20 Times Governments Lost Their Records And Had To Start Over

In 1666, the Great Fire raged for four days in September and consumed over 13,000 houses, plus the Guildhall and the parish offices where all property deeds and leases were stored. Without paper documentation of ownership, the rebuilding project would have descended into litigation. The solution Parliament devised was the Fire Court, presided over by Sir Matthew Hale. It heard claims without a jury but on the basis of oral evidence and professional reports by surveyors. Its decisions became the new land register of London, and it continued issuing them until 1672.

In October 1871, the Great Chicago Fire burned down the courthouse and every recorded deed, survey, and court filing in Cook County. There was no way to prove ownership. A title clerk, John G. Shortall, organized the rescue of his firm’s private collection of abstract-index volumes, and when the state legislature passed the Burnt Records Act in 1872, Shortall’s private records became the legal record of Chicago property titles.

The 1906 earthquake and fire that destroyed San Francisco wiped out City Hall along with all city records of births, marriages, and US citizenship. While the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 prevented most Chinese from immigrating to the US, it did allow US-born Chinese citizens to bring over children born abroad. Without any records to refute their claims, Chinese residents made sworn statements to say they were born in San Francisco and then sold the right to claim a birthplace in the US, the “paper son” or “paper daughter” status, to others excluded from coming to the country.

When the British army marched on Washington, D.C., during the War of 1812, a clerk in the State Department named Stephen Pleasonton bundled up the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution in linen bags and carried them to safety in Virginia. He escaped just in time. The British then set fire to the Capitol, the Treasury, and the War Department, burning up the nation’s financial records, its pension records, and every single book in the Library of Congress. To start over, Congress purchased Thomas Jefferson’s private collection of books.

In February 1258, the Mongols under Hulagu Khan conquered Baghdad, killing Al-Musta’sim, the last Abbasid caliph to rule from Baghdad, and razing the state chancery and libraries. Five centuries of tax rolls, land grants, and legal cases were burned or tossed into the Tigris. Later medieval writers would report that the river turned black with ink, an image of destruction rather than a literal fact. The new Mongol rulers had to set up new archives from scratch.

For over 700 years, England’s Exchequer used notched wooden tally sticks to record tax payments. In 1826, Parliament abolished them. Some years later, workers decided to burn two cartloads of the retired sticks by setting them alight in furnaces beneath the House of Lords. The resulting blaze ignited soot that had built up in the chimneys and spread rapidly through the Palace of Westminster, razing the two chambers of Parliament. Westminster Hall was spared. This calamity led to the establishment of what would become Britain’s national archives.

China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, ruled through his Chancellor Li Si, who ordered the burning of historical records from the kingdoms that Qin had conquered and of private copies of two classics of poetry and history. Li Si claimed scholars were using old precedents to criticize current policy; only the records of the Qin court and practical manuals on agriculture and medicine were spared. Later writers said that 460 scholars were buried alive in a purge, which modern historians now consider disputed rather than certain.

In the civil war called the Year of the Four Emperors, a clash between the armies of Vitellius and the future emperor Vespasian in December 69 AD destroyed part of Rome’s Temple of Jupiter. About 3,000 bronze tablets that contained records of Senate decrees, international treaties, and land grants were melted down in the blaze. After Vespasian took power, he dispatched agents throughout the empire to look for surviving copies in public and private archives. By 70 AD, the agents returned with their findings and recast all 3,000 replacement tablets.

A fire at Blodget’s Hotel in Washington, D.C., which housed the U.S. Patent Office, destroyed about 10,000 patent files and thousands of models. The fire wiped out every U.S. patent granted up to that time. To restore the record, Congress authorized a Patent Office clerk to recreate a list from any duplicate copies sent to him by inventors and courts. The reissued patents received new serial numbers ending with an X, for example, Eli Whitney’s cotton gin became Patent 72X. Only a small fraction of the lost patents were ultimately recovered.

Italian archivists tried to save Naples’s archives by packing hundreds of crates containing the city’s most important documents and sending them away to a villa outside the city. The attempt failed. Following the revolt called the Four Days of Naples, German troops that were being pushed back by Allied forces doused the crates in kerosene and set them alight, burning seven centuries of Angevin, Aragonese, and Bourbon state documents. For decades, archive director Riccardo Filangieri attempted to reconstruct the lost archives from records stored overseas.

