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Saturday, July 04, 1998
Records treasuries getting crowded
Associated Press
LAGUNA NIGUEL, Calif.-- Seekers through its historical treasures call it the "Ziggurat," and they wonder where its hidden gems will end up.
Officially the Chet Holifield Federal Building, the complex in this Orange County suburb houses the regional document repository for Arizona, Southern California and Nevada. About 70 people a day walk in looking for genealogical data alone.
Trouble is, papers are stacking up so fast that there will be no more room by the end of the year; officials say it may have to move.
"The idea of them moving is heartbreaking," said Phil Beckett, who recently hit pay dirt at the Ziggurat after a year of historical research.
The object? The signature of Tomoya Kawakita, convicted of treason during World War II and eventually pardoned by President Kennedy. The Calexico English teacher had long been fascinated with the case.
"This is actually Tomoya's own signature, written in his own ink," Beckett said, fingering a federal court document dated 1947. "This just did something to me. It makes me want to go further.
"My wife thinks I'm crazy," he said. "Here, I've found people who say, 'What you're doing is very, very real."'
So far, there is no plan to move, Diane Nixon, the office director, said this week.
All 13 of the national archives' regional buildings are bursting with material, and public forums around the country have been discussing the problem. Officials are weighing the input before deciding anything, she said.
Microfilm data that's prized by genealogists will stay in the region, she said. But it's clear something must be done with the paper.
Tax returns, documents from federal agencies, birth records, census data and federal court testimony find their way into storage. Only 5 percent of the 713,823 cubic feet of documents are official archive material, said Nixon.
It's not unusual for the archives to cull out 100,000 cubic feet of paper a year, only to receive 110,000 cubic feet, said Daniel Bennet, the operations coordinator.
Among the archivists' "gems list":
-- Naturalization documents for celebrity immigrants like Igor Stravinsky, Marlene Dietrich and Ayn Rand;
-- A 1936 letter from the Navy's chief of naval operations to Amelia Earhart's husband, promising to assist on her flight around the world.
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