How this history fan gets to read JFK's telegrams, Titanic insurance claims, UFO docs

What do a letter Martin Van Buren wrote to Queen Victoria, a telegram from Harpo Marx to John F. Kennedy, and an inventory of Eva Braun's possessions seized by the Allies have in common? Alex Smith has transcribed all of them.

As a citizen archivist for the National Archives and Records Administration, Smith is one of thousands of volunteers helping transcribe millions of digitized files so that their text is searchable in the administration's online catalog.

About six months before Smith, 70, was set to retire eight years ago from his position at Susquehanna University in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania, he came across a news article about the volunteer opportunity.

A graduate of Bowdoin College with an English degree and a penchant for history, he immediately settled on the program as a way to occupy his free time.

"I had been thinking about what it was after I had retired that I was going to do to give some structure and some passion to my life, and I thought this is perfect," he said.

The catalog holds descriptions of the archive's holdings researchers can use to locate files, but a computer can't always pick up the text within the files, Suzanne Isaacs, the archives' catalog community manager, told USA TODAY.

That's where citizen archivists come in: Their transcriptions of the documents make every word of the text searchable. "It unlocks history, and then it's available to the world," Isaacs said.

Archivists also use software that picks up images of text, called optical character recognition, but humans are still better at parsing old documents.

"We have so many different kinds of records over the course of a few centuries," Isaacs said. "They're odd sizes, they're folded, they're torn, ink bleeds through. Some are handwritten and gorgeous, and some are handwritten and it looks like chicken scratch. So we find that humans are just better, at this point, at being able to decipher what's said."

The program started in 2016, about five years after the archives started to add features to the catalog that allowed users to comment or transcribe the files.

Isaacs said the catalog holds 270 million digitized files, still a fraction of the 15 billion items held by the National Archives. "We're ramping up and getting more and more things in the catalog all the time," Isaacs said.

By 2026, the catalog is on track to hold half a billion files – which means more volunteers will be needed to help transcribe the documents.

Isaacs said the program is wide open to new volunteers, and those interested should visit the citizen archivist page on the National Archives website.

"We are constantly recruiting," she said. "Our work never stops."

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A backstage pass to history

In more than eight years volunteering, Smith has transcribed more than 100,000 pages of files across hundreds of years of history.

In 2017, Smith traveled to the nation's capital, where he was awarded the Citizen Archivist award by then-Archivist of the United States David Ferriero. It was Smith's first visit to the National Archives building.

Smith savors the peek behind the curtain of history he gets from the files, which are as diverse as safety guidelines sent to soldiers during the 1918 influenza pandemic and bankruptcy records of the famous Wild West showman Buffalo Bill Cody. "I learned it cost a dollar a night to stable a camel at that point," he said of the latter.

Sometime, the documents reveal hidden connections between historical events, like one Smith came across while transcribing insurance claims for the Titanic. The claims included transcripts of interviews with other sea captains meant to prove how the doomed ocean liner had violated safety norms. The name of one interviewee – Capt. William Thomas Turner – jumped out to Smith immediately.

"'We understand you have to finish this today because you're sailing tomorrow,'" the interviewers asked, according to the document Smith transcribed. "They said, 'Oh, and what ship are you captaining?' And he said, 'The Lusitania'" – a name now synonymous with disaster after a German torpedo sank it soon after in May 1915.

"It was indeed the trip in which it was sunk, and the poor man had been saying things like, 'Well, I don't really know how long it would take under normal circumstances to lower a lifeboat.' And I thought, well, you've got to find out in a few days," Smith said.

Smith has been amazed by the hidden angles of major historical events the documents illuminate. "I hadn't known much about the immediate aftermath of World War II, and there are fascinating documents on the displaced persons who were trying to get out of Switzerland, or China, wherever it was," Smith said. "Their stories are made very vivid. It's wrenching."

Some documents have a humanizing effect on well-known historical figures. Smith recalled an account from former Secretary of State Dean Acheson of an incident when then-President Harry S. Truman demanded the recall of the Russian ambassador for being rude to his wife, Bess Truman. "The Secretary of State said it took the combined efforts of the secretary, one of Truman's closest aides, and Mrs. Truman herself to try to talk Truman out of it," Smith said. "And finally, Truman said: 'That's it. I can't compete with all of you.'"

Once, while going through telegrams sent to Kennedy to congratulate him on his Democratic nomination for president, Smith found a telegram from the silent comedian Harpo Marx that asked, "'Do you need a harp player in your cabinet?'"

Smith has come across other humorous tidbits, like one from the court testimony of Kathryn Kelly, the wife of George Kelly Barnes, better known as Machine Gun Kelly, the infamous Prohibition-era gangster.

"She was a very inept liar," Smith said. "At one point, the prosecutor had gotten her to say that she was afraid of her husband, and anything she did, she did because she was afraid of him." Asked why she bought her husband the machine gun that became his favorite weapon, Smith read that Kathryn Kelly said, "'Well, I thought he was dangerous, but I didn't think he was going to be dangerous with the machine gun.'"

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'You never know what you're going to find'

Citizen archivists can work from anywhere – all they need is a computer. "We only ask for a page at a time," Isaacs said.

The flexibility is a factor that attracted Smith to the program. "It's entirely in your hands. You can do it at any time of day or night," he said. "I've had insomnia periodically and thought fine, I'm going to go in and transcribe whatever I was working on earlier in the day."

Although citizen archivists can pick their own documents to transcribe, the amount of material can seem overwhelming. "We create missions, which are topical subject areas, or very specific records about maybe a holiday or a celebration or a historic event," Isaacs said. Some missions available on the program's website now include World War II oral histories, records related to the Chinese Exclusion Era, and UFO-related records.

The catalog also recently announced a new mission in collaboration with the National Park Service ahead of America's 250th birthday to transcribe the pension files of Revolutionary War soldiers. "Something you transcribe could be used in an interpretation tour by a park ranger at a battlefield," Isaacs said.

Smith has participated in the missions, but he also enjoys coming across topics that pique his interest, or even searching for random keywords to see what pops up. "I enjoy just tossing a word in the search engine at random, something that doesn't have an obvious tie, like 'bakery,' or 'emerald,' or whatever comes to mind," he said.

"You never know what you're going to find. It just really is very fulfilling, and I've learned a lot."

Cybele Mayes-Osterman is a breaking news reporter for USA TODAY. Reach her on email at cmayesosterman@usatoday.com. Follow her on X @CybeleMO.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: National Archives recruits volunteers to read rare historical files