 Welcome, thank you for joining us. We will begin our program with John LeGloic at the top of the hour. While waiting, log in to YouTube, say hello and tell us where you're from. We will begin in just a minute. Welcome to the National Archives Know Your Records program. My name is Andrea Madney, the program's coordinator. Thank you for joining us. This is a live broadcast, so we are allowing you to ask questions to the presenter John LeGloic and chat with other audience members. Here's how to participate on YouTube. First, log in and then type into the chat section. We will address your questions for the presenter at the end of his talk. Under Show More, find links to the presentation slides, hand data, live captioning, and then evaluation form. The National Know Your Records program is to provide you with educational resources on how to access and do research using U.S. federal government records. But first, let me allow myself to do a quick thank you for the behind-the-scenes staff. Our YouTube chat moderator is Amber Forrester. Our audiovisual staff includes Jamie Atkinson, Brian Sipperly, and Alexis Van Dyke. And our captioning transcriber is Lindsay Herbert. Thank you all. Without further ado, today's program is entitled Grab Your National Park Service Passport and Go Online, Records of a National Register of Historic Places available through the National Archives Catalog with John LeCloak. Mr. LeCloak joined the National Archives in June 2006 as an archive specialist in the electronic records since 2013. He has been a full-time member of the Electronic Records Reference Branch, able to master some library science from the University at Albany and a master's in social studies education from Long Island University. Hired to joining us, John worked at the International Monetary Fund Archives in the Rockefeller Archive Center, where he was supervisor of the Nelson A. Rockefeller Papers Project. John is active professionally and has served as Treasurer and Chair of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference. He has also served as President and Treasurer of the National Archives Assembly. I am now turning the broadcast over to our presenter, John LeCloak. And welcome to this Know Your Records presentation on the files from the National Register of Historic Places or NRHP, which are available for download from the National Archives Catalog in most cases. I'm very happy to be speaking with you today from the comfort of my living room, where my teleworking desk has been located since March of this year. In this new normal in which we are all living, I've been looking for ways to promote these great records in our collection, especially in light of everyone's difficult situations, vacations canceled, school and work moving to an online environment, and generally a feeling of uneasiness and uncertainty. I thought, what could be better than virtually visiting some of these great properties around the country? So grab your National Park Service passport and come on along with me as we look deeper into the records of the National Register of Historic Places. By way of a little background and introduction, the Electronic Records Division of the National Archives, where I've worked since 2006, has been accessioning, preserving and providing access to the records of the federal government for going on 50 years. The records maintained by the Electronic Records Division range from raw data files to item level records and PDF documents and email and electronic cables. The majority of the records are from the latter half of the 20th century, with some records dating back to the World War II era. In most cases, the Electronic Records are transferred to the National Archives because of their risk of technological obsolescence. If the raw data is relatively clean, the records can be processed and made available within a short period of time from their creation. For example, within just a few years of the end of the Vietnam War, the National Archives had accession to many of the operational and casualty records of that conflict. Also, the Electronic Records Division has records in its custody that are just a few years old, which benefits those researchers working on contemporary research topics. Of course, some of you may be aware of the Government Initiative to move to accessioning only electronic records in the coming years, so there's some job security for me and my colleagues in the division. The Electronic Records Division received its first transfer of National Register Records in 2015. The gift to the nation was a proposal between the National Archives and the National Park Service to transfer all of the more than 90,000 files from the National Register of Historic Places to the National Archives for scanning, digitization, preservation, and storage, and to ultimately provide access to the records through the National Archives catalog. On this slide, you can see one of the files from the state of Michigan, which was the first state that we received. As you can see here by way of explanation, the contents of most of the nomination or registrations forms contain a location for the property, the classification of the property, the category, a site, structure, or even an object, its status and accessibility, its ownership and present use. The description of the property will detail the history of the property, who built it, how it was built, et cetera. There's a statement of significance why the property should be included on the National Register. Additional information is also included, be they notes from state historical preservation offices, photographs, maps of the property, and in some cases, letters of support from elected officials and other correspondents regarding the property is sometimes found in the file. When the files were transferred from the National Park Service to the National Archives, they were sent to two separate National Archives facilities in Fort Worth, Texas and Riverside, California, where the files were processed, the information