The National Archives is making great strides in digitizing some of the information it has in its collection. While it is unreasonable to think that all of the paper collections housed within the Archives are available online, there has been some progress made to assist researchers in locating information. One of these tools is NAIL—the National Archives Information Locator.

According to the NAIL page on the NARA Web site: “NAIL is the working prototype for a future online catalog of holdings in Washington, DC, the regional records services facilities, and the Presidential libraries. Until a full catalog is developed, NAIL will continue to serve as the NARA's online information system.” This working prototype currently contains approximately 3,000 microfilm publications descriptions, 400,446 archival holdings descriptions, and 124,000 digital copies. The NAIL database is updated every weekend.

What this means to researchers is that you can search NAIL to locate information available at the National Archives. This doesn’t mean you’ll be able to pinpoint a person in a document, but it does mean you’ll be able to find archival holdings that may help you in your research. You’d then have to visit the National Archives or one of its regional facilities, write to the Archives, or hire someone to look at the records to get the specific information you need.

For example, if I was looking for military pension information, I could use the NAIL Microfilm Publication search page and enter keywords “veterans” and “administration.” I chose these two words because military pensions are currently paid by the Veterans Administration. The search resulted in one record: Microfilm Publication M850, Veterans Administration Pension Payment Cards, 1907-33. If the person I’m looking for might have received payments during that time period, I could try to look at the publication.

It’s important to do this search within Archives records using several different keywords because, especially in the case of the military, the department responsible for the records has changed several times since the founding of our country. So you could also search by the keywords “military” and “pension,” and you would receive twelve hits, including the previously found VA files. This second search points to various indexes from specific wars, as well as Microfilm Publication T288, General Index to Pension Files, 1861-1934, which is available in its entirety online at Ancestry.com.

You can perform a similar search using keywords for find archival holdings listed in NAIL. Then, once you search, the full description link tells you more information about the selection, including its archival description and where it can be found. I tried searched this way by entering “military” and “pension” and received 1,264 hits, and selecting the box marked “Only Descriptions Linked to Digital Copies” only narrowed down the list to 1,241. One of the items available for viewing from this long list was the enlistment papers of William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody. In your case, you may not find your ancestor’s enlistment papers, but there are a lot of useful documents electronically available for researchers.

On the search page, there is also a list of media (e.g., satellite images, or maps and charts) and Archives units (e.g., military personnel records) you can choose from. You can use these selections to narrow down your search, or just use the keyword search to find everything on a topic. For example, I narrowed down my search a bit by selecting only “military” as a keyword and then selecting photographs (for media) and Center for Legislative Archives (for the Archives unit); I also chose to search for only those records that had electronic copies. I received one hit—three images of damage done to Fort Sumter in 1864. The images were viewable online. When I widened the search by choosing all units, I received 611 hits of photographs available on NAIL that pertain to the military.

Obviously, spending some time searching on NAIL could lead you to records or tools you were previously unaware of. Then, of course, you would need to find time to visit the Archives where those records are stored. If we only had more time in a day!

Elizabeth Kelley Kerstens, CGRS, is the managing editor of Genealogical Computing, editor of the Board for Certification of Genealogists’ newsletter OnBoard, the creator of Clooz—the electronic filing cabinet for genealogical records, and a frequent contributor to Ancestry Magazine. She can be reached via e-mail at liz@ancestordetective.com or at gceditor@ancestry.com.