Writing Ottoman history using the digitized U.S. consular archives NARA RG 59 (1/2): An overview of the holdings and a practical guide to online access.
U.S. diplomats and consuls in the Ottoman Empire are remembered for their role as witnesses – and actors – during the genocide of the Armenians from 1915 onwards, notably the ambassador in Constantinople (Henry Morgenthau) and the consuls in Harput (Leslie Davis) and Aleppo (Jesse Jackson)1. Serving a neutral power until 1917, the U.S. officers were able to remain in office and maintain a certain capacity for action, unlike their French and British counterparts, who were forced to leave their posts in the autumn of 1914, although the powers they represented had the two densest networks in the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century.
However, the value of the U.S. consular and diplomatic archives is not limited to the study of the genocide of the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire. The U.S. consular network was able to play such a role during the First World War, precisely because it had been established during the preceding period. This century of activity by the U.S. consular service has produced a substantial body of archival records that are kept by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). These largely overlooked archives have been little used by researchers specialising in Ottoman history2 or, more broadly, in the Eastern Mediterranean3 , particularly compared to more extensively researched repositories such as the French (Centre des Archives diplomatiques de la Courneuve; Centre des Archives Diplomatiques de Nantes) and British (The National Archives – Foreign Office) diplomatic and consular archives. Unlike these institutions, which currently offer online access to a limited proportion of their consular holdings, the NARA provides access to a large volume of diplomatic and consular archives covering the whole of the 19th century, up to 1910.
The purpose of this blog post – the first of a series of two – is, therefore, both to draw attention to the existence and availability of these NARA RG 59 archives and to describe how to access them.
Overview and key principles for the organization and classification of NARA diplomatic and consular archives
The archives of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) are kept and can be consulted in College Park, Maryland. They constitute the archives of the United States federal state and preserve the documentary traces of the activities of the various bodies of the federal government, including the Department of State, which manages diplomacy and foreign relations in the broadest sense.
The US diplomatic and consular archives are divided into two main Record Groups4:
- Record Group 59 (RG 59) – “General records of the Department of the State”, which contain the central archives of the Department of State, i.e. the documentation received over time and deposited in the archives.
- Record Group 84 (RG 84) – “Records of the Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State” contains documentation maintained in diplomatic and consular posts and repatriated afterwards.
Detailed inventories (RG 59; RG 84) and presentation pages of the digitised archives available online (RG 59; RG 84) can be found for each Record Group.5
Little information can be found6 about the RG 84, the holdings of which have hardly been digitised and put online (0.15%). On the other hand, some of the holdings of RG 59 have been digitised (6.9%7). This collection probably includes almost all (or, at least, a large proportion) of the dispatches sent by US consuls to the Department of State, from the origins of the US consular network up to 1910. This is the U.S. equivalent of the French consular series “Correspondance Politique et Commerciale”, i.e., dispatches sent by consuls to the Department of State.
For the Ottoman period, the holdings of the RG 59 are divided into three groups which correspond to three different ways of classifying the archives:
- From 1780 to 1906, dispatches sent by consuls can be found in the series “Despatches received from Consuls, 1783-1906”. The documents are arranged by consular post and in chronological order. The microfilms in this series have been almost entirely digitised and made available online. Diplomatic correspondence – from the resident minister in Constantinople – can also be found in the “Despatches from Diplomatic officers, 1783-1906” series.
- From 1906 to 1910, the filing system changed completely, with the “Numerical and Minor Files, 1906-1910”, the microfilms of which have been digitised in their entirety and made available online. All consular correspondence (worldwide) is arranged in case files – which means that documentation relating to a particular place or territory is extremely scattered.
- From 1910 to 1963, the documentation was classified in the “Central Decimal File”. The collection is arranged in series by country/territory, then by subject (and not by consular post). For the Ottoman Empire and then the Republic of Turkey (after 1923), the “Central Decimal File” has been partly microfilmed (1910-1929) but is not available online.
Accessing the archives (1) – Main principles of access and ergonomics of the NARA catalogue
All NARA documentation is organised according to the following hierarchy: Record Group > Series > File Unit > Item (volume generally corresponding to a microfilm roll). At every level in the hierarchy, each archival unit has a unique identifier (National Identifier – NAID) which functions in the same way as a permalink. You can copy and paste the NAID of any archival unit into the catalogue search bar and go directly to the fonds, series or object you are looking for.