scanned, metadata collected and compiled into finding aids and processing checklists, and finally scanned into portable document format or PDF files. Once each state was completed, the digitized files were transferred to the Electronic Records Division to be further processed by the processing branch and then turned over to the reference branch. As I noted earlier, the first state, Michigan, arrived in National Archives in College Park in late 2015 where the files were further arranged and entered onto an auto-upload spreadsheet prior to the ingest into the National Archives catalog. Nearly four years later, the final two states, Tennessee and New Jersey, were transferred and prepared for the catalog. I'd like to say here publicly and extend my apologies to a staff member who was involved in this project who waited and waited for New Jersey to arrive. He has ties to the Garden State and wanted to look at the NRHP properties from New Jersey. Gary, I'm sorry, it wasn't my fault. As soon as the first states appeared in the catalog, the reference requests for the records began to appear in the Electronic Records Reference Inbox. Many of these initial inquiries were for the files themselves as due to the size of the file, the catalog could not easily display the files in the PDF reader. We were able to resolve this for researchers by sending them a direct link to the file. We also received inquiries from individuals who were concerned about a particular property that may or may not be on the National Register and what, if anything, could be done for a property that had fallen into disrepair or maybe they wanted to acquire a plaque or a marker indicating the property was indeed on the National Register. In most of these cases, we informed the researchers the files in our custody were not going to be changed. We used some standard language in our responses in this area that reads, quote, please note that the National Archives does not change records that have been accessioned into its custody. It is the role of the National Archives to preserve the integrity of records that federal agencies or donors transfer for archival preservation, even if those records contain objective inaccuracies. Unquote. We will then refer the researcher back to the transferring agency, in this case, the National Park Service for further information. We received inquiries questioning why a particular property was identified in a particular state when the property was clearly located in a different state. In responding to these types of inquiries, it became evident that there were several themes that appeared in the National Register records. This is most prevalent for lighthouses and light ships where many lighthouses that stand around the country are contained in a multiple property submission, light stations of the United States that describe lighthouses that are located in other states outside of Alaska but are contained in an MPS for Alaska. I will go into this in a little more detail shortly as I am a self-proclaimed lighthouse lover. Of the more than 90,000 records in the National Register files, approximately 6,400 records are restricted under the Freedom of Information Act or FOIA, either under Section B3 for personal information or by Section B6. As I just mentioned, our colleagues at the National Park Service remain an invaluable resource to assist researchers in accessing the records of the National Register. On their website, they maintain a database, the NP Gallery Database, which contains some of the files that are not yet available in the National Archives catalog. They can also provide researchers with a copy of the file that is not yet posted online. I'd also like to note that the National Archives and National Park Service are working on an additional transfer of NRHP records, which we hope to make available in the near future. The NRHP National Park Service website also includes information on how to list a property on the National Register. It offers links to a specific state Historic Preservation Office, which can assist you in the nomination process. It provides information on the necessary criteria to be considered eligible. There are also sample nomination forms that can offer guidelines on how to frame your submission. There are links to more than 20,000 photographs in the National Register flicker screen. A note about photographs contained in the nomination files and those found on the National Park Service site, there are copyright restrictions on some of the photographs and their use is limited to fair use and may require permission of the copyright owners. National Register staff can often provide additional information on those seeking guidance, on the maintenance and preservation of a National Register property, which is one of the primary reasons we will refer researchers to their offices to answer the questions that they seek. The Electronic Records Reference Branch maintains a number of reference reports to facilitate access to the records in our custody. And provide researchers with a quote one-stop shopping list of records pertaining to a specific topic. We have research reports on census data, genealogy records, banking and financial records, and reports on the extensive holdings we have on the Korean conflict and the Vietnam War. These reference reports point to our records, some of which may be searched on NARA's Access to Archival Databases or AAD, as well as those available for download from the National Archives catalog. Records in the custody of the division may also be purchased and reproduced by the branch. The reference reports will also refer to other researcher tools that may be beneficial to researchers, such as reference information papers and or records that may be in the custody of other divisions of the National Archives. The branch had been planning on preparing a reference report to highlight the wealth of information found in the NRHP records and made a determination to also spotlight some of the other records in our holdings that deal with