Anne Copley
As many of our supporters know, the Trust has been working with the Archives in Washington to digitise and make more accessible some of the 80,000 files of the Allied Screening Commission, which was set up with the aim of compensating Italians who had bravely sheltered Allied escapees.
Each file deals with an individual who had looked after one or more escapees. The files are full of fascinating personal information, with statements from the Italians themselves as well as letters from the young men they had helped.
Should you wish to explore the possibility of a file relating to your grandparents or other ancestors – and know the name of the ancestor – the first step is to look through the online card index. The Trust has published a guide to help you, available in both English and Italian (https://msmtrust.org.uk/research/the-trusts-guide-to-researching-prisoners-of-war/ – Section 3-2 “Research in the United States”). Alternatively, you can write to us at info@msmtrust.org.uk and we will do all we can to help. Those who have found their forefathers’ files can confirm that it is a profound experience to “hear” their voices again.
I am having regular online meetings with staff at NARA to discuss matters including:
- A project to digitally analyse the card index file in order to produce a schedule of locations by region and province of every Italian helper with an existing file in the Archives. This should be of great interest in particular to academic researchers who want to concentrate on one area, or even one town, in Italy. My son Findlay Bewicke-Copley – a computational biologist – is in discussion with NARA technicians as to how to achieve this.
- A project to set up a Citizen Archivist Mission, which allows anyone interested to enhance the digital files by transcribing them or by tagging useful information contained within. In that way they become more searchable. In particular, those who don’t know the names of their forefather’s Italian helpers will have a better chance of locating the relevant file. Anyone interested in becoming a Citizen Archivist is welcome to contact us for more detail.
- The actual digitisation of the first 100 boxes of files is still awaiting a start date with final details still being worked out.
