NIGR 2012-Day 1

It has been a very long day. We started out meeting in the hotel lobby at 8 a.m. to walk over to NARA (Archives I). Once we got there we went through the strange security process. Why strange? Apparently it changes on a dime and nobody ever seems to know what is going on. Another words departments don't seem to communicate with each other and this wasn't exclusive to just Archives I. Hard to imagine government departments not telling each other what is going on right? (har! har!)

Anyway, after security the morning started out with a basic introduction to the archives, getting i.d. cards made (my picture is worse than a DMV picture), and hearing about the 1940 census. I missed a lot of this presentation since I was getting my i.d. card made at the time. However, I've indexed the 1940 census so I don't think I really missed too much.

We also had presentations on Headstone Records for Military Veterans, the Still Picture Branch at Archives II, an in depth session about NARA at Your Fingertips, and Cartographic Records at Archives II and the Library of Congress. This last session made me very jazzed about going to the Library of Congress tonight and exploring the maps. You can imagine my disappointment when I discovered that the maps are held in the Madison building..... which would be closed for the evening when we were scheduled to be there. Classic!

When we arrived at the Library of Congress (LOC) I went through the process to get my researcher card. This process was not nearly as time consuming or painful at it was at Archives I. Then we listed to a presentation on what the LOC has, which is a lot. LOC is the largest library in the world, with over 151 million collections. After the presentation I did a little research in the Genealogy room. I didn't find much and really at this point I was pretty tired, as was everybody else. We dragged ourselves back to the hotel.

I submitted 4 pull slips at Archives I for tomorrow. I'm excited to see what discoveries I can make. For now.... I'm exhausted and ready to recharge with a good night's sleep.