Regional treasures rest at Seattle's National Archives branch

The building at 6125 Sand Point Way N.E. is a vast, gray study in deliberate anonymity.

True, it has a sign — a gray sign — identifying it as our local branch of the National Archives and Records Administration. But it wasn't until a banner was hung by its entrance earlier this year, announcing the 75th anniversary of NARA's existence, that it seemed the place might want visitors.

Treasure troves usually aren't so shy about revealing their existence.

In this climate-controlled warehouse you can find the "entrance and clearance" record of the schooner Exact's passage through Port Townsend as it carried the Denny Party to their landing spot on Alki in 1851. Or leaf through a Puget Sound Naval Shipyard logbook to read the entry from Dec. 7, 1941, noting that hostilities with the Japanese have commenced and that all appropriate measures have been taken. Or pore over a scrapbook filled with candid photos of Clark Gable and Loretta Young on set as they shot the 1935 version of "The Call of the Wild" in Mount Baker National Forest.

Court-case records, citizenship applications and census data are all here, along with photographs, maps and engineering drawings.

You can also take a gander at the draft cards of Jimi Hendrix and Ted Bundy.

History of the archive

October is National Archives Month, so it seems an apt moment to take stock of this rich repository in our midst.

The National Archives were established in 1934, but until 1950 all permanent federal records were held in the nation's capital. By 1955 there were 10 Federal Records Centers across the country.

Seattle's Federal Records Center (FRC) was established in the early 1950s at the south end of town before moving to the Sand Point building in 1962. In the late 1960s, the Regional Archives branch opened here, too, after the decision was made to no longer send all the permanent historic records to D.C. Instead, they would be kept in the region to make them "more accessible for the people who were most likely to use them," NARA Regional Administrator Candace Lein-Hayes says.

The Sand Point Way building is 202,150 square feet. In the FRC stack area, boxes of documents are stored on 14-foot-high shelving with an 850,000-cubic-foot storage capacity. The Regional Archives stacks can hold 50,000 cubic feet of records, 37,000 of which are filled at present. Almost all these records are open for research.

"Those few that are closed," Regional Archives Director Susan Karren explains, "are restricted under one of the nine Freedom of Information Act exemptions."

The influx of records never lets up. Everything that comes in, Karren says, is immediately evaluated. "Is it low-risk? High-risk? Medium-risk? At risk for immediate loss? That dictates how we process the records."

Anything at risk for immediate loss is processed immediately.

The local NARA branch has a staff of about 40 professional and student employees, including seven working in the Regional Archives proper who are assisted by 40 or so part-time volunteers, including unpaid student interns.

Any kind of research question can come over the transom at any time. Recently Karren got a request for the blueprints of a former bomb shelter under Interstate 5 near Ravenna Boulevard. A group of local citizens was lobbying for it to be given national landmark status. Karren wasn't sure she had anything to offer — until a researcher who had been looking at Seattle freeway records told her of a blueprint she'd found.

Another recent find: four small color snapshots of Seattle with grease-pencil marks on them showing where the future Interstate 5 would bisect the city.

A security system is designed to safeguard records but still accommodate researchers. If you want to look at original paper documents, you need to present a photo ID with your address and some sort of research credentials. You'll then be issued a research card, which allows you to examine documents with an attendant on hand and a camera trained on you.

"We want to make sure the record's there for the next guy," Karren says.

Privacy, she adds, is respected: "If you come in to see records, we don't ask why. ... We don't talk about what research other people are doing."

The microfilm archives and public-access computers are open to all comers, and that's where the volunteers, some of whom have been with NARA for 30 years, are "a great asset," Lein-Hayes says. "Many of them have done genealogy research in particular, and they can really get people started."

Resources for those exploring their family trees can yield information from census, military, tribal records, criminal cases and all kinds of immigration paperwork (the latter two often contain photographs).

Paper and microfilm

In the digital era, research can be a matter of just a few computer mouse licks. But there are still concerns about the long-term viability of digital archives.

As Lein-Hayes explains, "Digital is great for disseminating information — making it widely available, easy to use."

But it's tied to particular hardware and software formats, and it's difficult to know how long those formats will be preserved. So paper and microfilm remain a key part of the picture.

As for the building's forbidding exterior, Lein-Hayes admits it sends out a confusing signal: "We kind of go back and forth between advertising that we're open and keeping a low profile as a federal agency." After the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 and Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, there was uncertainty on how to handle security concerns. "We've kind of opted for a middle ground," Lein-Hayes says.

"People in Seattle are very lucky that we're here and not Portland or Boise," Karren says. "People are always amazed, when they do come in to see us, at what we have. They say, 'This is really cool. I didn't know you guys were here.' So I always say, 'Come see what we're saving for you.' "

Michael Upchurch: mupchurch@seattletimes.com