Once you have clicked on the digitised microfilm roll (rolls generally contain between a few hundred and over a thousand views, in black and white), you can scroll through the views and view/download one view at a time, or download the entire microfilm (by clicking on “Download this digital image”, below the viewer). Each microfilm generally weighs between 0.5 and 1.5 GB. Finally, it should be noted that the pdf files are searchable, enabling full-text searches (in typed documents, which is the majority of documents from the late 1890s onwards).
Accessing the archives (2) – From the opening of the posts to 1906 (“Despatches from U.S. consular officers”)
Access to documentation sent by consuls to the Department of State up to 1906 (NAID – 302031) is very simple. The archivists at NARA have prepared a list of all the US consular posts for which dispatches have been microfilmed, up to 1906. The list below includes 24 consular posts in Ottoman territories – or which were under Ottoman sovereignty for part of the 19th century (Algiers, Tunis, etc.). It specifies the chronological boundaries,8 the references of each File unit and the number of microfilms available for each post.
Consular post | Country (2025) | Start date of the documentation | End date of the documentation | Microcopy reference (microfilm rolls series) | National Identifier (NAID) | Number of rolls (Items) |
Aleppo | Syria | 1835 | 1840 | T188 | 196006841 | 1 |
Alexandretta (today Iskenderun) | Turkey | 1896 | 1906 | T504 | 196007036 | 1 |
Alexandria | Egypt | 1853 | 1873 | T45 | 196007001 | 7 |
Algiers | Algeria | 1785 | 1906 | M23 | 196006730 | 19 |
Athens | Greece | 1837 | 1906 | T362 | 196006931 | 8 |
Baghdad | Iraq | 1888 | 1906 | T509 | 196007038 | 2 |
Beirut | Lebanon | 1836 | 1906 | T367 | 196006936 | 23 |
Brusa (today Bursa) | Turkey | 1837 | 1840 | T711 | 196007183 | 1 |
Cairo | Egypt | 1864 | 1906 | T41 | 196006966 | 24 |
Candia (today Heraklion, Crete) | Greece | 1836 | 1841 | T374 | 196006943 | 1 |
Canea (today Chania, Crète) | Greece | 1832 | 1874 | T190 | 196006842 | 2 |
Constantinople | Turkey | 1820 | 1906 | T194 | 196006846 | 24 |
Constantinople (Diplomatic corr.) | Turkey | 1818 | 1906 | M46 | 177380734 | 78 |
Chios | Greece | 1862 | 1871 | T669 | 196007152 | 1 |
Cyprus (Larnaca) | Cyprus | 1835 | 1878 | T463 | 196007006 | 2 |
Erzerum (today Erzurum) | Turkey | 1895 | 1904 | T568 | 196007085 | 2 |
Harput (today Elazığ) | Turkey | 1895 | 1906 | T579 | 196007094 | 1 |
Jerusalem | Israel-Palestine | 1856 | 1906 | M453 | 196006769 | 5 |
Port-Said | Egypt | 1870 | 1876 | T658 | 196007142 | 1 |
Salonica (today Thessaloniki) | Greece | 1832 | 1840 | T414 | 196006968 | 1 |
Sivas | Turkey | 1886 | 1906 | T681 | 196007162 | 2 |
Smyrna (today Izmir) | Turkey | 1802 | 1906 | T238 | 196006886 | 15 |
Trebizond (today Trabzon) | Turkey | 1904 | 1906 | T700 | 196007174 | 1 |
Tripoli | Libya | 1796 | 1885 | M466 | 196006782 | 7 |
Tunis | Tunisia | 1797 | 1906 | T303 | 196006899 | 12 |
Fig. 1-a – Series of microfilms of consular posts in Ottoman territories in the RG 59 series, up to 19069
Fig. 1-b – US consular posts in Ottoman territories – or territories that have been under Ottoman sovereignty – up to 1906, for which documentation RG 59 is available online10
Accessing the archives (3) – 1906-1910, “Numerical File”, “Minor File” and “Card Index”
The documentation sent by consuls between 1906 and 1910 has also been fully microfilmed, digitised and made available online. However, the disruption in the way these archives are classified (after 1906) makes access difficult. You will need to be patient and have a good internet connection.
From 1906 to 1910, the documentation related entirely to the Central State Archives has been classified in two series (microfilmed under reference M862), which have been fully digitised and made available online: “Numerical File” and “Minor File”. All consular documentation received by the “Department of State” from all over the world11 is filed here:
- The “Numerical File” (NAID – 654171): contains 25982 cases corresponding to files dealing with a place, a consular post, a theme, a case or sometimes an individual, ranging in length from a few pages to several hundred, or even more than a thousand pages. The “Numerical File” is contained in 1178 microfilms (1-1178).
