Railroad Retirement Board file

By Anonymous on Tue, 12/01/2015 - 06:43

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Citation Issues

I just received my grandfather's file from NARA Atlanta in an email. I have Evidence Explained, second edition and I am a bit confused with the QuickCheck Model. Would this be my citation for the file?

James John McCarry pension file, SS no. 716-09-2211, 1954; records of the Railroad Retirement Board, 1934-, National Archives Record Group 184; RRB-Congressional Inquiry Section, Chicago, Illinois.

Pat O'Donnell Kuhn

Pat, the QuickCheck Model for

Pat, the QuickCheck Model for Railroad Retirement Board records at p. 545 is for a pension file. Is that what you received or did you request an employment or personnel file? In addition, we need to consider the following:

Did you make your inquiry through the CIS at Chicago or did you inquire at NARA Atlanta?
Did the NARA Atlanta staff provide any file/collection/RG data—either in a cover letter or as a stamp on the back of at least one of the documents?

I requested and recieved a

I requested and recieved a pension file from NARA Atlanta. I recieved it by email and there is nothing stamped on it saying it came from them. They did include a reciept for my payment to them in the email so would this identify as it came from NARA Atlanta?

Patricia, guesswork often

Patricia, guesswork often leads us astray. The best approach would be for you to email them back and ask them to provide a specific citation. If you run a query for "NARA" at this site, you'll see that this issue has come up again and again, with NARA sending out documents devoid of any archival identification. For example:

A forum question at https://www.evidenceexplained.com/content/muster-rolls-ordered-online-nara deals specifically with NARA's response when asked for a citation.
QuickLesson 4 is a longer discussion of how we can often reconstruct the citation, when NARA doesn't supply one, by using NARA finding aids: https://www.evidenceexplained.com/content/quicklesson-4-nara-citations-finding-aids

Let us know what response you get, please.

I have sent an email

I have sent an email requesting a specific citation for the file.

I will let you know what I hear back

Good. We'll stay tuned.

I had an answer back. I was

I had an answer back. I was told that the record group held at NARA Atlanta are the Railroad Retirement Bornd Inactive Claims folders which is the Record Group 184. The citation information he gave me was

Record Group 184, 1934-87

Railroad Retirement Board (Inactive Claim Folders)

National Archives Identifier (NAI): 5743080 (Testural Records)

National Archives at Atlanta

So my revised citation:

James John McCarry pension file, SS no. 716-09-2211, 1954; records of the Railroad Retirement Board, 1934-1987 (Inactive Claim Folders), National Archives Record Group 184 (NIA: 5743080, Testural Records), National Archives in Atlanta.

does it look ok?

Patricia, it's good to hear

Patricia, it's good to hear that the archives staff responded positively—and so promptly. You've assembled all the essential elements, but they need a bit of rearranging. The basic order for citing NARA documents (see EE 11.1) is this: start with the smallest element and move up to the largest—i.e., document, file, collection, subgroup, record group no.: name, location. So, let's consider several pieces of the description you were given:

The NIA should be an identifier for the file itself, not for the record group.
The descriptor "Inactive Claim Folders" is a subgroup of Record Group 184; in a smaller-to-larger arrangement, it would be cited before the RG number
As EE's chapter 11 also demonstrates, NARA's preferred style of citation now puts the RG number before the RG name and links the two with a colon.

The result would be this:

James John McCarry pension file, SS no. 716-09-2211, 1954; NIA: 5743080, Textural Records; Inactive Claims Folders; RG 184: Records of the Railroad Retirement Board; National Archives–Atlanta, Morrow, Ga.

You'll also notice that I altered the phrase "National Archives in Atlanta." In the NARA system, the branch that serves the Atlanta region is known as "National Archives–Atlanta" but it's actually in Morrow, Georgia.