Back Home

Seminar on Records and Archives in Society

Course This Week Past Readings History Archives Projects

Jeff Frederick The Mystery of Ohio's Missing Presidential Election Returns, 1804-1848 Donald Ratcliffe, "The Mystery of Ohio's Missing Presidential Election Returns, 1804-1848," Archival Issues 17 (1992): 137-144 and Dennis East, "A Lesson in Archival Reality: A Commentary on Donald Ratcliffe's 'The Mystery of Ohio's Missing Presidential Returns, 1804-1848,'" Archival Issues 17 (1992): 144-149. The historian and archivist are eternally linked together as professional complements. An historian bereft of properly maintained sources is reduced to educated guesses at best and retelling mistaken stories at worst; likewise, an archivist whose records are of no use to current or future scholars is in a precarious position. In retelling the story of lost Ohio presidential voting records, historian Donald Ratcliffe and archivist Dennis East ultimately bring to light the important interpretive question of how the historian and archivist can best work together. Ratcliffe's essay is a tale of his quest to find election records of presidential campaigns in Ohio before 1824. Manifesting no small amount of narcissism, Ratcliffe seems aghast that the collective archival community of Ohio could neither produce the records his project demanded, identify their location, or be so suitably informed about the importance of his research that they would instantly drop their own duties to unravel the mystery. After engaging in some old fashioned historical legwork, Ratcliffe uncovered that the state records were destroyed by fire, and local records disappeared as clerks, with little space to house official records, discarded pollbooks and tallysheets rather than pass them on to their successors. County clerks were under no obligation to maintain presidential voting records and, thus, never preserved any of the documents. In the end, Ratcliffe's "detective work turns out to be worse than a wild goose chase" and the search proved ultimately disappointing. (Ratcliffe, 142) Ratcliffe, claims this is a cautionary tale which should serve to reproach lackadaisical archivists who haphazardly collect and catalogue records without learning the value of what they possess and the value of what is absent from their holdings. Ideally, Ratcliffe's corrective, which is strikingly similar to conclusion reached by archivist Tom Nesmith, would cause archivists to become experts of their own collections as well as practical scholars, aware of the major interpretive questions of history. As would be expected, East approaches the issue from a slightly different perspective. He prefers to focus on the numerous fires, floods, windstorms, thefts, riots, and human errors which have "contributed mightily to the loss of Ohio's state and local records" (East, 145) In addition, East points to other archival realities like funding inadequacies, understaffing, backlogs of material to be processed, and legislative mandates which have prevented archivists from full historical self actualization. East argues that archivists should be historians both in training and in practicality, but bemoans the fiscal and time constraints which perforce limit that accomplishment. What emerges in these articles, besides the woeful jeremiads of two professionals who seem to be more reactive than proactive, is a call for collaboration in order to protect the historical commonweal. Communication between the two professions too often focuses on inaccurate perceptions of the other group and the need for one group to compensate for the performance of the other. Archivists, no doubt, feel encumbered by their demanding customers, while historians wish their record keepers were friendlier and better informed. Thus, the central question remains: how do archivists and historians work together to make both professions more valuable and better equipped for excellence? Clearly, these articles should be kept; not so much for the narrative aspect of the missing records in Ohio, but rather, for segueing into an important discussion of collaboration or, at least, cooperation. Since neither group can achieve professional competence without the other, there may be no more important issue than arriving at a mutual understanding.