historic preservation and architecture. The division had also recently completed work on a set of records from Governor's Island, which prior to its designation as a popular tourist destination in New York City had been a working ford and part of the defense system for New York Harbor. We also wanted to promote our collections concerning the Historic American Building Survey, or HABS, and the Historic American Engineering Record, or HAIR, which are in the custody of the Library of Congress, but an index is in our holdings. The records of the National Register were a natural fit for this reference report, which you can see here. Within the reference report that we created on historic preservation and architecture, we featured the National Register files and also included an appendix where we listed the states in alphabetical order and a list of themes that we had identified in the records. The list of states in an alphabetical arrangement was partly due to the fact that when the states were transferred to the National Archives to be added to the catalog, they were not transferred in alphabetical order. As I mentioned earlier, the first state we received was Michigan and then finally, New Jersey and Tennessee. From the appendix, researchers can easily access the state in which they are interested rather than scrolling through the 61 file units to get to a state that is not intuitively where one might expect to find it. And you can see the list here of the alphabetical states along with some of the themes that we have identified. So we also determined a number of themes that ran through the National Register records as did our friends at the National Park Service and listed them on the appendix to the reference report. You can get your kicks on any number of sites along Route 66 and stop in at the Oklahoma 66 Motel. The file is seen here at the top of this list, which was constructed in circa 1933 and it's significant for its association with Route 66, the most popular touring highway in the West and represents an important part of the development of business made possible by highway systems. It is also architecturally significant as an excellent representative example of the modern style of architecture. This style was popular for roadside buildings from 1920 through 1940. Rise of the Motor Court Hotel came as a result of automobile travel, which was a popular form of recreation for middle class American families. In 1935, it's estimated that at least 85% of vacation travel was by car and accounted for over half of the total estimated expenditures for all recreational purposes. The 66 Motel is an outstanding intact example of one of the motor courts developed in response to the need for inexpensive lodging and meals for traveling families and businessmen during the Depression. You can also cross over under or through any number of bridges, covered historic railroad truss or otherwise, or if you have children of college age years, you can make a decision to send them to a university based on how many historic properties there are on campus. If you're tired from all your traveling, you can spend the night in any one of the many historic hotels, motels or inns. You can get medical attention at an historic hospital or veterans hospital, or you can ride the rails and free America's historic train stations. The list of themes that has been identified is by no means exhaustive. And if you find another theme in the records, I encourage you to let us know and we can add it to the list. And maybe I can talk about it in one of the monthly blog posts that I've started on the National Register Records. The National Archives has many social media platforms on which staff can promote the records in the custody of the National Archives. As the about message for the text message blog notes, as employees of the National Archives and Records Administration, we are stewards for billions of pages of records that contain historical and evidentiary information created by the federal government. A dedicated staff of archivists, specialists, technicians and volunteers from NARA's many facilities across the country are hard at work every day to ensure that these records are preserved and made accessible to the public. And every day we are making discoveries while we work from the mundane to the extraordinary. The text message is an opportunity for staff members and volunteers to share their knowledge and discoveries with the public. We hope you enjoy reading about our finds as much as we enjoy sharing them with you. Shortly after beginning my period of 100% telework, I contacted the NARA staff member who oversees the text message blog to see if he was interested in a series of blog posts on the National Register Records, working off of the thematic list that I referred to in a previous slide. In my first post, I introduced readers to the records of the National Register and previewed the blog posts to come. As I mentioned earlier, I have a thing for lighthouses and my first post out of the gate in June was on lighthouses, where I talked about the many lighthouses in the National Register Records, as well as the extensive records about lighthouses that exist in the holdings of the National Archives. As noted earlier, many of the lighthouses described in the NRHP records are collectively described under a state in which they may not be physically located. The reason for this is many of the multiple property submission records related to subjects on a national scale are arranged by subject. For example, US Coast Guard lighthouses, properties submitted as part of the US Coast Guard lighthouses and light stations of the Great Lakes thematic resource are almost all filed under Illinois, even though some of the light station properties are located in Michigan, New York, Ohio, Wisconsin and other states. In addition, many lighthouses are contained under an MPS description for the state of Alaska. Growing up, my family spent a few weeks every summer at my grandmother's house in Owl's Head, Maine. Her