The Equalizer

“You had better remove the records,” Secretary of State James Monroe warned President James Madison during the War of 1812 as British troops advanced toward Washington to burn it down. The U.S. government would approach the obvious need to secure and centralize federal records the way it solved a lot of its problems back then: by identifying the issue and then addressing it a minimum of four score years later. Scrappy clerks spirited the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence to safety, but after the redcoats retreated, the records’ true enemies remained: mold, sunlight, disorder, fire. In 1921, for instance, most of the 1890 Census, a pivotal account of how immigration and emancipation had transformed the country, went up in smoke.

Finally, in 1934, Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a law to found the National Archives, whose responsibilities would come to include expanding access to executive branch documents to comply with the Freedom of Information Act and, after Watergate, managing all presidential records.

Over the past nine decades, the National Archives and Records Administration has expanded its scope beyond its founding rationale of protecting its holdings to its current stated mission to “drive openness, cultivate public participation, and strengthen our nation’s democracy through equitable public access to high-value government records.”

Sounds good, unless you’re reading those words anywhere west of Pittsburgh and east of Guam. For instance, the taxpayers of Conrad, Mont., (population 2,318 in the 2020 Census) live more than 2,100 miles from the National Archives headquarters on Constitution Avenue. (Despite building branch archives around the country to house some regional records, residents of Anchorage or Boise still have to schlep to Seattle. St. Louis hosts most of the military personnel records, and the National Archives’ main holdings remain in Washington, D.C., and College Park, Md.)

NARA Chief Innovation Officer Pamela Wright, a graduate of the University of Montana, grew up on a ranch outside Conrad. “My job,” she explained, “is to find the most efficient and effective ways to share the records of the National Archives with the public online. NARA has been in the business of providing in-person access to the permanent federal records of the U.S. government for decades, and we are pretty good at it.” She added, “We are still expanding and improving our digital offerings” — so far, about 300 million of NARA’s more than 13 billion records have been scanned and posted to the internet — “but now my family in Montana can easily access census records, military records and many other pertinent records from home.”

It makes a weird kind of sense that the government worker who understands the value of providing online advice and information to far-flung Americans, and who is driven to connect the citizens of the hinterlands to their own stories as told in our collective federal records, is a woman whose hometown is a 32-hour drive from a reference desk in D.C.

Blond, like so many of Montana’s Scandinavian descendants, Wright, in her 60s, has an old-world face resembling most of Ingmar Bergman’s ex-wives. Her childhood ranch, which during the Cold War housed one of the hundreds of silos for intercontinental ballistic missiles scattered around the Great Plains, also featured a party-line telephone shared by multiple rural households, the kind that a mid-century phone company ad once celebrated as the telecommunications equivalent of a “barn raising.” Now her mission is to digitize all 13 billion of NARA’s records so they fit into the cellphones in the pockets of her old neighbors’ jeans.

Every document, map, photograph, recording and film in the National Archives that Wright and her colleagues have scanned and transferred to the internet — accessible from a laptop in Lubbock or a smartphone in Sitka — makes the agency more democratic and more fair, which means the country is, too. One of the Archives’ prized possessions refers to this time-consuming drudgery as forming “a more perfect union.”

I traveled from my home in Bozeman, Mont., to D.C. to follow Pam Wright around the National Archives in the capital and at its immense storage complex in suburban Maryland known as Archives II. She humored my requests to look at landmark documents pertaining to our shared Western heritage, including Montanan Jeannette Rankin’s credentials as the first woman to serve in the House of Representatives. I wondered if Wright might see herself in her fellow University of Montana graduate’s historic feat in Washington, but she’s too modest to put on such airs. The only time she bragged about a brush with Montana fame was when I mentioned Town Pump, a statewide chain of gas stations, and she crowed that her cousin used to work at the one in Conrad.

