Hi Alice,

First of all, thank you for your outstanding Pennsylvania in the Civil War website at http://www.pa-roots.com/~pacw/ and thank you for commenting on the NARA Fees posting. I went to look at the response you referred to on the "Pennsylvania in the Civil War Discussion Forum" at http://www.cwoodcock.com/forum/db_TalkToMeV2.cgi?forum_name=pennboard . This site is NOT one of my message boards, if you are upset with the thread on that site, I have no control or responsibility for it. My posting, was meant to decrease some of the misinformation and hyperbole. I have posted an identical posting on ALL of my state message boards, but am not allowing "opinion based" responses, as some of the contributors to the thread on this site can confirm. This site is an "open discussion forum" where people can say whatever they want about a Civil War-related subject, in this case the proposed fee schedule increases at the NARA, within the boundaries of appropriateness and decorum.

I hope my posting of the "official" notification by the director was not objectionable and was informative for the readers, as to the actual changes being proposed at the NARA. If by posting an NARA communication, I am responsible for "the hype that you've initiated", then so be it. If factual information causes a strong reaction, then perhaps it is the message and its source that is the problem, not the person who cut-and-pasted it.

I take it you are in disagreement with some of the responses allowed on this site. Your views as a counter to those, is exactly what this site is meant to provide, balance. I think your support of the NARA is admirable and I concur with your position that the NARA be adequately funded. I do NOT think this is a political issue, however. The current and the former administrations have never been overly supportive of the funding of the preservation and reproduction of military records. I am not sure if you're aware, but just yesterday, hearings were conducted on Capitol Hill discussing the problems at the NARA and particularly this issue of a worsening of the performance of the staff. The representatives of the NARA acknowledged the problem and promised changes.

Perhaps money is one part of the problem, but I'm hearing complaints and concerns from my researchers over the problems in interacting with the staff and lately we're having to repeat requests for documents, especially Union pension files, three and four times. For individuals ordering records from the archives under the current conditions, faced with this type of response they would wait for many months or years to receive their records, if they ever get them at all.

"I have a dog in this fight." This website offers a private service to provide Compiled Service Records and Pension Files for both Union and Confederate Soldiers. We charge $26.95 for a Union service record and $44.95 for a Union pension file. These rates are a little higher than the current rates directly from the NARA, but our customers get to communicate directly with their expert who is a professional historian and our turnaround time is about two weeks for CMSR's and four weeks for Pension Files. Recently, the pension files are running late, as our researcher is receiving rejection after rejection for requests for documents.

I guess I'm not in the best mood to make a lot of supportive statements regarding the staff who pull our records. This is not an indictment of all of the staff at the NARA, but, at least the people we are having to deal with do a very poor and seemingly disinterested job.

I hope the NARA receives adequate funding from whichever party is in power and that there are improvements in the staff. I am not overly optimistic.

Thanks again for your Pennsylvania in the Civil War website, I hope our visitors and contributors will visit.

Jim Martin