- The “Minor File” (NAID – 656890), which is more modest, is contained in 62 microfilms (1179-1240) organised alphabetically by place name (post office or country), but sometimes in other ways (by topic, for example).
Microcopy reference (Microfilm rolls series) | National Identifier (NAID) | Number of rolls (Items) | |
Numerical File | M862 | 654171 | 1178 |
Minor File | M862 | 656890 | 62 |
Card Index | M1889 | 656824 | 86 |
Fig. 2 – Numerical File, Minor File, Card Index, 1906-1910.
Finding documents requires going through the “Card index” (NAID – 656824), which consists of a series of 86 microfilms (reference M1889). These consist of tens of thousands of card index cards which follow each other in alphabetical order: each refer to a case or a sub-folder of a case in the “Numerical File”, or to a reference (in alphabetical order) in the “Minor File”. The index cards may bear the names of countries, regions or towns (whether they host a US consular post or not), or an indication of topic ranging from the general to the very specific.
An example of a search in the Card Index: “Armenia”.If you are searching for “Armenia” or “Armenian”, you need to download the fourth microfilm in the Card Index (NAID – 18668742), which covers the interval from “Apia” to “Athens”. This microfilm contains 4154 views. Then you need to locate the thirty or so “Armenia” files (and its variations, from the general to the specific: “Armenians”, “Armenian Evangelical Alliance”, “Armeno-American Club Worcester”, “Armenians at Van”, etc.), and note the Numerical File or Minor File references.
Fig. 3-a Card referring to case 15170 opened in 190812.This card refers to a case opened in August 1908 concerning property issues of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. It bears the reference 15170. It is therefore necessary to open microfilm roll 920 of the series (NAID – 20374167) which covers the range of cases from 15163 to 15217. Starting on page 90 of the digitised roll, there are about sixty views concerning property issues of Ottoman Armenians living in the United States, including, for example, this letter sent to the Department of State by Dikran Bedikian, a naturalized U.S. citizen and carpet and antiques dealer living in New York, who is apparently appealing to the U.S. authorities to intervene in favour of his rights to property in the Ottoman Empire.
Fig. 3-b Letter from Dikran Bedikian to the Department of State, 5 March 191013.
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These processes for accessing documents, which are both complex and time-consuming, mean that it is necessary to plan the archival research using a spreadsheet. They make it illusory to obtain all the documentation issued by a consular post between 1906 and 1910, since it is scattered in dozens or even hundreds of cases, which would require downloading an almost equal number of microfilms and then sorting through them. Nevertheless, it is worth taking a look. On the one hand, the years 1906-1910 are very rich in events in the Ottoman Empire. On the other hand, there are cases that recur in many Numerical File records, which can contain hundreds of pages and dozens of sub-folders. Examples include 10044 – “Political conditions in Turkey” (microfilms 717 and 718; NAID – 20078242 and 20079316) or 19274 “Relief of sufferers from uprising in Turkey”, dealing with humanitarian aid for survivors of the 1909 Adana massacres (microfilms 1060 and 1061; NAID – 20583722 and 20585100).
Accessing the archives (4) – After 1910, the “Central Decimal File”
As the reorganization of the fonds attempted between 1906 and 1910 proved unsatisfactory14 the method of filing the records changed again in 1910, with the adoption of the “Central Decimal File” (NAID 302021) which remained in use until 1963. With regard to the Ottoman Empire and then the Republic of Turkey, a series (M353) of 88 microfilms covering the period 1910-1929 and entitled “Records of the Department of State relating to Internal Affairs in Turkey” has been produced. The microfilms are digitised on request and sold on the NARA archives website15. The finding aid (the pdf of which can be accessed here by searching for “M353”) shows that the series is thematically structured. Dispatches sent by the various consular posts are classified in thematic sub-series: Political Affairs, Economic matters, Industrial Matters, etc.
