WASHINGTON — National Archives visitors know they’ll find the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights in the main building’s magnificent rotunda in Washington.
But they won’t find the patent file for the Wright Brothers’ Flying Machine or the maps for the first atomic bomb missions anywhere in the archives inventory. Some were stolen by researchers or archives employees. Others simply disappeared without a trace.
Some records have been missing for decades from the archives’ 44 facilities in 20 states and the capital, including 13 presidential libraries.
“When I came here nine years ago, there was no acknowledgment that we had a problem,” the archives’ inspector general, Paul Brachfeld, told The Associated Press.
Since then, he has started a recovery team that attends trade shows and Civil War re-enactments and enlists the help of dealers and researchers to recover historical items that belong to the government.
Brachfeld also has documented thousands of electronic storage devices, including computers and servers, that have gone missing over the past decade from the National Archives and Records Administration.
The agency has two missions that sometimes are in conflict: preserving documents and making them available to the public in monitored research rooms with surveillance cameras.
“We do not have item-by-item control,” said archives spokeswoman Susan Cooper. “We can’t. We have 9 billion documents. We don’t know exactly what’s in each of those boxes.”
Missing from the National Archives
Many historical items the Archives once possessed are missing, including:
•The patent file for the Wright Brothers’ flyer. From 1969 to 1980, the file was passed around multiple archives offices, the Patents and Trademarks Office and the National Air and Space Museum. It was returned to the archives in 1979 and was last seen in 1980.
•Target maps for the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. In 1962, military representatives checked out the maps, and they have been missing ever since.
•A portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt. In May 2004, one of FDR’s grandsons asked to see the portrait at the Roosevelt presidential library in Hyde Park, N.Y. It couldn’t be found and hasn’t been seen since 2001.
•About 160 Civil War documents. A 40-year-old National Archives intern in Philadelphia stole them, and about half were sold on eBay. The documents included telegrams about the troops’ weaponry, the War Department’s announcement of President Abraham Lincoln’s death that was sent to soldiers, and a letter from famed Confederate cavalryman James Ewell Brown Stuart.