In “the vault” in NARA’s neoclassical D.C. headquarters, Wright and I gazed upon the Louisiana Purchase, a striking black volume bedazzled in gold, like a pair of pants worthy of Prince, one of the Louisiana Territory’s greatest sons. When Napoleon, strapped for cash, sold control of more than 800,000 square miles to the United States in 1803 — a preposterous, nearly ungovernable stretch of real estate that would encompass the present-day boundaries of France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Britain, Portugal, the Netherlands and Switzerland — he cursed us as a people with a perpetual state of alienation (and North Dakota). Conrad is up near the Louisiana Territory’s northwestern edge, just east of the Continental Divide. We flipped to the fading signature that bequeathed to Wright a birthplace as well as her life’s work shrinking down all that distance: “Bonaparte.”

Like that of every American, Wright’s family history winds through the national narrative as recorded in the Archives, through war, immigration and big, transformative acts of Congress — what she refers to as “hotshot records” — and in the prosaic papers she calls “miles of good old, hardworking, everyday federal records.” When I asked her how her people first arrived in Montana, she emailed me the homestead land entry case file from the Interior Department that she had copied from NARA’s Denver branch. It certified that her North Dakota-born grandfather, Ole Aakre, had proved up his Conrad homestead in 1921.

In the NARA vault, we also glanced at the Homestead Act, signed by Abraham Lincoln in 1862 — a leg up for future settlers like her Norwegian American grandfather and an irrevocable setback for the continent’s original inhabitants. If National Park Service estimates are correct, more than one-fourth of all Americans descend from homesteaders, including both of Montana’s U.S. senators, Democrat Jon Tester and Republican Steve Daines. (Daines’s great-great-grandmother probably knew Ole Aakre, since she also homesteaded near Conrad — as every Montana voter knows, because he brings it up to repent for the moral failing of being born in California.)

The movie star and former child Mouseketeer Ryan Gosling once told talk show host (and ex-junior tap dancer) Conan O’Brien that he could spot a fellow “kid dancer” from “a mile away,” and that’s how I am with alumni of the Federal Work-Study Program. Show me some nobody from nowhere with a state-school diploma and a fancy job like Pam Wright’s, and work-study tends to come up. Which is why we spent a few minutes in the NARA vault paying homage to Lyndon B. Johnson’s wobbly signature on the Higher Education Act of 1965. Thanks to the Federal Work-Study Program, an underappreciated section of the law that offers needy college students part-time jobs to fund their educations and get work experience, the archives of the University of Montana’s Mansfield Library hired Wright as an undergraduate to transcribe oral history recordings of the wildland firefighters known as smoke jumpers. That was her first credential for — and taste of — a middle-class, professional life. (I had an almost identical experience down the road at the rival college, Montana State; for me it was work-study in the photo archive at the Museum of the Rockies, cataloging old black-and-white pictures of trains. Wright and I were both good investments. And that was a lot of trains.)

“My folks were uneasy about me going to college,” Wright recalled. “My dad had aspirations for me being a waitress at the Home Cafe in Conrad. My two older sisters had flown the coop by then, and I think he was hoping at least one of us would stay around home and marry a local farmer.” Imagining another life than the path one’s parents had in mind is a vague and lonesome prospect, but it helps if there’s an actual campus bulletin board where state-sponsored want ads are posted to nudge things along. The National Archives overflows with reminders of how the federal government affects all Americans’ lives, but there was a kind of science-fiction chill in witnessing Wright standing before the Higher Education Act of 1965 when she would not have been standing there without the Higher Education Act of 1965.

Wright’s working-class, rural background, including the guts it took to light out from north-central Montana’s wheat fields in the first place, informs how she does her job and how she thinks about meeting the needs of the taxpayers she serves. It’s not just that in leading NARA’s digitization projects she’s chipping away at the physical distance separating provincial Americans from federal records. She also understands the potential psychological estrangement from Washington as a seat of power. Her first job after graduating from the University of Montana was tracking down federal documents such as tribal water rights for a Missoula research firm that dispatched her to the National Archives. “When I first started researching historical records,” she said, “the federal buildings were pretty intimidating for someone not raised in the ‘fedland’ of D.C. There are guards posted at the entrances and all kinds of research-room rules and regulations. The digital experience, while not the same as holding that piece of paper in your hands, provides less of a barrier to getting to the records.”

