Interesting thing

Every archivist has at least one interesting-thing-I-found-in-a-box story, but an unnamed archivist working for the Central Arkansas Library System has what may well be the best interesting-thing-I-found-in-a-box story ever.

And you thought government records were boring . . . .

Government archives sometimes get a bad rap: a lot of people are under the impression that they're stuffed full of old policy documents and other legally necessary but deadly dull stuff, and even archivists who work in other settings sometimes think that government records are pretty dry.

I could go into my standard spiel about how government records document the rights of citizens to hold property, receive benefits that they have earned, and participate in civic life and how government archives promote government transparency and accountability. I could also go on about how government archives attract not only academic historians and genealogists but also biologists, engineers, historic preservationists, linguists, epidemiologists, attorneys, documentary filmmakers, and all sorts of other users. All of these things are true.

However, one of the things I most like about working in government archives is that even the most humdrum-seeming of records series can contain the unexpected. Seven or eight years ago, several colleagues and I were moving a very large and red rot-plagued series of 19th century financial records and discovered that the series included a little volume bearing a crudely inked title: "No-Good Lawyers." It was a listing of Victorian-era attorneys who had, in various ways, run afoul of the New York State Banking Department -- and a welcome little diversion from a laborious and dirty task.

Sometimes the unanticipated finds are amusing, and sometimes they're horrifying. When I was still in grad school, I was examining a series of photographs taken at a psychiatric facility and found that, in addition to images of female patients playing around with cosmetics and staff-patient softball games, it included a series of photographs documenting the administration of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). It took me a little while before I figured out precisely what was going on in those photos, and when I finally did, I was completely unnerved. I hastily put the photos back in their box, told the reference archivist what I had found, and fled the research room. I haven't seen those photographs in over a decade, but the thought of them is still unsettling.

And sometimes, of course, the finds are hilarious. Every day, the Web site of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) highlights one of the records in NARA's holdings. Many of the featured records are historically significant; for example, yesterday's featured document consists of the U.S. Congress's official copy of the Twelfth Amendment, which it passed on 9 December 1803. However, today's document, which was issued on 10 December 1959, concerns a less weighty matter: the United States government's efforts to find the Yeti.

Clicking on the image below will bring up a much larger and more legible version. I'm particularly fond of regulation no. 2.

"Regulations Governing Mountain Climbing Expeditions in Nepal - Relating to Yeti"; UD-WW, 1454, , Box 252, Accession #64-9-0814, folder 5.1 Political Situation - General, File ended Dec 31, 1959; Records of the Agency for International Development; Record Group 286; National Archives. Image courtesy of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.

Scandal in the records

One of the things that I love about working with records is the possibility of finding unexpected treasure -- an odd or interesting document hidden among routine correspondence or subject files. As a grad student, I found autograph letters from Eleanor Roosevelt and T.S. Eliot nestled among the correspondence of a refugee economist from Germany, and I've subsequently stumbled across other fascinating and unanticipated things.

A legal document uncovered by a British archivist at the Rotherham Archives and Local Studies Service and highlighted in an article in the Daily Mail is also quite a find:

It was a scandalous affair which would have ruined the reputations of two well-to-do families.

The married son of a wealthy industrialist fathered a child with the 18-year-old daughter of a factory manager while his wife was also pregnant.

These days, such behaviour would hardly cause the raising of an eyebrow.

But in Victorian times it was something to be kept secret at all costs.

Threatened with being named and shamed, the cheating husband bought his lover's silence with a formal legal agreement.

The document, signed by the two parties on October 20, 1874, meant no one ever discovered the truth about little Herbert Higginbottom . . . until now.

More than 130 years later, the document has been put on display at the central library in Rotherham.

It was discovered in papers from a prominent South Yorkshire law firm by an archivist sorting historical documents donated to the library service . . . .

William Haywood was 27 at the time the agreement was drawn up. His father had been a partner in a prosperous iron foundry, and Heywood assumed his father's position at the firm at the time of his father's retirement. Shortly after he married his wife Martha, the daughter of an area architect, he began a clandestine affair with Elizabeth Higginbottom, the 18 year-old daughter of a glass factory manager.

The secret affair was short and passionate and resulted in the boy Herbert, born only a few weeks after Haywood's legitimate son.