house sat on a cliff overlooking Penobscot Bay and was just around the point from the Owl's Head light. Close enough that we could walk there, which we did quite often. The light station's dwelling was built in 1826 with attached shed wood frame construction painted white with green trim. The light tower was built in 1826, brick, 14 feet in diameter, 30 feet round painted white. The history of the Owl's Head light is also described in the NRH Prefile, which you can see here. At the entrance to the attractive seaport of Rockland, Maine is a high wave swept promontory visible to all who sail up and down Penobscot Bay. Pine trees and grassy terraces vie with each other for possession of this rocky headland. While at the very peak of the cliff, partly surrounded by spruce trees, is a lighthouse. The Owl's Head, which gives the promontory its name is easily identified by the rocky cliff. By the two cave-like hollows which form the eyes and a ridge which makes the bridge of the Owl's nose. Rocks that jut out on either side of the bridge form two eyeballs. The Owl's Head light was also the site of several shipwrecks of note. Shortly after, quote, William Masters became keeper of Owl's Head light in 1845, in the Equinox Hill Gale of the March 21st, 1847, the schooner hero smashed against the rock shore at Owl's Head, while another affortunate craft, the Sloup Louisa, hit at Crockett's Point, unquote. In 1850, quote, one of the strangest events in the entire history of Maine took place between Owl's Head and Spruce Head. During the terrible December 22nd Gale of that year, five vessels were thrown ashore between the beach at Owl's Head and Spruce Head, including a coastal schooner which had been anchored off Jameson's Point when the storm broke. The board of the schooner were three persons, the mate, his bride-to-be, and a deck hand. Down below, the girl had already retired for the evening, but when the schooner crashed, the young woman grabbed a large blanket and hurried up on deck. The three frightened people huddled in the shelter of the tap rail, the mate then thought of a plan. Making the girl lie down next to the tap rail, he lay down beside her and then covered her with the blanket. The deck hand crawled in beside the mate and the blanket was pulled over so that all three were under its protection. Each successive wave left its thin covering of ice which soon built up to a depth of several inches over the blanket, under which the three helpless people lay. Heavier and heavier grew the weight of the ice and finally the two lovers shut off from the air lost consciousness. The tide started to turn and go out and as morning came the deck hand who had kept packing with his sheath knight to keep a small air hole open through the thick ice took heart. He chopped and punched his way out from under the ice cap that had built up over the three shipwrecked victims. The sailor crawled to the rail nearest the shore, clambered over the side and dropped to the icy rocks below until finally he reached a road. He was brought to the keeper's home, quickly revived and asked to tell his story. When the keeper and the family realized that the boy and the girl were still aboard ship under a heavy blanket and several inches of ice, they made plans to reach the schooner. Retracing the sailor's steps in the snow, the members of the rescue party were soon able to see the masks of the schooner showing above the snowdrifts and located where the two lovers were encased in the ice. The rescuers cut the pair from the ice although it was believed they had already frozen to death. The hands and feet of the two frozen people were slowly raised and lowered and their bodies ceaselessly massaged was the first to awaken from her death-like sleep, stirring slightly after two hours' attention. Her lover took almost a full hour, more to respond to the steady treatment but he finally showed signs of life and a few moments later actually opened his eyes. When spring came, they had almost completely recovered. The following June, their marriage took place. The story of their strange experience was told up and down the main coast for many generations. It's just one story of a small lighthouse in Maine. There are many more tales to tell regarding the history of the American lighthouse. Following the post on lighthouses, I commemorated National Ice Cream Month where I discussed the files pertaining to ice cream companies, shops and parlors around the country. In August, the traditional dog days of summer and a time when wildfires will often erupt, I spotlighted the firehouses, fire lookouts and observation towers that are represented in the National Register files. In September, when students around the country would ordinarily be headed back to school, of course, that was delayed, rearranged or suspended altogether, I wrote a post on schools found in the National Register files. Our HP records are a number of Rosenwald schools which caught the eye of some of my colleagues. For example, the Tennessee SP Free Hills Rosenwald School lies in the middle of the rural African-American village of Free Hill along the Free Hill Road in the vicinity of the county seat of Salina in Clay County, Tennessee. Built between 1929 and 1930, the school has original free room tea plan, asphalt, jingle, stable roofed frame building with a brick and concrete foundation. Its craftsman-like roof brackets are the primary decorative feature of the school. The interior floor plan of these rooms, closets and restrooms, retains integrity with minor alterations with several kitchen appliances from the early 1960s are still installed in the industrial room used for the teaching of domestic home-making, crafts and industrial arts. The original wooden walls, flooring, stage and ceiling also exhibit a high degree of historical integrity. The school is significant for its role in the development of public education for African-Americans under the auspices of the Rosenwald Fund in Clay County. As the openly Rosenwald School in Clay County, it