Asked about working at the intersection of the Archives’ original documents, which can emit almost mystical vibrations, and their handy if banal digital facsimiles, archives specialist Catherine Brandsen replied: “I do get what you mean about the romanticism of original records, especially paper records. The old-book smell and the feel of the paper does immerse you.” However, she added, “it honestly feels very natural to me to have a physical copy of a record plus having scans online. It’s like social media: Sometimes I joke that some of my friends ‘live in my phone.’ The friends are still real people, and we can get together occasionally, but I don’t have to fly across the country every time I want to interact with them.”

As NARA’s first chief innovation officer, Wright explained, “my role has been to ignite a culture of innovation across the agency, to nurture new ideas and to incorporate emerging technologies in order to better share our records with the public. For example, we worked with Wikipedia to put thousands of digital copies of our records on their website. This resulted in billions of views by people who may never visit the NARA website, let alone one of our buildings.”

Wright leads NARA’s ongoing open government initiative, which she said started as an Obama administration mission to emphasize “transparency, participation and collaboration with the public.” To that end, and to enlist volunteers’ help in digitizing records, in 2011 she founded the Citizen Archivist program. The project, she argued, has brought about a “culture change.” In the traditional model, archivists were a priesthood of persnickety crypt-keepers standing between the general public and precious records. “I think that system worked great for the 20th century,” she noted — but in the 21st century, archives “should be in your pocket.”

Pam Wright’s name appears sparingly on the NARA website, yet her ideas and programs are evident everywhere. Her faith in the citizen archivists calls to mind her fellow University of Montana graduate, the low-key, egalitarian Senate majority leader Mike Mansfield, for whom the campus library where Wright got her start is named. In describing his ideal of leadership — in contrast with his domineering predecessor, LBJ — Mansfield quoted wisdom attributed to the Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu: “A leader is best when the people hardly know he exists. And of that leader, the people will say when his work is done, ‘We did this ourselves.’”

“The first time I felt a real sense of government ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people’ was when we started working with the public,” Wright recalled. “There are citizens who have great knowledge and care deeply for the records and are willing to provide their time and talents to provide greater access to the records.”

The citizen archivists have transcribed more than 3 million pages of the NARA Catalog. Typing up and deciphering faded, often handwritten old documents that have been scanned to the website but are not necessarily legible to the average user or searchable online is painstaking, eye-aching work. A volunteer recruitment slogan asks, “Is reading cursive your superpower?” Archivist Cody White described interpreting these blurry inkblots of the dead as “more often like code-breaking than anything else.” The typed transcriptions are displayed online alongside the originals so a researcher can see how a document looks while more easily understanding what it says. Because transcribing is remote, volunteers from across the country and around the world can work on all kinds of topics, from the Revolutionary War to unidentified flying objects.

Other volunteers have added 10 million tags to existing online records with searchable terms, thereby cramming more value and intrigue into each document or image. For instance, a 1975 photograph of first lady Betty Ford on a Florida lawn wearing a button in support of the ERA acquired 24 tags, including the Equal Rights Amendment and “women’s rights,” along with her name, “trimmed hedges” and the politely put “Gerald Ford’s first term” (there wasn’t a second).

A recently shuttered nine-year volunteer scanning program added more than 800,000 scanned pages to the catalog, including a project to digitize the pension records of the Buffalo Soldiers and Indian Scouts who served in the U.S. Army out West after the Civil War. Fighting the Indian Wars and smoothing the way for pioneers, these Black and Native veterans were in the vanguard of normalizing non-White, career military personnel in the United States. Another way to look at it is that they were abetting what kids today might call “settler colonialism.”

