Here's a sort of a Christmas present for all you fine people. You can't take it to the bank but you can eat it in a manner of speaking, since it is food for thought.
I think it would be more fun for you to look the stuff over and think about it rather than have me try to explain it.
Before I lose you in explanation, here's the link to the pictures I took of the stuff this morning. Some of them aren't very good because the place was closing early for CHRISTmas and I didn't have much time. Remember you have to put in the password "
attack" to see the pictures. There are four pages of photo icons in the album, click on them to enlarge.
http://s17.photobucket.com/albums/b62/cannonmn/Archives%20091224/dont' forget, password is "attack."Where did it come from? Briefly I was at the National Archives in DC this week looking for some needles in the haystack, and along the way talked to an employee I hadn't met before. Anyway he asked me "have you looked in the subject index file?" I'd never heard of that before. Turns out in the "Old Navy" area I was looking in, there are many different places where different holdings are listed, there's no single place where it is all listed. He pulled out a couple of overstuffed large-capacity 3-ring binders and I flipped through them, maybe a few hundred pages with three or four small collections of papers described on each page. Sure enough there's a huge amount of files, boxes, ledger books, etc. on naval ordnance which I'd never known about in the 30 years I'd been visiting the Archives. I took pictures of some of the things I flipped through this morning. Obviously I'll have to go back again soon and look at more of it, and get better photos too. The Archives has thousands of different "items" or "entries" they like to call them, within the areas of Army and Navy ordnance, and no one person has enough time in their life to see them all. Some might be only a single ledger book, and others could individually fill a garage.