served as a physical tool of education reform as well as a social center in the local African-American community until it ceased being a rural school in 1966. Sears Roebuck and company magnate Julius Rosenwald funded his first school for Tennessee African-Americans in 1915. In 1919, Rosenwald hosted a meeting in Nashville for education reformers who wanted to establish a rural school building program. They created a Nashville office which would review requests from local communities and provide money from the Julius Rosenwald Fund or JRF according to the number of teachers planned for each school. By the time the program closed in 1932, the Rosenwald Fund had helped to build more than 350 schools in Tennessee. In the Statement of Significance, historian Marius Hofschwelle notes, the principles of black self-help and industrial education dominated the JRF school construction plan. It further notes that the schools included facilities for industrial, agricultural and home economics instruction. Schools like the Free Hills Rosenwald School offered a thorough curriculum in vocational education focusing on industrial training for boys and home economics for girls. The Free Hills Rosenwald School, like many other Rosenwald schools across Tennessee, represented a new higher level of commitment by state and local officials to the education of African-Americans. Although much of new commitment focused only on vocational education offerings, school boards spent more money on the local schools making new teaching material and resources available to the students. Rosenwald also wanted his schools to be permanent additions to public education. So the principles of industrial vocational training and black self-help would be taught well into the future. He required that state and local government funds match his contributions, as well as those of the local African-American community. In the case of the Free Hills School, the African-American community raised $200 for its construction. Well, public coffers provided $1,775 and the Rosenwald Fund gave $500. For the month of October, which is designated as American Archives Month, I wrote two posts. One on an article that I had read in Time Magazine that discussed the problems that many cultural institutions were facing in the time of the coronavirus. And the second on federal, state, and local archives and museums, many of which their buildings are on the National Register, including the National Archives building in Washington, D.C. Just last month for November, I wrote a post on Native American Heritage Month, which is traditionally commemorated in November. Within the NRHP records are many themes pertaining to ethnicities, including Native Americans, African Americans, along with many other nationalities and religions, including Judaism, Islam, and Christian denominations. When 2020 turns to 2021, and we can only hope for better things in the new year, the posts will look at both African American and women's history in February and March, respectively. And there will be posts on libraries. Spoiler alert, they're not all Carnegie libraries. Theaters, whether they be drive-in, stage, or movie, and golf in May, just in time to dust off the sticks and hit the links. Maybe you can head to one of the oldest golf courses in the United States, the Shinnecock Hills Golf Club in Southampton on Long Island in New York State. In, quote, an area of sandy hills that had been devoted to grazing livestock until its development as a summer resort area in the late 19th century. Unquote. In the description portion of the nomination form, it notes that one of the aspects of the Shinnecock Hills Golf Club's history that is so compelling is the early determination to have a clubhouse as part of the original plan of the site, the first golf club in the United States to do so. In September of 1891, the trustees accepted sketch plans presented by the noted gilded age architect, Stanford White, of the firm McKim Mead and White for a two-story wood shingle building to be constructed north of St. Andrews Road on a natural rise in the land, commanding views of both the ocean and bay from its piazzas. White was paid $350 for his work and construction began immediately. The new clubhouse was furnished and available for use in June, 1892. Local builder DJ Wells was awarded the contract at a total cost of $6,550. The firm was retained again just a few years later when members asked for renovations to be undertaken on the clubhouse. Regarding the golf course itself, the evolution of the golf course at Shinnecock Hills reflects the larger story of golf course design in this country, as well as the development of the game of golf and how it is played. The first purchase of land for the course was in September of 1891, when the newly created club acquired between 75 and 80 acres from the Long Island Improvement Company for $2,500 or $33 an acre, a two-thirds discount over the average price of land in the area. This initial purchase included land both north and south of the Long Island Railroad or LIRR tracks, on which the railroad prohibited play across in 1916. The Shinnecock Hills Golf Club has a lengthy statement of significance detailing the impact the club has on the introduction and evolution of the sport of golf in the United States from the course's establishment in 1891 through 1930. The Shinnecock Hills Golf Club was one of five founding members of the United States Golf Association in 1894 and the first to construct a clubhouse solely to serve the sport of golf. In addition, Shinnecock was among the first, if not the first to establish a dedicated women's course in 1891, a reflection on the active role women played in development of the club and course. The Shinnecock Hills Golf Club is also architecturally significant in displaying the distinctive characteristics of the American shingle style of the late 19th century. As the expression of a new architectural type as the first clubhouse in the United States specifically built for the sport of golf and