The pension requests, submitted later on by veterans or their widows, contain the testimony of fellow soldiers, physicians and neighbors, and recount the humdrum stuff of each man’s life.

Crow scout Hairy Moccasin served with George Armstrong Custer’s 7th Cavalry in the prelude to the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Plains tribes such as the Crow were not magical proto-hippies. They were a sovereign nation in the Montana Territory whose traditional enemies were the Lakota and the Northern Cheyenne. When Hairy Moccasin and the other Crow scouts sided with Custer, they were allied with the enemy of their enemy, including the Hunkpapa Lakota leader Sitting Bull. Custer discharged the scouts on the eve of the battle, and Hairy Moccasin detoured to Fort Ellis — incidentally, about four miles from where I am typing in Bozeman — before returning home to the Crow reservation east of here. He married and remarried, fathered and buried children, and died of tuberculosis in 1922. The government approved his widow’s pension request.

By using volunteer labor to help digitize records, the Citizen Archivist program was, according to Wright, a frugal attempt to “get more accomplished without additional funding.” She noted: “The agency simply does not have the resources to manually transcribe all of those digitized records so that users can search the catalog and find the specific record they are looking for. The question has been: How do we fill that gap, knowing the limitation of our resources, the quantity of information we hold and the deep interests of our stakeholder communities?”

The National Security Archive has warned that if the chronically underfunded National Archives is to cope with the overwhelming needs of the digital age, its 2025 budget of $481.1 million should be nearly doubled to $900 million. Given that the National Archives rotunda enshrines, in a moisture-controlled case of bulletproof glass, the complaints of the stingy tax protesters who founded this nation by breaking with a king “For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent,” the United States was predestined to administer a somewhat austere bureaucracy.

Thus, NARA’s partnerships on digitization projects with genealogy websites such as FamilySearch and Ancestry have contributed millions of digital records as well as technical help, Wright noted, at a time when “we can’t afford to develop new technologies or we don’t have enough staff to do the work on our own.”

Wright talks like a Washington bureaucrat, but she still thinks like a Montana rancher. Growing up, she recalled, “we were thoughtful about our use of water, because we had a cistern for water and hauled water was precious. We kept all of our kitchen scraps to feed our pigs. We canned berries and veggies from the garden, we had a root cellar for our potatoes and carrots that provided for us through the winter, we knitted mittens and hats for winter, and we did all of the other work that regular rural families do to make the best with what you have. Those ideals have absolutely carried over into my federal career. We are stewards of resources that belong to the American people.”

She added, “Innovation is often about figuring out how to use what you have to accomplish something that’s never been done before.”

The Archives’ preservation and presentation of the nation’s paper trail is impersonal, nonpartisan, and full of delights and dismay. There’s a photo of Jesse Owens at the Berlin Olympics, both feet in the air. There’s Alexander Graham Bell’s patent for the telephone. There’s Frank Sinatra’s worst recording, singing “America the Beautiful” with Nancy Reagan on the White House lawn. There’s Bay Area sculptor Ruth Asawa twice: in records about Japanese internment camps (where she was incarcerated as a teenager) and, after she had moved past that to become the stubborn genius who conjured beauty out of wire and air, as an adviser to the National Endowment for the Arts in the 1970s. And there are the 2020 electoral college results, in which NARA’s Office of the Federal Register flagged what was supposed to be the most newsworthy development of certifying that year’s general election: For the first time, both Maine and Nebraska split their votes.

With the Archives having 270 million records online, I suspect that researchers tend to find what they are looking for. If they’re searching for evidence that the United States is only an ongoing white supremacist ordeal, they’ll find that. If they’re on the lookout for progress, there’s plenty. If they think the federal government has gotten too big, one of the 13 billion records might confirm that.

