Historical Records Survey

The Historical Records Survey (HRS) was a project of the Works Progress Administration New Deal program in the United States. Originally part of the Federal Writers' Project, it was devoted to surveying and indexing historically significant records in state, county and local archives. The official mission statement was the "discovery, preservation, and listing of basic materials for research in the history of the United States". The creation of the Historical Records Survey was one of the signal events "in what Solon Buck called the 'archival awakening' of the 1930s".

Organized on November 15, 1935 under the direction of Luther H. Evans, the Survey began life under the Federal Writers' Project and in October 1936, became an independent section of Federal Project Number One and the Works Progress Administration's Women's and Professional Division. The project was granted a budget of $1,195,800 (equivalent to about $28,100,000 in 2025) twice over: one budget was for a survey of federal records located outside of Washington, D.C., and another budget in the same amount was for a survey of state and local historical records.

In 1939, with more artistic federal programs under attack from Congress, partly because they employed suspected Communists, the less controversial HRS was moved to the Work Projects Administration Research and Records Program, Professional and Service Division. Over the course of the program, HRS employed upwards of 10,000 American workers. Base pay for a month's work was between $50 and $60.

In 1939 the federal government handed off the program's activities to willing state governments; each state had its own supervisor co-ordinating the Survey's activities.

The HRC, headquartered in Washington, D.C., was organized into subdivisions (regional, state, district) and much of the work was done at the behest of the National Archives and Records Administration or state archive agencies. The HRS sometimes cooperated with the Daughters of the American Revolution and other volunteer groups with an interest in local history and genealogy. As noted in Evans' obituary in American Archivist, "Survey workers were active in every county of every state, in every state capitol, and in thousands of town halls."

The HRS was generally considered the most efficient and inexpensive of the Federal One projects. However, because of the program's short lifespan, many of the indexes were not published and remain in only piecemeal form in local and state record repositories.

Evans' deputy Sargent B. Child became HRS director in March 1940 after Evans took a job with the Library of Congress' Legislative Services Division. Child served until 1942. In 1942, the HRS was reorganized under the Works Progress Administration Service Division War Service Section, which later discontinued "fact-finding, survey, records and clerical services" as superfluous to the war effort. Pursuant to a Presidential letter of December 4, 1942, the HRS program was shut down February 1, 1943.

To bring together the records of the past and to house them in buildings where they will be preserved for the use of men living in the future, a nation must believe in three things. It must believe in the past. It must believe in the future. It must, above all, believe in the capacity of its people so to learn from the past that they can gain in Judgment for the creation of the future.