as a work of the architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White. Originally built in 1892, the shingle style building has retained its characteristic cross gable roofline, shingle style details such as swept eaves, palladium windows and fluted door column, colonnade, porch through the changes and alterations of 1894, 98, 1912 and 1930. The golf course originally laid out in 1891 and 92 retains the early golf course design aesthetic of minimal alteration to the natural terrain through the additions and alterations up to 1930 when the course achieved its present form. Early courses were more naturalistic than the courses constructed today which tend to impose artifice on the landscape rather than working with the existing contours of the landscape. The town of Southampton boasts several other properties on the National Register as well, including Southampton Village, Sag Harbor Village and Sagaponic Historic District. The game of golf was gaining in popularity in the latter half of the 19th century. Quote, the six whole course at St. Andrews Golf Club in Yonkers was laid out by members in 1888 and is often credited as the first golf course in the United States. In 1885, there was one course in the United States. By 1900, there were more than 1,000, unquote. The club is also important to women's history as women played an important role from the founding of the club which became the developing ground for many successful female golfers. As early as 1891, a course for women of about a mile's length was planned and laid out south of the railroad. By 1892, six of the stock holding members were women. Women from Shinnecock Hills Golf Club entered the women's amateur championships beginning in 1895 and two Shinnecock women were one the first four of these events. Cynthia Brown and Beatrix Hoyt, the first women's amateur tournament held at Meadowbrook, New York featured three women from Shinnecock Hills and was won by Shinnecock's Cynthia Brown. Starting in 1896, Beatrix Hoyt dominated the competition at the time she was not yet 16. The Shinnecock Hills Golf Club was one of the five founding members of the United States Golf Association in 1894. Despite its pivotal position in the history of the game of golf was not well known to the golfing world in the early 1960s. No important tournaments had been played at the club since the modern course opened in 1931. In 1977, the club hosted the prestigious Walker Cup. The club has hosted several US Open golf tournaments and in 1967, the course was not even included in golf digest 200 toughest tests of golf. By 1989, however, it was ranked third in the country all without substantial changes being implemented to the course. Many consider Shinnecock's only real American course rival to be Pebble Beach in California. Close with a note about the pictures that I've included in this presentation. As with the blog posts that I've been writing I will often search, start by searching in the catalog for images with a specific keyword based on the topic then search specifically within the National Register files as well. The National Register files are full of information and there are photos in most if not all cases but they're embedded with the files through if I find a different photo described in the catalog I will grab it and shape the post around those images. To that end, if I were going to write a blog post about Bastrop, Texas, I could use this picture which I found when I searched the catalog for thank you. And I could use this picture along with any number of the approximately 250 properties that are found in the NRHP records including the old Bastrop Company Pavilion or other sites located in Bastrop County, Texas. So you can see here. So thank you all for your attention today on this great topic and I hope that you'll have a look at the NRHP records in greater detail and virtually visit those sites that are of interest to you. A favorite state that you visited as a child or particular site that peaks your fancy. A note on this picture which shows a series of thank you notes addressed to Federal Emergency Management Association staff displayed in the windows of the Bastrop, Texas Convention Center following a series of wildfires in September, 2011. And again, please accept my thanks for attending today. I'm happy to take any questions that people may have regarding the NRHP records. Thank you so much, John. So we do have some questions that came in advance from staff. So let's see, our first one that came in is I found a property that is found incorrectly in the nomination PDF. Who do I contact to correct this? I'm sorry. So the question was, you have a proper, go ahead. The question was that the person had found a property that was spelled incorrectly in the nomination PDF and you're wondering who do I contact to correct that? So as I said earlier that, you know we don't change the records once they've been accessioned into our custody. So we would refer people back to the National Park Service for them to look at the files and determine if there can be a change made. Perfect, thank you. Our next question that's come in, are there places that have the designation of a historic place that are not represented in the record? So I think it's noteworthy that so the National Register records that we have, all 90,000 of them, encompass that a process was undertaken by which a state historical office or a local historical society, someone said, you know what, we need to do something with this building. We need to do something with this site before something else happens to it. You know, and we lose it forever. So in working with the National Register, they submit the application process of all which all of those files are part of. But there are certainly, there's no restriction that says, you know some small local historical society or a state historic office can't say, you know what, we're not gonna go to the federal government among this, we're just gonna put a plaque on this and say this is a Tennessee historical