If we citizens engage with the records with the maturity and humility to at least try to look past our own assumptions, we will encounter what might be called “the full Nixon” — tapes of Richard M. Nixon at his most depraved, but also his signature on legislation that embodies his best intentions, such as the Clean Air Act and the Return of Blue Lake bill that returned 48,000 acres to Taos Pueblo. This marked the first time the federal government restored land taken from an American Indian tribe, a blessing so significant to the Pueblo that, in 2013, they invited Nixon’s brother Ed to New Mexico to celebrate the centennial of Nixon’s birth. The Archives will never run out of records of sinners’ good deeds, while the pure intentions of the righteous take up fewer linear feet.

NARA veteran Trevor Plante, “Director, Archives I Textural Records Division,” watches over the nation’s most sacred documents. Plante is tall, stately and understandably pale given that his workplace consists of a series of secure, windowless chambers. Asked to consider the charisma of original records — some so old they were inscribed on parchment, which is made from the skin of animals — he replied: “Some of the most emotional experiences I have witnessed are tribal elders viewing Indian treaties between their tribe and the U.S. government. Many can often point to their ancestors’ names on the treaties.”

In the D.C. vault, Plante, who partly inspired the archivist protagonist in Brad Meltzer’s thriller “The Inner Circle,” showed Wright and me the 1835 Treaty of New Echota. Ceding the Cherokee lands in the southeast and signed by a handful of unauthorized representatives of the Cherokee Nation — some of whom would be assassinated in retribution — the treaty empowered the U.S. government to march both of my parents’ ancestors cross-country at gunpoint on the Trail of Tears. En route, 4,000 died.

Though mine is a family of mutts who can trace our origins through more mundane if hopeful documents like Gothenburg ship manifests, my native forebears are easier to find in federal records because of the way the government has always intruded on American Indians’ lives. The Treaty of New Echota is the most fraught and world-historical genesis of how my relatives and I came to be. I glanced at it, spontaneously wept, and then chided myself that I was writing for a newspaper that is supposed to make federal employees cry and not the other way around.

I have read the text of this treaty in books and online many times, including at New Echota, the old Cherokee capital in Georgia where it was signed. I had never had such a primordial reaction to the words and signatures before seeing the real thing up close.

That said, Indian treaties are not talismans. They’re contracts establishing government-to-government relationships with Washington that can list responsibilities, rights and boundaries. When Thomas Jefferson paid Napoleon for Louisiana, it wasn’t for the land itself, as France owned very little of it; rather, it was for the proprietary right to make binding treaties with the territory’s Native nations and pay them for their lands.

To repair, consolidate and provide easy public access to all 374 ratified Indian treaties in NARA’s collections, Wright’s Office of Innovation partnered with the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture in Santa Fe, N.M., and an anonymous donor to create DigiTreaties.org, a user-friendly website for students of history, including tribal attorneys, that is searchable by tribe or location, with added features such as timelines and maps.

In 2016, Wright founded a digital reference platform on the NARA website called History Hub. Her most fascinating, addictive innovation, it is a public service in the purest sense. Anyone, anywhere may submit a query to History Hub free of charge, and a roster of NARA archivists, other federal staffers and citizen volunteers will chime in with answers, follow-up questions or advice on where to look to find out more. Here’s a random sampling from its 23,000 questions and 52,000 replies:

Were Herbert Hoover, J. Edgar Hoover and “the vacuum cleaner guy” related? (No, but J. Edgar and Herbert used to receive each other’s mail by mistake.) Where might one locate a photograph of Crazy Horse? (Nowhere, as none exist.) Are the terms “suffragist” and “suffragette” interchangeable? (“Suffragette” was widely accepted in Britain, but the American movement considered it an insult and insisted upon “suffragist.”) Were there iron mines near Rockaway, N.J.? Yes, the Hibernia and Mount Hope mines being the most famous. Why did a lot of early 20th century Ohioans tie the knot in Indiana? (Fewer marriage restrictions made Indiana “the hot destination to elope in the eastern Midwest.”)

