look at for my dissertation is the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) correspondence files. I had been warned in advance that the INS files are tricky to use, but wow was I not prepared for what I found: first of all, the correspondence files only run through 1957, so I already need to find a work around, since my project runs until at least 1968. Secondly, there is no finding aid. At all. What they do have is Record Group T458, a 31-roll microfilm subject heading list. Basically every time the INS added a box to the archival collection, they took a notecard, typed out what was in the box, and microfilmed it. Thankfully, at least these 31 rolls were in alphabetical order, but since the microfilm was created over the span of about 30 years, the keywords have changed (i.e. displaced person to refugee to political refugee,) not to mention the fact that a few of the key terms I expected to be there just weren't. On top of all of that, the microfilm only runs through about 1953, so I'm still not sure how to access 1953-1957. San Bruno happens to have a copy of T458, and archivists and researcher-friends told me I should look through it before heading to D.C. (especially since INS records have to be cleared in advance by the archivist in charge before you can look at them.)

So after spending a number of hours trying to come up with as many keywords as I could think of that would be relevant for my project (and hand-cranking the reals back and forth - they have the old style microfilm readers,) I now have a 5 page excel spreadsheet with what I think are box and file numbers. And even that I'm not quite sure about.

Next moves: Contact the NARA archivist in charge of the INS Collection, contact the USCIS Historian (formally the INS historian) for help, and find other collections for 1957-1968.