This is a continuation of my two previous posts on John Caesar Grossi, a minor figure in the JFK assassination who is the subject of a surprising number of FBI files in the JFK Assassination Records Collection (ARC).
Many documents in these files had extensive postponements; a number were withheld in full.…
I finally have an introductory page on the content of the ARC. Here is a link to it. There is another link to it on my home page as well. Let me know if you have any corrections or suggestions! …
This is my fourth post on NBR records in the JFK Assassination Records Collection. (See here for a general introduction to records designated NBR “not believed relevant”).
The documents I discuss in this post are financial records of the Cuban Revolutionary Council (CRC). The CRC was “an umbrella group of anti-Castro groups formed with the support of the U.S.…
This is the first note in a new series on how the Mary Ferrell Foundation (MFF) managed to match up the records from NARA’s 2017-2018 ARC releases with the appropriate metadata and plug them in to their massive document archive.
This was a big, big job; my hat is off to them, particularly to Mary Ferrell Foundation President Rex Bradford, who doubles as the MFF’s website designer and programmer.…
I posted my first note on the JFK ARC on November 14, 2017, so I’ve been writing on this subject for three years now. I had no particular goals when I began, so I can’t speak of any accomplishments to date.
I have, however, slowly acquired a few goals along the way.…
This post discusses an FOIA release from NARA that came out in February 2020. The release includes a couple of record lists and NARA’s letters to President Trump on releasing material in the ARC. The release is available from NARA here. It is also available in a somewhat different format from the Government Attic website here, and from the “FOIA Online” website.…
I have been looking at the ARC 2017-2018 releases again and there are still many questions I cannot answer. One question that I am looking at now is what makes some of these documents “releases” to begin with.
Here is an example of this problem. CIA record 104-10001-10042 was released on April 26, 2018.…
As noted earlier, the ACRS, NARA’s on-line database of metadata for documents in the JFK Assassination Records Collection, has been down for maintenance since the end of September 2020.
In its place is a 27M excel file which NARA describes as “listing every item in the [ACRS] database to facilitate researcher access to the information in the system” (see here).…
This is a follow-up to a note I posted over two years ago (March 2018).
That note looked at the question of how many records were listed in the ACRS, NARA’s on-line database of ARC metadata. Since the ACRS has become available on-line, with a little bit of programming one should be able to answer that question definitively; just scan and scrape it.…
[First posted on May 4, 2018, at rgr-cyt.org.]
For those not in the know, most (but not all) records in the JFK Assassination Records Collection at NARA have finding aids called Reader Information Forms (RIFs) Each RIF has a unique 13 digit number that identifies the document. In this numbering system, the first three digits represent the agency that provided the record.…