A patron curious whether any specimens of the fruit flies launched into space in 1947 were preserved and, if so, where, received a suggestion from an archivist to consult the Naval Research Laboratory records but also to keep in mind that “the National Archives does not consider biological specimens to be federal records, and as such we generally do not intentionally accession deceased insects.”

History Hub is on the internet, but it is not of the internet. The contributors are courteous, curious, knowledgeable, generous and nonpartisan. In other words, it’s rigged. NARA staff screen the submissions for foul language and inappropriate trains of thought. (Rejected applicants are invited to clean up their posts and try again.) The moderators foster a format where readers root for every contributor. Here’s hoping that Steven tracks down his Air Force discharge papers, that Dorothea was able to spot her relatives in the newsreels of Jim Thorpe’s wedding, that Chelsea learns more about the dating scene in Japanese internment camps and that Otis finds that photo he wants of movie star Shelley Winters meeting Robert F. Kennedy.

Many History Hub searches are straightforward requests for military personnel records or family papers. “Looking for my grandmother” comes up repeatedly. I started to feel protective of History Hub’s amateur genealogists. While one post attracted several relatives of the Syrian immigrant who may or may not have invented the ice cream cone, other families might unearth darker claims to fame. I have my great-great-grandfather Stephen’s Confederate Army service record, photocopied from NARA 30 years ago and certified with a red sticker bearing the National Archives seal. These documents stick to you. Best-case scenario: You get comfortable with discomfort. Worst-case? A swarm of apostates fly the Confederate flag in the United States Capitol and a photocopy in a drawer starts beating like a telltale heart.

To understand how History Hub works, I registered with the site and typed in a request about an unsung Cold War exploit in my home state: Where might one locate the records of the Air Force flight crews that trained for the Berlin Airlift in Great Falls, Mont.?

While users posting common genealogy questions or military records requests can receive answers within a couple of days, my niche topic languished for a few weeks before an archivist replied with a link to 46 Berlin Airlift citations in the NARA Catalog, also directing me to the Air Force Historical Research Agency, with the caveat that some of the documents might still be classified 75 years later. Because you never know when you might need to dust off an aerial resupply plan to thwart a Soviet blockade of West Berlin with condensed milk and coal?

While the nine presidential elections in which I have voted have disabused me of the notion that knowledge is power, careening around History Hub and witnessing the archivists and citizen archivists help total strangers find the truth is a reminder that, more often than not, knowledge is pleasure.

When I asked prolific History Hub volunteer Joel Weintraub, a retired zoology professor from Cal State Fullerton, if his former profession relates to his work for the National Archives, he replied that he had specialized in field biology and ornithology. “Birding,” he said, “requires identification skills, analytical skills, the ability to see part of a situation and extrapolate it to the whole, and methodology skills” that he applies to steering others through thickets of federal records, particularly censuses. He likened spotting a “life bird” in the wild after clocking hours of learning about a species “so when I actually saw it in the field I knew what it was” to helping a NARA patron dig up “another ancestor that I can check off the list.”

The National Archives manages the U.S. census records. Wright led the team that got the 1950 Census online at midnight the day it dropped in 2022. (To protect privacy, complete census records are not made public for 72 years.) “The way we developed the 1950 Census website was groundbreaking for NARA — the first use of AI for our digital public access — and it was thrilling to see it go live at the very first minute it could legally be made available,” she said. “Everyone can see themselves in the country.”

A social leveler, Elvis “Pressley” — the census takers were not exactly spelling bee champs — takes up the same amount of space as my friend Chuck.

Considering that an old census is government data collected by the not especially sappy Commerce Department to apportion the House of Representatives, reading one can get pretty personal, pretty fast. Weintraub remembered a retired archivist from one of NARA’s branch archives telling him about helping a visitor look up her people in the 1940 Census: “An hour later, he noticed she was still staring at the same screen. When he asked her if she needed help, she told him that most of the members of the family were now deceased due to age or the Second World War, and that record she was looking at emotionally connected her to her family of that time. She just wanted to sit there contemplating her experiences.”