When an earthquake followed by a tsunami and five days of fire consumed large parts of Lisbon in 1755, the Royal Palace of Ribeira crumbled. So did the archive containing the records of Portuguese commerce with its empire in Brazil and India. But an archivist called Manuel da Maia managed to preserve another building, the Torre do Tombo, and with it the kingdom’s medieval charters. To compensate for what had been lost, the Marquis of Pombal, King Joseph I’s prime minister, ordered a survey of every parish across the country, creating the first modern administrative database in Portugal.

The 1890 census documented over 62 million Americans, and the vast majority of the schedules survived a fire that broke out in the Commerce Department’s basement, though they suffered smoke and water damage. But the schedules fared even worse in poor storage conditions for more than a decade until Congress gave the bureau permission to destroy them. Nearly the entire census was destroyed by the mid-1930s, with only a few thousand records remaining anywhere in the country. The loss sparked outrage among the public, which ultimately led Congress to establish the National Archives.

During the Irish Civil War, government troops under Michael Collins bombarded anti-Treaty troops entrenched in the Four Courts, Dublin, in 1922. The bombardment ignited explosives nearby, which then caused a fire at the Public Record Office of Ireland, destroying over seven centuries of records, including the medieval chancery rolls, wills, census schedules, and parish registers. Since then, archivists have been slowly reassembling them by obtaining copies of the original records from parish books and foreign archives. A digital reconstruction of these records is underway.

In the Yucatán town of Maní, a Spanish friar named Diego de Landa organized an illegal pyre and set fire to the region’s prized hieroglyphic bark-paper books. He believed them to be devilish, and in his official count, he burned up 27 of the texts, wiping out the family histories, borders, and taxes recorded in them. The Spanish government reprimanded Landa for his actions, as he had exceeded his authority. The local nobility still managed to reclaim their lands, however, by drawing up new deeds in the Roman alphabet.

The destruction of feudal titles by the National Convention, France’s revolutionary legislature, was not accidental. It did not just happen when peasants spontaneously burned their lords’ manors in 1789. Instead, the revolutionary government specifically ordered on July 17, 1793, that all the feudal titles, noble tax rolls, and manorial registers, kept in municipal and noble archives, be collected and burned, threatening five years in irons for anyone caught hiding one. This legal and administrative act abolished the nobility’s claims to the land and created a single land register for the nation as a whole.

Polish occupying forces clashed with Russian militias, and in the ensuing chaos the Kremlin’s government offices were set alight, taking with them the Land Office and its store of centuries-old land charters, serf registers and tax rolls. When Michael Romanov became Russia’s first Romanov tsar, his government had virtually no paper trail of who owned what, or who owed what in taxes. Some regional monastery archives had survived, allowing some local claims to be verified, but the government nevertheless spent years sending surveyors out across the country to start from scratch with a new land register.

The fire that destroyed the Tre Kronor royal castle in Stockholm on May 7, 1697, was a disaster for the national archive. Staff, including the royal archivist Johan Peringskiöld, threw documents out of windows into the courtyard below. But more than 17,000 bound volumes and 1,100 medieval manuscripts, comprising royal decrees, treaties, and tax registers, still burned. The new king, Charles XII, ordered parishes and provincial governors throughout Sweden to provide duplicate copies so the state archive could be reconstructed.

After Oliver Cromwell’s troops took Edinburgh Castle, they packed up Scotland’s entire national archive and sent it down the coast to the Tower of London. When Charles II was restored to the throne, he ordered the records sent back home, and dozens of wooden barrels were crammed aboard a merchant sailing ship bound for Scotland. It sank in a storm off the Scottish coast before reaching port, with nearly all of the medieval crown registers and parliamentary rolls of Scotland going down to the ocean floor. Scottish officials reassembled what they could from surviving local court copies.

In the Russian Revolution of 1917, mobs in Petrograd and Moscow burned down the headquarters of the Okhrana, or imperial secret police; the imperial courts; and the land registries, obliterating the files the Okhrana had amassed on revolutionaries and others, along with records of ownership dating back centuries to the era of feudal serfdom. But key military and diplomatic archives in Petrograd escaped destruction. In December, the new Bolshevik government, led by Vladimir Lenin, established ZAGS, or civil registry offices, transferring responsibility for recording births, marriages, and deaths from the Orthodox Church to secular state bureaus.

The Japanese koseki, or “family registry,” which served as legal proof of family membership and hence citizenship, was decimated in the Great Kanto Earthquake that struck the Tokyo/Yokohama region in 1923. Over 100,000 died when the earthquake and the firestorms that followed burned down entire neighborhoods and government buildings that held the koseki. Local governments hastily erected bureaus of the family registry and reconstructed individual koseki by interviewing residents and using testimony from friends and family members to authenticate claims of identity.

This content was created with the help of AI.