September 2026 Program
BACKGROUND:
National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has announced plans to close its San Bruno, California, and Chicago, Illinois, facilities within three years, with transfers potentially beginning as early as August 2026.
San Bruno holdings comprise 100,000 cubic feet of records, including Asian and Pacific immigration and naturalization materials; the original case file from United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the 1898 decision that helped establish birthright citizenship; Chinese Exclusion case files; German, Italian, and Japanese American World War II records; documents concerning the Tanforan Assembly Center incarceration; legal records related to the motion to vacate Fred Korematsu’s 1944 conviction; Japanese picture bride files; Alien Files containing visas, photographs, and family-history materials; records documenting Indigenous and Hawaiian communities; Mexican Land grant cases; and arrival case files for Russian Jews and other immigrants from throughout the world.
Chicago facility holds permanent records created by federal agencies and courts in Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, including naturalization and genealogical records and Chinese Exclusion Act case files from Chicago and St. Paul, Minnesota.
Public access to historical records is under threat as demonstrated by the attempt to dismantle the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences—the only federal agency dedicated to providing funding for the nation’s libraries—by executive order.
SPEAKER BIO:
Grant Din has been conducting research at the National Archives branch in San Francisco (located in nearby San Bruno) since the 1990s, finding countless treasures. Learn about some of the stories he has found there and at other regional branches, and why the regional archives should be kept open.Grant Din has been doing genealogy for family, friends, clients, and charity auction winners for over forty years.
He has been on the staff of the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation and worked with or volunteered for many other nonprofits, and was the lead author of the Chinese American Historic Context Statement in San Francisco and the co-curator of the permanent exhibit on Angel Island, Taken From Their Families, about the WWII detention of Japanese immigrants there. Grant’s given online or in-person genealogy presentations for countless organizations and currently he’s spending a lot of time as communications co-chair of Save Our National Archives (saveournationalarchives.org), which is a coalition of people and organizations fighting to keep the National Archives branches in San Bruno and Chicago open and accessible to researchers.