It Depends!

I am a master's candidate in the Archives and Records Management program at Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA. During the spring and summer of 2011, I did my internship at the National Archives and Records Administration in Seattle, WA. I am also an ambassador for the April 2012 release of the 1940 Census. I'll blog about that here as well as my experiences indexing it, and I encourage you to get involved at http://the1940census.com.

04 March 2012

On Impermanence and Transition

“Nothing in the world is permanent, and we’re foolish when we ask anything to last,         but surely we’re still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it.”                                                                               - W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge
One of the first, most difficult truths archives students learn in graduate school is that, at best, only 5% of records created ever get to be preserved within the stacks. Unfortunately, it's often estimated at closer to 3%. There are a multitude of reasons for this - lack of resources, not enough archivists - but more often than not, the things we create are lost or destroyed long before an archivist even has a chance to process them. In the contemporary moment, things just usually don't have the importance that later generations will attach to them. And frankly, it has to be this way. As much as we might like to know every detail of our ancestors' lives, it seems fitting that what we get is a curated view. What bothers us the most is that great-grandma may not have curated it herself, but rather had it curated for her by outsiders, officials, or unthinking next-of-kin. And so we're left with an uncomfortably incomplete picture of those who came before us, and acceptance of this is as much an ideal part of the archivists' toolkit as appraisal or description.
 
Yet none of this is to say that impermanence should be the enemy of a grand undertaking.
 
The 1940 Census will be released on 2 April 2012, and an immense indexing project will begin right out of the gate, fueled by innovation, volunteers, and institutional collaboration. It is a progression from indexing projects of past Census releases, but it is hardly a culmination. The vast Web 2.0 outreach campaign, using social media, blog ambassadors, and recruitment of indexers across all walks of life, builds on the inescapable velocity of the internet and is yet a transitional phase, between years-long offline indexing and whatever the future of access and outreach holds for genealogists in the digital age. It is transitional between the 1890 Census, destroyed by fire and carelessness and lost to us forever, and whatever awaits us at the release of 1950, ten years down the line and available through the unimaginable technology that awaits us.
 
The 1940 Census is also transitional, of course, within an historical context. None of this has escaped the media attention on this release, a photograph of America made of 132,122,446 pixels. Many counted in 1940 were the first Lost Generation, people who had survived seemingly the worst the world had to offer, World War I and the influenza epidemic. They found themselves in an interminable worldwide depression that uprooted families and communities and exacerbated social problems hitherto thought confined to other people, in other places. As census enumerators arrived on American doorsteps, Europe was disintegrating, and even more uncertainty and pain awaited, unseen, on the horizon. They have rightly, if somewhat elaborately, been called the "Greatest Generation," and in some ways, they lived much as we do - doing the best they could with the resources and information they had, sometimes aware of historical context, and often unaware of the transitional frames that we would later impose with our incomplete picture, with incomplete records.
 
We are witnessing the creation of another Lost Generation. This is not to draw unwarranted historical parallels, because we can't possibly do that without diminishing one long-passed generation and attempting prognostication of another's fate. But while we're indexing, while we're searching and connecting dots, creating the image of those we find at one frozen moment in 1940, let's be mindful of what Americans in 72 years might want to know about another lost generation that started to see its opportunities erode in 2008. Of course, statistically and culturally, this recession nowhere approaches the Great Depression. But we understand some things viscerally: we've told ourselves that surely it won't last much longer, looked for signs we're pulling out of the tailspin, and muddle along the best we can, wondering what our lives will look like if and when prosperity returns. What assumptions will future Americans make about us? What stories can we leave?
 
We can't possibly see the context of the transition we inhabit, but we can try to leave more behind us. The Census Bureau was aware of the monumental historical changes that had occurred in the 1930s, and appropriately expanded the scope of questions, giving us a less-incomplete picture of the effects of the Great Depression. The 2010 Census was a pared-down version of a Census schedule, and as I filled in mine, I was suffused with the importance of recording my existence at a certain time and place, but also with disappointment that my descendants, should they come looking for me, will know fewer details of my life from that record than I have learned of my ancestors. I am in transition myself; as I am now will change, fall away, merge into a future me, until the day comes when I cease to exist at all. I can leave no permanent sign of my life, but I leave what I can.
 
And as an archivist-in-training, I try to preserve what I can as long as possible and make it available to others. I am so excited to get to index the 1940 Census. It gives me a sense of being able to exert a little bit of control over impermanence, though I'm fully aware of my limitations in this respect. I encourage heartily participation - to any extent - with this project. For the first time, the Census will be released as free digital images, and passionate volunteers will index the records, paid only in self-satisfaction in having made them easily accessible. Dedicate a little time to this project. After all, it only comes every ten years, and with thousands of volunteers readying themselves by indexing other extant records, this opportunity to work "behind the scenes" will be transitory as well. Get involved at http://the1940census.com.

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