George, This last time while taking the shuttle to the NARA in DC I sat next to a lady whose job it was to transfer WBTS records online from their collections. Her job description was rather long but she was an interesting lady. The majority of people riding the shuttle from College Park to the NARA are employees at the NARA but non employees are also welcome to ride.

According to her about 5% of the WBTS records at NARA are online. She said she had transferred millions and millions of records but the problem is there are hundreds of billions of records.

When you first enter the NARA in DC one of the first places you would want to visit is the Finding Aid Room located on the ground floor. The finding aid room would look like your normal library in some respects but they have many more binders. I have not counted the binders but would guess there are hundreds of them. Inside each binder are specific listings for that record group. Some of these binders have more than thirty pages and on each page there might be twenty different listings.

If you ever go to the NARA in DC George you probably will not be able to accomplish anything on your first day because your mind can't understand what they have.

Generally speaking there are two sets of records. One is what the NARA calls the stacks. The stacks are hard bound volumes usually brown in color and generally are large volume books. Most of them were written a few years after the war from war records. The second is what I call boxes. The boxes are that and usually contain tri fold letters. Each box might contain upwards to a thousand letters or more. A few years ago I found an unopened letter from the war but it was much to do about nothing but I was the first person to read it. They also have thousands and thousands of rolls of micro-film records.

For example if I were to go to the finding aid room and want to look at Camp Chase correspondence for November and December 1864 they might bring me 7 boxes of letters. So we are talking about seven to eight thousands letters just for November and December 1864 in relation to Camp Chase for those two months. Some of the letters might have been sent to the Camp Chase commander from prisoners or just about anything in general. Of course when I say seven or eight thousand letters I am just making that up as I can't remember how many boxes there were or how many letters were in each box. But I can say it would take me the entire day just to look at each letter in a box if I wanted to do the job correctly. Most of the letters are in tri-fold.

Most of the published books that are hard to find might be found on World Cat. NARA has micro-film about Camp Chase that probably can be borrowed and is online if you look in the right places. It's okay for someone just starting off with Camp Chase but for someone like me who has been doing this for a couple of decades I want to look at the NARA at DC in those 95% of records that have not been released.

From my understanding Mr. Grady Howell might be visiting the NARA in DC before the end of the year and is entertaining using the shuttle from the NARA at College Park to the NARA in Washington DC. One never knows who you might be able to meet when taking the shuttle.