We’re delighted to welcome nationally known genealogist Craig R. Scott to present  Finding Aids and the National Archives on November 5.

Craig will guide us through the structure of our National Archives. He’ll also explain how to use finding aids — guides, indexes, catalogs, and more — to navigate its vast
collections.

Craig describes his talk this way: “The National Archives of the United States documents American history from the time of the First Continental Congress. That is a lot of paper, pictures, and other things, so much in fact that it requires organization.”

“Organization means that there are rules about how things will be filed and how they  can be located once they are stored,” Craig says. “Finding aids is a term that describes the various publications, such as guides and indexes, microfilm catalogs, reference information papers, inventories, preliminary inventories, special lists, checklists, descriptive pamphlets, and other tools that have been created to assist either the researcher or the archivist in locating records.”