January 29, 2025

A couple of weeks ago, I jumped on a chance to volunteer for the National Archives as a transcriptionist.  Perhaps some of you saw the same call out for people who could read cursive (talk about appealing to only a baby boomer crowd). Well, apparently, I was one of 30,000 new "citizen archivists" to sign up after that public plea.

Looking for something to add to my retirement, such transcription work seemed perfect, especially during a particularly brutal winter when I might not want to get out too much. It appealed to me in several other ways. I figured I would make my deceased mother proud returning in retirement to the kind of work we did together around 1990, albeit apart (her in Morgantown, me in Bloomington). While in Grad School at Indiana University, I supported my mother's role as co-editor for the Ambassadorial Diary of John W. Davis. With a cubicle, part-time job and my own literary research at the main library in Bloomington, I had incredible access and time to help my mother determine, identify and create footnotes for Davis' diary. It was fascinating work, appealing to my general love of history, as well as deductive thinking. I supposed I did see myself as Captain Footnote in those late 1980s and early 1990s days. Finally, and not insignificantly, transcribing historical records seemed to be the best revenge on a national and cultural desire to pretend history never happened, to whitewash, exonerate, eliminate, outright negate historical records that didn't fit a narrative agenda.

Yes, you can say I am still naïve. As David Byrne sings, same as it ever was.

Once I had watched some tutorials and read some FAQ about the work, I got right into it, starting with some records from U.S. submarines during WWII. I figured if Mom was smiling in Heaven because I was doing this kind of work, Dad was jostling her aside to get a better look, smiling because I was going straight to one of his historical interests: World War II. In my heart, I hoped I would eventually be able to type "And we sunk their battleship," using the same boastful voice I put on at twelve when playing Milton Bradley's Battleship (or the counter "they sunk our battleship" in Droopy Dog voice). Alas, I got no hits. For one thing, I was finding that such battleship records were very popular with other archivists, and so I often would get one page transcribed, and then find the next 10-15 already transcribed. In addition the pages I did find were very technical, dry in the by and by. I did quickly learn a number of technical terms related to submarines, such as nozzle posts. Mostly what I learned is that submarines had a lot of leakage problems. Yowzah!  So while I did eventually transcribe tables that showed how many torpedoes were fired during a period of time, if they hit (the ones I found didn't), the distance to the target, and the latitude and longitude of the submarine when shots were fired, I was still far away from the kind of historical record I longed for.

So the historical record was interesting but not exciting enough. Besides all of these were typed records (we transcribe those also, so as to create searchable documents). I was finding no handwritten stuff to transcribe.

I went back to the other options, looking for something else. I found a lot of Revolutionary War and Civil War pension files that were handwritten, but, boy, the handwriting was something else. There were also lots of references to names and places that would make guessing the words even harder. Having just come off the emotional roller-coaster that is Jayne Ann Phillips' Night Watch, a Civil War and post-Civil War novel, I figured I would stay away from these pension files also.

Then I saw the chance to transcribe some of the files from a Greek consulate in 1903-1904. This seemed perfect, a connection with the same kind of material I was researching for my mother 40 years ago (did she elbow my dad back out of the way to get her original view back?), as well as probably a subject not as intriguing to the other 30,000 (or more) citizen archivists out there. And while much of those files were typed, many had handwritten comments on them that made them interesting, and there were some handwritten documents scanned into the file.

I ended up transcribing a lot of one consul's files. The material was generally interesting, as he often had to report on the commerce around Athens, Syra and Naxos, Greece. He had to report on marriages of American citizens in his consulate, as well as deaths of Americans. He also seemed to have staffing challenges. He was either a one-person HR department, or more accurately, someone doing much of the work of HR in an HR-less world (we can all dream!). The biggest challenge, at least among the 40 pages or so that I transcribed, was a dispute between himself and one of his clerks, which eventually included some slanderous, according to the counsul, newspaper articles. Basically, the full drama is played back for the Assistant Secretary of State for approval to move forward with a new clerk, which is recommended via one candidate. Ah, the days before HR. They were simpler times.

Alas, I started to get a little bored of these records. I noticed that many of my colleague archivists were transcribing the meatier communiqués, but avoiding the cover sheets, which are so tedious, return address, mailing address, summary of enclosed message (the summaries sometimes were barely 5-10 words shorter than the brief communiqué), and stamps all over showing the various acknowledgements of receipt.

And then President Trump ordered the release of JFK, RFK, and MLK materials. Talk about sharks in the water. I think all 30,000 of us jumped on those files. I hope I am not the only non-conspiracy theorist in our group. I had to jump ahead deep into the file to find some things not transcribed yet. What I have worked on have been mostly mailings to the Warren Commission or the Secret Service from "everyday" people, who show me that back then a lot of folks had a jump on conspiracy theories. One message said that the Commission should check into New Zealand for some information; multiple ones call Warren a communist or communist-lover in not revealing the truth of how Oswald was a communist stooge. Frankly, it stopped being funny, in the "hey, honey, come hear what this guy says" kind of way, and just became depressing. Don't even get me started on the illiteracy of many of these letters and notes. When I first started working on these files, I told my wife to be suspicious if I die suddenly (and weirdly) while doing this. At the moment, I would love to find something that seemed so malevolently accurate. Heck, I might even have dreamed that I might find relatives of some our current leadership involved, some skeletons that they might have wished hidden. In the end, though, I am reminded of how sad human beings can be.

As I write this summary of my first two weeks as "Citizen Archivist" (would have been "Comrade Archivist" if all those fears about the communists had come true; damn Lenin and Marx, they really screwed up the 20th century), I realize that I am not simply transcribing linguistically, but also biologically, in that I am copying a DNA of America 60 years ago for the same strand of craziness today. It is a bit disheartening.

I am not giving up, though, mind you. This is still better than going outside and interacting with the crazies of the world. I will play around in the JFK files for awhile longer, than go sniffing around some other documents. In some ways, this is like being back in the IU library. Poke around long enough and I will find something else fascinating.