On Instagram and TikTok, Jen Shaffer is the Formidable Genealogist. She chose the name, she said, to stand out. “It was unique, and it was just a little imposing, maybe,” she said.
Shaffer works out of New Brighton untangling the mysteries of clients’ family trees. Recently, she’s trained her research powers, and her social media feeds, on a different set of questions.
“Genealogy lovers. Stop scrolling,” she said in one video. “The National Archives is closing its public research facilities in Chicago and San Bruno, California but they won’t say when.”
In June, the National Archives and Records Administration released a three-sentence statement announcing it will close its buildings in Chicago and the Bay Area in the next few years. The Chicago branch holds federal documents linked to the upper Midwest, including Minnesota. Shaffer says her clients find records there that “make names and dates into actual people.”
Genealogists and historians were alarmed by the news. They raised concerns that the records will move far away, and in some cases, become practically impossible to access.
After Shaffer began posting about the closures, she heard from employees of the branches that are expected to close. She said they fear losing their jobs.
“Several staff members also alerted me to how those records are not ancient records just used for genealogy,” she said. “They're used actively by living people.”
The Chicago branch holds naturalization documents that she said people need to apply for dual citizenship, for example. It also holds records on tribal enrollment, boarding schools, and treaties for the Great Lakes region.
Anton Treuer, a scholar focused on Ojibwe language and culture, said most records on Native American history are in Chicago and Kansas City. He has turned to those records to write history books, and to provide expert testimony in court.
“I have found records in the National Archives that affirmed and validated tribal oral histories about critical events and have made really immeasurable impact on a number of treaty litigation cases,” he said. For instance, he said historic records played a role in a lawsuit that four tribal nations in Wisconsin won over taxes on tribal lands.
“It may be the case that there are some people who do not want tribes to litigate abuses of the treaties that they signed and want to undermine tribal sovereignty,” Treuer said.
The federal government is required by law to keep government records open to the public. Treuer said they could become temporarily inaccessible during a move. After a move, people would have to either travel, or request (and pay for) scanned copies. The government could deny requests it deemed unreasonably difficult.
For Treuer, that's not just inconvenience.
“Any move to restrict or provide impediments to the free and ready access of citizens to information about their government or its operations, past, present, and future, is dangerous,” he said.
The National Archives and Records Administration did not respond to a request for comment. Late last week, it released more detailed plans. Most Chicago records will go to Kansas City and the rest to four other locations around the country. The announcement did not include a timeline.
It said the buildings that are closing need upgrades the government can’t afford and the move is part of a long-term effort to consolidate storage space as more records are digitized. Right now, only about four percent of federal records have been scanned, according to the agency’s website.
“I think it's a change that's been going on for 30 years in philosophy and priorities,” said former National Archives employee John Scroggins, who grew up in Minnesota.
Scroggins pays attention to the status of regional archives, because he says he helped build that system, starting in the 1960s. He saw them as a way to get people interested in history.
“We had the locations, we had the volunteers, and we had support in Washington,” he said. “And we did things to bring the regions more to people's attention than they do now.”
In recent years, the government has closed other regional archives: one in Anchorage under the Obama administration and another in New York under Biden’s.
This time, members of Congress are getting involved. A group of Democratic U.S. representatives have introduced a bill to block the closure of archives, but it's not clear if it will pass. Scroggins expects to see more closures in the future.