In the 1950 count, scribbled on a page for Muskogee County, Okla., my late dad, Pat, is 8 years old and alive forever. So are Louis Armstrong in Queens, Georgia O’Keeffe in New Mexico and Duke Kahanamoku in Honolulu. Folk singer Pete Seeger, staying with his in-laws in Greenwich Village, will have Billboard’s No. 1 pop single that year with his group the Weavers, a swaying take on “Goodnight, Irene”; thanks to the House Un-American Activities Committee, by the 1960 Census, all the Weavers would be blacklisted, so you could see them in your dreams but not on NBC.

In 1950, the name of Dad’s mother, Esther, is misspelled, and a follow-up question reports that both of her parents were born in the United States, even though the same census taker that very day had interviewed them and noted that they were born in Sweden, marking down Elin as “Helen.” When I found the page for my mom and her parents, who lived a few miles away, I noticed that, in 1950, her Cherokee father, Cisero — the census taker’s handwriting looks like “Crisco” — was described as W, for White, though the 1940 Census had marked him I, for Indian. (This pluralist country did not allow its citizens to identify as more than one race until 2000.)

History Hub volunteer Susannah Brooks explained: “One must remember that, unlike the most recent census, individuals did not enter the information about their household, but rather told a census taker, who wrote down what they thought they heard. Therefore, there are many misspellings of name and place of origin. Also, census takers might enter the race of a person based on appearance, rather than asking the individual their race.” She noted that census takers dictated some details straight from the mouths of neighbors or unsupervised children. The abundance of errors, along with occasionally illegible handwriting, can make for frustrating searches. Brooks nevertheless pointed out that a census is a starting place to look for clues leading to other records and further insights.

“This is where knowledge of family and general history intertwine,” she said, “forcing one to better understand why ancestors may have done certain things during their lifetime.”

I had just such an epiphany when I noticed in the 1940 Census that my grandfather Cisero’s employment was listed as “WPA road crew.” The only thing that could make an old-fashioned liberal like me light up faster than the letters “WPA” is the phrase “Jimmy Carter’s cardigan.”

It was news to me that Cisero had held down any job. I remember him as the gloomy drunk who ruined my grandmother’s life. I asked my mom, and she said there had been some sort of accident — that he broke his back working on the road crew and was never the same afterward. I felt a flicker of compassion for a dead man I’m still afraid of. And while I’m grateful to the Commerce Department and the National Archives for imparting the origin story of my grandfather’s misery, did it have to be my beloved New Deal?

Sitting in Wright’s office at Archives II in College Park, Md., I asked her to call up the 1950 Census and show me her parents’ names, Theodore and Simone, in Montana. It’s her favorite federal record. “I love this because it is a snapshot of my family history,” she said. “1950 just doesn’t seem that long ago, but my sister Bea is now in her 70s, and Mom and Dad are long gone.” We both choked up remembering our dead dads. Like a lot of ranchers, her father had a second job, in his case installing carpet. He served in the Army in France in World War II, where he met and married her French mother and brought her back to Conrad, where she became “the elegant French lady who worked at the local JCPenney’s.”

An excerpt of a 1950 Census page showing Wright’s parents and siblings, her favorite federal record. (National Archives)

An excerpt of a 1950 Census page showing Wright’s parents and siblings, her favorite federal record. (National Archives)

An excerpt of a 1950 Census page showing Wright’s parents and siblings, her favorite federal record. (National Archives)

Asked if being surrounded by old paperwork all day had affected her relationship with death, Wright summoned an image from her rural girlhood. She said she thinks of life as a combine tilling soil, and each person’s particular clump of dirt is brought to light for only a moment before the machine tramps it down and keeps on going.

