‘Making American history unavailable’: Genealogists lament plan to move National Archives from Chicago

Editor’s note: This article has been updated to reflect Teresa Steinkamp McMillin’s title as certified genealogist.

Teresa Steinkamp McMillin discovered her passion for genealogy as a child watching “Roots,” the seminal, 1977 miniseries adapted from Alex Haley's semifictional novel. As an adult, the Inverness genealogist conducts research on behalf of the U.S. Army to help repatriate missing soldiers.

For researchers like her, National Archives and Records Administration facilities are invaluable.

“Each branch has one-of-a-kind manuscript collections you won't find at other branches,” said McMillin, a certified genealogist.

Among those national treasure troves is the nondescript building on Chicago's southwest side that houses the National Archives at Chicago. It contains 140,000 cubic feet of national records from Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Minnesota and Wisconsin, ranging from naturalization papers and tribal documents to court transcripts and Great Lakes maritime records.

But the materials housed there will likely become less accessible to historians, genealogists and ordinary folks curious about whence they came since NARA announced that it will close the archives in Chicago and San Bruno, California.

Chicago-held records from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Chinese Exclusion Act case files, documents related to the Pullman Strike of 1894 and the capsizing of the Eastland in 1915, transcripts from the Chicago Seven trial, and more will be distributed to archives around the country, according to Suzanne Hoffman, president of the Illinois State Genealogical Society.

The result will be information “so dispersed it will be inaccessible,” added Hoffman, genealogist and past president of the Association of Professional Genealogists.

McMillin says there's no timeline for shuttering the Chicago archives.

“There's no transparency I can see in this process,” she said. “It's all being done very quickly. We need to know where everything is going to end up and how we can access it.”

A message on Chicago archives’ website indicates “staff are moving approximately 10,364 cubic feet of Court of Appeals records to the Kansas City area.” The message, which references the COVID-19 pandemic, is posted to a page that was last reviewed in June 2022.

McMillin acknowledges a lot of information is available online, but not all of it.

Compounding the challenges researchers will face, only about 3% of Chicago's records — fragile case files, records printed on brittle onionskin — have been digitized, Hoffman said.

“A lot of the records have been imaged, but they're not accessible because they haven't been indexed,” she said, meaning that researchers don't know where to look for what they need.

Records that haven't been digitized can only be accessed in person and by appointment. That presents difficulties, particularly for people seeking records related to slavery and Asian exclusion in the context of legal matters, Hoffman said.

Worried that vital records could be misplaced during the move, Hoffman cites the pivotal Radium Girls labor and workplace safety case involving young women who painted watch faces for the Radium Dial Company in Ottawa, Illinois, during the 1920s and 1930s. The women suffered radiation poisoning from their exposure to the paint, which Melanie Marnich chronicled in her 2008 play “These Shining Lives” and novelist Kate Moore reported in her 2016 book “The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women.”

“Those records came from the National Archives Chicago, but they're not digitized,” she said. “Once they're put somewhere else, how are we going to find them again?”

The failure to digitize documents, combined with the decision to shutter the facilities, is tantamount to “hiding American history or making American history unavailable,” said Hoffman, a former Wheeling resident, who became a genealogist after more than 30 years in high tech.

According to Hoffman, records are in one group of documents; the index of those records are in another; and “finding aids,” or the system by which researchers can search by subject matter, are in another. Those material groupings could be stored in as many as 12 locations around the country, she said.

“It's like hiding the clues to a puzzle in multiple locations,” Hoffman explained.

In a July 2026 letter to acting U.S. archivist Edward C. Forst, Hoffman said closing the Chicago site is not a “matter of facilities management.”

“The regional archives are not a real estate line item to be trimmed in pursuit of a leaner portfolio,” she wrote. “They are public infrastructure of the most fundamental kind, the places where the American people go to examine the documentary record of their own government and their own families.”

NARA representatives did not respond to a Daily Herald request for comment, but published reports cited cost-cutting and reducing federal real estate holdings as the impetus.

In a statement on its website, the Council of the Midwest Archives Conference expressed similar alarm over the pending closures.

The MAC described Chicago's archives as “significant holdings of immeasurable value.” Noting that regional archives were established to allow public access to the federal government's historic records, the statement indicated planned closures “will have the opposite effect, moving records further from their principal users.”

Hoffman urges people contact Illinois senators and representatives to express opposition to the closure of the archives, which she believes will contribute to a further decline in American history literacy.

“Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it,” she said, referencing the famous axiom.

“You have to know where you came from to know where you're going.”