- Their published writings are among the most complete accounts from the rare foreign observers present in the Ottoman East (Harput), or in a place of transit for Armenian deportees (Aleppo), during the genocide: Henry Morgenthau, United States Diplomacy on the Bosphorus: The Diaries of Ambassador Morgenthau, 1913-1916, Londres, Institut Gomidas, 2004, 536 p. ; Leslie A. Davis, The Slaughterhouse Province: An American Diplomat’s Report on the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1917, New Rochelle, N.Y, Aristide Caratzas, 1989, 216 p. ; Ara Sarafian (ed.), United States Official Records on the Armenian Genocide 1915-1917, Princeton, Taderon Press, 2004, 746 p. [↩]
- These include Ruth Kark, American consuls in the Holy Land, 1832-1914, Jerusalem, United States of America, Magnes Press, Hebrew University, 1994, 388 p. , 1994, 388 p. and David Gutman, The Politics of Armenian Migration to North America, 1885-1915: Sojourners, Smugglers and Dubious Citizens, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2019, 272 p. [↩]
- Specifically, the US consular network tended to establish itself in the Western Mediterranean in its early years of operation. See Silvia Marzagalli, « Le réseau consulaire des États-Unis en Méditerranée, 1790-1815 : logiques étatiques, logiques marchandes ? » dans Arnaud Bartolomei et al. (eds.), De l’utilité commerciale des consuls. L’institution consulaire et les marchands dans le monde méditerranéen (XVIIe-XXe siècle), Rome, Publications de l’École française de Rome, 2017. pp. 295-307. See also the map of the U.S. consular network in the Mediterranean at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries. [↩]
- Broadly speaking, the distinction between RG 59 and RG 84 corresponds to the difference between the diplomatic archives kept at La Courneuve (CADC) and the consular posts records kept at Nantes (CADN). The RG 59 corresponds more or less to the Correspondance Politique et Commerciale des consuls (CPC) series, which can be consulted at the CADC. [↩]
- A complete overview of the 613 Record Groups, ordered by volume and indicating the digitisation rate for each RG, can be found on the very well-designed archive access portal (it should also be noted that the archivists are very responsive, by e-mail). Overall, the RGs – which correspond to the archives of the entire federal government – are very unequal in size and are also very unevenly digitised. Other Record Groups may complement the RG 59 and 84. These include “RG 85 Immigration and Naturalization Service”, 84% of which has been digitised and put online. [↩]
- Like the archives of consular posts (CADN), the RG 84 holdings may be richer and more extensive than the central archives of the Department of State (RG 59), since they contain correspondence received by the post (notably from consulates and subordinate consular agencies, other consular actors, local authorities and private individuals). As is the case with the CADN, we can assume that the posts at the head of the network – Constantinople in the first place – have very rich collections, as is the case with the series repatriated from the Constantinople embassy (166PO/A-B-C-D-E) containing more than 2,000 boxes and volumes. It can also be assumed that a number of fonds held in the posts in the Ottoman interior and East were lost, looted or destroyed during the First World War. In the case of the French consular network, the posts in Anatolia and Eastern Anatolia in 1914 (Angora, Diarbékir, Erzeroum, Konieh, Sivas, Van, see pages 54 to 56 of the Annuaire diplomatique et consulaire de la République française for 1914, available on the Gallica portal) which produced and kept archives (like all consular posts) have no archives that can be consulted at the CADN. We can assume that the archives of the RG 84 contain the same gaps, produced by the same historical circumstances. [↩]
- It is probably the period from 1910 to 2025 – during which the diplomatic and consular network certainly expanded in line with the US global power – that has brought this rate down. The RG 59 holdings available online are very rich in information for a long 19th century from the 1780s to 1910. [↩]
- The start date more often corresponds to the first documents mentioning the opening of the post than to the actual opening of the post, which is often several years later. When the end date is before 1906, this generally means that the consulate has closed or, more frequently, that it has been downgraded to a vice-consulate or consular agency, which implies that the agents of the post no longer correspond directly with the Department of State but with their consular network head. For example, the posts at Aleppo (1835-1840) and Salonica (1832-1840) were demoted in the same year and corresponded with Beirut and Constantinople respectively. After 1840, documentation issued by Aleppo and Salonica can be found in the collections of their respective consulates general. [↩]
- The place names on Figures 1-a and 1-b reflect the spelling used by NARA archivists. [↩]
- The dates indicate the start and end dates of the documentation. Algiers (1785-1906) is off the map. Map background generated with Graticule ; source: Natural Earth. [↩]
- It should be noted that, from 1906 to 1910, consular dispatches were mixed in the cases with diplomatic correspondence and with miscellaneous correspondence received by the Department of State, particularly from parties other than U.S. diplomats and consuls, including ordinary individuals (sometimes living in the United States and dealing with matters related to their country of origin). Although more difficult to access, the files from 1906-1910 sometimes contain a richer variety of documentation. [↩]
- NARA, RG 59, Card index, M1889, 4. [↩]
- NARA, RG 59, Numerical File, M862-920, 15170. [↩]
- See the finding aid in RG 59. [↩]
- In 2025, the price of a microfilm was 125 dollars. [↩]
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matthieugosse (24 avril 2025). Writing Ottoman history using the digitized U.S. consular archives NARA RG 59 (1/2): An overview of the holdings and a practical guide to online access. Consoli. Consulté le 15 juin 2025 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/13sws