site or you know, this is a Mississippi historical site. So but the overarching National Register is they are a federal designation but there's nothing to say you can't have many levels of historical properties. Okay, so going down to someone's house, our next question is, they say that they have a home listed on the NRHP and they want to do some renovation. Is this allowed? That is a, it's a great question and it's a question that we've gotten several times. We've had researchers contact us and you know, I'll say I'll insert a personal anecdote here many years ago when I was a school teacher and I was working with the gentleman who actually lived in historic property and another of my colleagues, another one of our teachers they used to constantly play practical jokes on each other and so he had me call this other teacher who lived in the historic house and say that I was from the state preservation office and we understood that you were thinking of painting your house from red to blue and that you know, you have to, you can't do that and if you've already started you're gonna have to repaint it the other way but there are not necessarily restrictions on changing the appearance of a property but that is not a decision that the National Archives is going to make for anyone. Again, we would refer people back to the National Park Service and if they want to add a wing or change the color or pick it up and move it someplace else the National Park Service would be the final authority on those decisions. What a great practical joke. Thank you. So it's not the National Archives. That's correct. So our next question is about, you know is connections and credit. It says, who should I credit if I'd like to use the photos in the nomination for an article that I am writing? So again, it's a case of we would refer researchers to the citing records of the National Archives and as I said, in most cases, the photographs that are found within the records are sometimes may have copyright restrictions. So therefore, it would be the responsibility of the person using the photograph to try and determine the copyright. We had a request not too long ago where somebody had found this photograph and wanted to include it in a paper that he was writing. And we said, the actual file itself does not have copyright as a federal record but if you wanted to use those photographs you would have to determine if copyright existed for those particular photographs. So and in looking at the particular file itself that he was interested in, I determined there was a list of the photographs that existed in the file and it said, oh, these were taken by this State Historic Preservation Officer or this landscape architect. Here's his name. Go forth and find that person and ask him if you can use those photos. Okay, there you go. A little bit of sleuthing might be involved. Yes. Speaking of sleuthing, our next question actually comes from an archeologist. They say, I'm an archeologist and would like to access to a restricted property. I would like access to a restricted property. Do I contact the National Archaeologist to request access? There are, so as I mentioned, there are some records that are restricted under the Freedom of Information Act under B3 or B6. In some cases, the National Archives can review the files that are in our custody. And in other cases, we would refer them back to the National Park Service FOIA office. So those are the two avenues that people would have to explore at this point, which would be to either file the FOIA with the National Archives or file the FOIA with the National Park Service and the National Park Service can then turn around and authorize us to release the file by sending us a letter or an email that says it's okay for this file to be released. Okay, it's not very often that we tell people to go ahead and submit a FOIA. Usually, most of our information is already available, but this is one of those unusual cases. Yeah, I mean, it's a case where in some cases, the files are restricted because of personal information, perhaps the person who lives in the site objected to their house being placed on the National Register and they don't want people trampling through their gardens. Or there are, the other restriction that we encounter a lot is the property may have archeological significance, whether it's Native American or some other archeological dig or ruins and they don't want it any further just disturbed. That makes sense. Thank you for further information on that. We have another question. So how recent, how recent are the nominations in the National Archives custody? So the majority of these files are, I think there are some that date to as early as the 1960s and then there are some that go as late as the, I think there are some that are as late as the 2000s. And as I had mentioned, we are currently discussing with the National Park Service to bring in some additional set of materials that will go through as late as I think 2013 or later. Okay. Thank you. Our last question, I think might take us a while. So bear with us if we go longer than an hour. So if you're interested, please stay. If not, we understand respect your time. So our last question that we've received is how do we find out if a property is listed on that NRHP? Can we search by address? You can provide it that the metadata was appropriately captured. And so I think if we would like, what we can do is I have created a short video on searching the NRHP records. And if we would like to watch that video, we could certainly do that. And then after that, we can go see if the catalog is cooperating today and have a look for ourselves. Wonderful. Okay. I am going to play the video. So go ahead and put yourself on mute and let's see how this goes. Search and record. The national rents are at historic places. And they're available both for viewing and downloading from the National Archives catalog. The easiest way to begin your search is to start at the National Archives homepage, seen here and available at