We do not know how or precisely when the relationship ended, but Elizabeth's father was clearly determined that the wealthy heir should be forced to take responsibility for his son.

Higginbottom is believed to have threatened legal action when Haywood tried to avoid responsibility for Herbert and the legal agreement was drawn up.

In return for a pay-off of £500 (£50,000 in today's money) the Higginbottoms agreed to ensure the facts did not become public.

The rest of the story is fascinating, and the Daily Mail supplements it with some good photos of this extraordinary document.

I used to think that the digital age would put an end to these kinds of serendipitous discoveries, and in some ways it surely has -- when confronted with ancient storage media housing data of unknown format, content, and quantity, we generally stymied. However, I do think that there is still room for serendipity in the electronic era. I'm in the final stages of processing a series of electronic records created during an investigation into a political scandal, and I found some mighty entertaining documents while familiarizing myself with the records' intellectual content. I'm by no means the first person to look over these records -- just about every news organization in New York State has done so at this point -- but the experience has underscored the fact that electronic records can be just as fun and as full of surprises as their paper counterparts.

Hiroshima, serendipity, and the historical record

I've always been fascinated with the surprising ways in which paper-based records sometimes survive and come to light. Adam Harrison Levy has penned a compelling -- and hauntingly illustrated -- Design Observer piece (hat tip: Andrew Sullivan) about the complicated and serendipitous custodial history of photographs of Hiroshima produced by the Physical Damage Division of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey for the Pacific Theatre of the War.

The Strategic Bombing Survey was charged with assessing the destructive capacity of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Its Physical Damage Division consisted of approximately 150 "engineers, ordnance experts, interpreters, photographers and draftsmen" from all branches of the armed forces. In late October and November 1945, the Physical Damage Division worked in Hiroshima, "tracing blast paths, calibrating bomb damage and analyzing the physical destruction of the city." They also took photographs documenting the bomb's effects upon the city's built environment. Some of these images appeared in a 1946 War Department report, but many others were never published.

The Physical Damage Division photographs are in many respects unique; as Levy points out, the U.S. government censored the news media in Japan, and as a result images documenting the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are relatively scarce. However, some of them turned up in an odd place. About eight years ago, a diner owner in suburban Boston took his dog for a walk and noticed a pile of trash sitting in front of a neighbor's house. He stopped to sift through the junk and opened up a battered suitcase sitting amongst the other garbage. It contained 701 photographic prints documenting the destruction of Hiroshima.

Haunted by the images, the diner owner kept them and ultimately came into contact with Levy. Together, they retraced the complicated custodial history of these images, which had been created or collected by one of the men assigned to the Physical Damage Division. The story of how these photographs were twice discarded and twice recovered and finally ended up in the custody of the International Center of Photography is nothing short of amazing.

The photographs themselves, some of which supplement Levy's article, are deeply unsettling:

Although the images taken by the Physical Damage Division don’t depict the human suffering of the atomic bomb they do provide a vital function. They say: this is what we, mankind, are capable of unleashing upon each other. Like ruins, they refer back into time (this is what we have done, are capable of doing) while simultaneously warning of a future we have not yet encountered (they give substance to our terror of the use of another nuclear weapon).

It is possible that these photographs are duplicates and that their interment in a landfill would not have done irreparable damage to the documentary record. The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration holds photographic negatives and prints of at least some of the images taken by the Physical Damage Division; searching NARA's online catalog for "Physical Damage Division" will retrieve the appropriate catalog records. However, given that NARA has noted that there are gaps in the numbering scheme used to order the photographs, some of the images that Lt. Corsbie created or collected may well be unique.

However, I'm glad that the prints about which Levy writes have found a suitable home. NARA has yet to digitize its Physical Damage Division images (this is not a criticism -- NARA's resources are finite and its holdings are huge), and the existence of a duplicate set of these important images is a good thing.

At the same time, I'm a bit sad. In the decades to come, serendipitous finds of this sort are going to become increasingly rare: owing to the speed with which hardware and software become obsolete, it will likely be impossible to recover data from outmoded storage media tossed onto trash piles (or into recycling bins). Who knows what sort of imperceptible but very real losses the historical record will suffer as a result?