To paraphrase Hank Williams, who made his final federal census appearance in 1950, we’ll never get out of the National Archives alive. Beyond the seemingly infinite subjects to explore at NARA or on its website — the Lavender Scare, Puerto Rico, that time Annie Oakley wrote to William McKinley offering to round up 50 lady sharpshooters to fight in the coming war with Spain — the democracy that the researcher encounters most often is death itself. I stumbled upon my 2-year-old grandfather Carlile’s 1906 application to the Cherokee Nation’s Dawes Rolls of citizenship, and whatever I might think about that historical episode — it was an insidious program of federal overreach to privatize tribal lands and bulldoze Indian Territory into the new state of Oklahoma — I was so caught up in Pa’s memory that I could smell his breath, a signature scent of Jack Daniel’s and Prince Albert in a can. Turns out my bones to pick with history cannot compare with my feud with death.

Wright took me to the chilly storage room safeguarding one of the National Archives’ holy of holies, the blue metal cabinets protecting photographer Mathew Brady’s glass-plate negatives from the Civil War. If only all the photographed fallen men strewn across the killing fields could see the devotion with which their country watches over those fragile bits of glass. Their names would not be written in the 1870 Census, but thanks to them, those of others would. The 1870 Census was the first to list all African Americans by name.

As I was heading toward that storage room with an entourage of archivists, one of them noticed I was taking notes with an ink pen, and we had to turn around to scare up a pencil. Ink can permanently damage records, whereas lead can be erased. Wright handed me an official blue National Archives and Records Administration pencil, and off we went. It was stamped in all caps, “HELP US PROTECT THE RECORDS.”

When a NARA archivist politely but firmly gives you a HELP US PROTECT THE RECORDS pencil so that you and your cheapo ballpoint do not besmirch the people’s treasures, you begin to understand how these were the same people making a federal case out of boxes of classified documents stashed in a Florida bathroom — the Presidential Records Act of 1978 requiring an administration to turn over its records to NARA being just one of the 13 billion scraps of paper in its care.

When Pam Wright told me that she had majored in English at the University of Montana, we got to talking about the legendary writers who had taught or studied in that department — from the critic Leslie Fiedler and the Western storyteller Dorothy M. Johnson, author of “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” to the poet Richard Hugo, who taught the novelist James Welch to “write about home.” Turns out, Wright and I have the same favorite poem, though Hugo’s “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg,” set in a dying mining town northwest of Butte, is probably a lot of Montanans’ favorite poem. When I visited the National Archives rotunda, I stood in line behind a group of schoolchildren to file past the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the headwaters from which all federal records flow. Watching the children genuflect before one and then the other, I remembered the most stirring line in Hugo’s poem: “The car that brought you here still runs.”

Above the rotunda, Wright and I stood next to Trevor Plante in the vault as he showed us the very first law: “An act to regulate the time and manner of administering certain oaths.” The first law passed by Congress after the ratification of the Constitution, it was signed by George Washington on June 1, 1789. We all bent forward, squinting, but Washington’s name was too faint to make out. That of Vice President John Adams, signing as the president of the Senate, was clear. The law requires government officials to “solemnly swear or affirm” that they will “support the Constitution of the United States.”

While the wording got tweaked and replaced over the centuries, every government official still swears an oath pledging to support and defend the Constitution. The staff of the National Archives, Plante pointed out, are the only ones “also responsible for physically protecting the Constitution itself.”

Wright swore what she described as a “simple and powerful” oath. “I do remember thinking that the federal government doesn’t fool around, and that this was truly an important responsibility,” she said. “That oath makes you realize that what you are doing is fundamentally important to the country, no matter what capacity you are in while working for the federal government — that your work and how you conduct yourself matters, and you need to be aware of the significance of it.”

While I would love to agree with Wright, my cable TV subscription comes with C-SPAN, so I’ve witnessed too many featherbrained antics to believe that the federal government never fools around. But I’m no different than any other citizen searching the National Archives. I found what I was looking for: an inventive civil servant who answers to her people. I was looking for a country I want to live in.