archives.gov. From the homepage, click on the gray rectangular box on the left of the page that reads research or records. From that page, the address of which is archives.gov slash research. You would click on the search the catalog button located in the research in the National Archives catalog box on the left side of the page, which will bring you to the National Archives catalog homepage, which may also be accessed at catalog.archives.gov. In the search box, you can enter any keyword, series or a specific National Archives identifier. You also have the option of undertaking an advanced search where you can narrow down your search parameters if you wish. For our purposes here, I will type in National Register of Historic Places into the search box. The series in which we're interested appears about halfway down the list. The National Register of Historic Places and National Historic Landmark Program Records, 2013 to 2017. National Archives Identifier, 208 127 21. Now we will click on that link to take us to the series description page. From this page, you have the option of reviewing the 61 file units described in the catalog or by clicking on this hyperlink or you may search within the series by clicking on the blue box next to the hyperlink as I'm indicating here. For our first search, I want to direct you to the finding aids that accompany each state record. So I'm going to click on the 61 file units described in the catalog and we will see a list of the file units arranged in the order in which the states were added to the catalog. Let's click on the Illinois records which will take us to the file unit description for the state of Illinois and it's 1,981 items found in the catalog which I will click on next. You will then see that the first three items that are listed are three finding aids for the state of Illinois. One for multiple property submissions, one for national historic landmarks and one for single properties. As you can see, the finding aid will appear in the viewer when you click on it and you will also have the option of clicking on the down arrow which will open the file in a separate window or tab and you can also right click on the blue arrow and download the link and open the file locally on your own computer. Now in reviewing the finding aid for the multiple property submissions, you can see that these submissions are arranged thematically throughout the state of Illinois. Now the other finding aids, so in the case of the national historic landmarks, these properties are going to be listed alphabetically and I will point out that in most if not all instances of the thousands of files associated with each state, national historic landmarks represent the lowest number of records for each state. For Illinois, there are approximately 85 NHLs. Now for the single properties, these properties are listed alphabetically by county. It starts with Adams County and it runs all the way through Woodford County in Illinois. Now going back to the list of Illinois properties, I will point out that so following the three finding aids, the properties are then arranged first by NPS, followed by NHLs and then finally the SPs and then within each category, they are listed in alphabetical order by county. So the first NPS property for Illinois will be in Adams County and the final NPS property would be in Woodford County. In addition to these three finding aids, there is also a general withdrawn properties finding aid which may be found at the end of the property list for most of the states, which includes those properties that may have been withdrawn from the national register for one reason or another. Perhaps the property was destroyed or something changed and therefore its historic status changed and it was no longer listed on the national register. Now for our second search, I'm gonna go back to the main description, the series description, but we're gonna click on search within the series. Now when you do that, you'll see that any search that you conduct will be confined to the national register records as is indicated by this box right here. So it shows that it is searching with a wildcard within the national register of historic places and national historic landmarks program records. Now let's search for lighthouses. Now what you'll get is a list of nearly 1500 NRHP records that contain the keyword lighthouse. The default sort list is going to be by relevance, but you can also search by title which will arrange the list alphabetically or you can search by a specific national archives identifier but therefore all of the national archives identifiers that appear here would appear in numerical order. So reviewing the list by relevance will push actual lighthouses to the top of the list. As you can see here, these are all going to be lighthouses but if you were to go to the end of the list, you would find records that contain the word lighthouse but may not specifically refer to a coastal beacon, like for instance, the Washington SP Fort Lawton, a property on which a lighthouse is located but it is not specifically a lighthouse. So there are just two ways to search the National Archives catalog for the records of the national register of historic places. Thanks for watching and happy hunting for your favorite national register site. Okay, so that was a great tutorial video. I think that worked out well. So I think that we are now at the conclusion. I don't have any more questions that have come up. I wanted to say thank you, John, so much for your presentation. And to our audience, if we did not get to your question or if you do have one later, you can submit it to our email address c-e-r at nara.gov. Please know that the presentation video recording and handouts will remain available on this YouTube webpage. Also, we value your opinion, so please take a minute to complete a short evaluation. Find the evaluation link under show more and on behalf of the National Archives, thank you for joining us and thank you, John. Thank you very much. That was great fun.