Rails interface onto NARA Record Group 210, containing information on interned Japanese Americans from WRA Form 26. Information has been privided by the US National Archives as an unrestricted data source.
If you are unfamiliar with the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, plenty of information is available online:
- https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/japanese-relocation
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_Americans
The US National Archives Catalog compiled these records in the late '80s as a series of punch cards. They were digitized into a flat file, but the schema remains difficult to parse out manually. The Access to Archival Databases (AAD) system does present a semi-useful interface onto the data, but it is seriously limited in filtering and exporting capabilities. This app allows more expressive and complex usage of the data using ActiveRecord.
Requires Ruby 3.1.2. Uses SQLite3 by default; if you want another database, you can set it up yourself. It's frankly not large enough a dataset to really warrant any heavy lifting.
Just run rails db:prepare. The app will automatically download the plaintext data set from the NARA and import it.
If the automated downloader encounters an issue, just go to https://catalog.archives.gov/id/1264228, download the TXT
file under the "Electronic Records" header, and place it in the db folder.
Run rails spec.
Please run rubocop -A to lint your branch before submitting pull requests. Any help is welcome and appreciated!
If you would like to contact me, please find my email address at my website.
Please see the license.