NARA: National Archives - Alaska

My first experience with the National Archives was in late 1988.  NR ROW was in the process of researching the basis for several highways that were apparently conveyed to the State of Alaska via the 1959 Omnibus Act Quit Claim Deed.  The bulk of the records I wanted to locate were transmitted to the Federal Records Center in 1961 by the Juneau office of the Federal Highway Administration.  Most of these consisted of the old records of the Alaska Road Commission and The Bureau of Public Roads from 1920 to 1958.

Files located in the Federal Records Center were still considered to be under the custody of the agency that provided them.  So I was required to obtain a letter of authorization from FHWA to access their files at the Federal Records Center/National Archives branch at Sand Point Way Seattle Branch. At that time I was just attempting to get a feel for what we might find in their files.  1988 was also the same year that Claus Naske gathered a large amount of records from these files for the RS-2477 Trails Project that he was performing for DOT&PF.

In 1990, the Alaska files from the National Archives were moved to Anchorage.  While this provided easier access to the historic highway records, most of they were still only in hard copy form. Unfortunately in 2014 a decision was made to move all of the Alaska records back to the National Archives branch in Seattle.

The files available below were obtained from a variety of sources and represent xerox copies of certain Alaska related record groups.  The National Archives is currently digitizing their file and many can be found at the Alaska Digitization Project site.  I haven't yet spent much time at this site to see how complete their digitization process is at this point.