NARA’s National Personnel Records Center
Posted by David | Filed under St. Louis, genealogy, military
Members of the St. Louis Genealogical Society were treated to after-hours tours of the National Archives’ new National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis County on Monday and Tuesday of this week. I was lucky to attend the Tuesday tour and estimate at least 50-60 people attended.
You can’t quite tell from the video, but at ground level the shelving has boxes fifteen high and two deep. Each aisle goes on and on and on. Above that, there are two additional levels with grated catwalks. Each of these levels has boxes seven high and two deep per shelf. There are several of these large storage rooms, all independently constructed, within the facility. In about a year, staff anticipates they will have over 2.3 million boxes at the NPRC.
Because of the large number of daily requests for records not open to the public, the NPRC averages over 5000 inbound boxes each day that come from offsite storage. (Until the records reach a certain age — I think it was 62 years after discharge or separation — they are kept elsewhere in the St. Louis area and are not part of NARA.)
Because of the size of the NPRC, it’s not surprising to see the workers dressed casually. Our tour through the meeting room, lobby, research center, storage rooms, and various document restoration labs was lengthy, not only in time but distance. Comfortable shoes are a must.
The fire in 1973 was devastating, but made much worse because the building had no sprinklers. Zero. The old Record Center was on Page Avenue in St. Louis and was a six-story building. After the fire it had five stories.
Because of the amount of widespread damage, restoration is done on a case-by-case basis. We were able to view examples of fire and water/mold damage on some of the records from the 1973 fire that were currently being handled in the lab. Other examples currently in the lab were records saved from the USS Arizona.
I was informed a couple of years ago that my grandfather’s WWII Army file was one of the records lost in the fire, which was not surprising given the high percentage of records lost. Other than that, I don’t really have a need to use this NARA facility. So I really only went on the tour out of curiosity. I was lucky, though, that it was explained how to trace a soldier’s history through daily/weekly/monthly unit reports. It sounds tedious, but at some point I’ll have to give it a shot considering it’s all there is to find.
