On Friday, the Alaska State Archives took official ownership of about 3000 cubic feet of records from the now-closed National Archives branch in Anchorage. This was done in a signing ceremony attended by court officials, judges, lawmakers, state historians, and museum volunteers. Since the records are being transferred from one archive to another, they all come ready to store in acid-free file folders and boxes. On August 4, 7 & 8, the records will begin to arrive in three 40-ft shipping containers. The containers will hauled on the Alcan Highway to Haines, after which a ferry will complete the transfer to the Juneau. The Alaska State Archives and Museum is currently under construction in Juneau with a portion of the storage space already completed, allowing a place to put all these records.
Twelve hundred of the records are from the Alaska Railroad. Included in the railroad records are items like lists of stoppages. According to State Archivist Dean Dawson in an interview with KTOO’s Matt Miller, “It might be we picked up five tons of coal from Healy, for example. Some of those are just garden variety records that make the trains run on time. Others, for example would go back to the early teens – a hundred years ago – and document why certain decisions were made regarding routes, regarding services, and so forth.”
The railroad records will be catalogued over the next year, and those that are considered to have no permanent archival value may be offered back to the Alaska Railroad itself.
Included in the transfer were about 1800 Alaska Territorial Court Records that date back to 1884. These records may be available to researchers in Juneau within a month or so.
Since the National Archives closed its Anchorage facility in June, most of the NARA records from Alaska are being sent to Seattle, to be consolidated with those records already housed there.
For more information, check out the following entries.
http://www.greenfieldreporter.com/view/story/e441744fb42e474cbd7af7433a23ecb3/AK–Historical-Records
http://www.ktoo.org/2014/07/27/state-archives-accepts-alaska-railroad-territorial-court-records/
http://www.greenfieldreporter.com/view/story/e441744fb42e474cbd7af7433a23ecb3/AK–Historical-Records
http://www.thenewstribune.com/2014/07/28/3306906/territorial-court-records-will.html?sp=/99/296/359/
http://www.adn.com/article/20140530/national-archives-records-stored-anchorage-bound-juneau-seattle
