If you volunteer as a Citizen Archivist, you are well acquainted with our Missions. Missions are groups of records we bring together for volunteers to tag and transcribe. You can contribute a tag, comment, or transcription to any records in the Catalog, but with more than 279 million digitized records it can be hard to know where to begin. The Community Managers create missions on a variety of topics, some highlighting historical anniversaries, and a range of skill levels to help Citizen Archivists find an interesting record to transcribe.
In addition to our standard missions, Community Managers added a special set of missions titled Outside the Box. Typically these missions ask Citizen Archivists to do a bit more and give additional instructions.
2904/107 -- Tom Sue, selected pages, National Archives Identifier 5955058
In honor of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, let’s explore the Chinese Heritage Outside the Box mission. From 1882 to 1943 the United States Government severely curtailed immigration from China to the United States, passing a series of laws that resulted in documentation of international movements of many Chinese nationals. Certain Federal agencies were particularly active in enforcing the exclusion laws, including the Customs Service, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), which in 2003, became the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS), and the U.S. District Courts.
Many of the records these agencies created to implement the Chinese exclusion laws are in the custody of the National Archives and have been digitized. Records in this mission come from National Archives field offices around the county and include the National Archives at Riverside, the National Archives at Boston, the National Archives at San Francisco, the National Archives at Kansas City, the National Archives at Seattle, the National Archives at New York, the National Archives at Chicago, and the National Archives at Fort Worth.
To help make these records more accessible, the National Archives at Riverside collaborated with theChinese Historical Society of Southern California. National Archives staff trained student interns and with scanners donated by the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California, they digitized more than 56,000 pages.
Chinese Exclusion Act case files being digitized by a scanner donated by the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California. (Photo courtesy of the National Archives at Riverside staff.
Records relating to Chinese exclusion laws are a major resource for the study of Chinese immigration and Chinese-American travel, trade, and social history from the late 19th to mid-20th century. Because many documents relate to individual immigrants, they are invaluable for the study of Chinese and Chinese-American family history.
This Outside the Box mission invites Citizen Archivist volunteers to transcribe the records and add specific tags that will help provide greater access to these records. Please review the guidance to create consistent tags for these records, your contributions will help provide greater access to these records.
Searching Within a Record Group, Series, or File Unit
You may perform a “search within” to search only for records contained within a particular Record Group, Collection, Series, or File Unit. To do so, navigate to the main description page for the Record Group, Collection, Series, or File Unit, and click on the blue hyperlink “Search within this Record Group/Collection/Series/File Unit” found in the black header below the title information.
This will take you to a page where you can search within using keywords in the search bar. Remove any existing words from the search bar and type a name, subject, or other keyword in the search bar.
Additionally, you can find another “search within” link in the Inside this… section of the description.
Today’s tip can be found on the Using the National Archives Catalog page, linked from the Help button on the top of every page in the Catalog. We’re sharing hints and tips in response to questions we've received through our survey. We’ll share more in future newsletters, so please consider filling out our survey about your experience with the National Archives Catalog.
If you are experiencing an error in the Catalog or have a question about the Citizen Archivist, please do not use this survey. Instead, please contact the Catalog staff at catalog@nara.gov.
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