Karen and I spent Wednesday through Friday of last week at the National Archives II in College Park, MD. After worrying that we wouldn’t find any patients records, we found more than I imagined possible. Too much, in fact. They have nearly all of the Morningside Hospital patient lists from 1904 through the early 1950s, plus contracts, investigation reports, personnel records, medical officer reports, and administrative correspondence between Morningside and the Department of the Interior. We worked each day for 10 to 11 hours, scanning and copying. In the end, we had nearly a gig of scanned documents and photos and a 4 inch stack of copies. I don’t think we made a dent in what’s there.

This presents us with an entirely new set of questions, the most important of which is how to handle this much information and make it readily available to families and other researchers. Over the next month, we’re going to seek advice on the organization of historical collections and database design. In the meantime, we’ll post more patient lists and articles on some of the more interesting information and photos we found in the files.

Stay tuned.