My wife Denise Kiernan worked for seven years on a book about the women who worked on the Manhattan Project in the so-called “Secret City” of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where all the project’s uranium was enriched. When The Girls of Atomic City was published in 2013, it was an instant New York Times Bestseller, and spurred a sub-genre of books about women working in technical fields who were forgotten by history because of their gender. The popularity of the 2023 movie Oppenheimer has brought national attention once again to the Manhattan Project. We routinely get emails from fans asking how they can find out definitively if a family member worked on the project during wartime.
I asked her to answer this question at some length. Her discussion follows below.
If you haven’t read the book, rectify that right now. Check out The Girls of Atomic City right here (affiliate links) or click the image below.
Take it away, Denise!
By far, the most common question I receive from readers via email is how they can verify that a family member worked at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in service to the Manhattan Project during the 1940s. Since this comes up often, I thought I would post some advice on the matter so I can easily refer readers to this post in the future.
It’s really hard to say one way or another whether a specific individual worked on the project. The files of the Atomic Energy Commission stored at the National Archives in Morrow, Georgia, number something like 5,000 to 9,000 boxes. No human has ever read through most of those boxes. They were simply bundled up in Oak Ridge and shipped to this facility outside Atlanta for safekeeping. Researchers like me have only worked through a tiny fraction of them.
At the time I was researching the book, I heard that either the archivists there or ones in Oak Ridge were attempting to compile a database of employee records so it would be easier to search for someone’s name—exactly the sort of genealogy work family members would need to do. But I don’t know if that plan was ever carried out, or if that was a goal that never came to fruition.
You might have luck phoning the archives in Morrow, Georgia, to see if they can help you. Depending on where you reside, you can certainly visit the archives outside Atlanta, or hire a researcher to look for that information for you. You’d start here (https://www.archives.gov/atlanta) and write to the archivists for any information they can provide. They can usually recommend freelance researchers who work at hourly rates.
But—and this is a big but—I would not go that route unless the archivists have a realistic idea of where that information is. As I said, there are 5,000 to 9,000 boxes there. You don’t want to pay anyone by the hour to look through those. It’s impossible.
It only makes sense if the archivists there say, “We have this one box where we keep all the employee records, and many of the researchers who come here are often successful finding the names of employees in that.” (One box of documents can take a good researcher one full day to read through.)
How do I know? Welcome to my life! That’s why nonfiction history books take a long time, and money, to research and write.
People often ask if a genealogy database such as Ancestry.com might be helpful. I’m not so sure. The Atomic Energy Commission records are not vital records listing births, deaths, or marriages. Nor are they school records such as the high school yearbooks that appear with regularity on some online resources.
Newspapers.com might be helpful, if your relation was ever mentioned in a Tennessee paper during the time he or she was working there. But remember: the Manhattan Project operated under strict secrecy and employees were routinely threatened with dismissal for speaking about their work. A mention of their name in a Tennessee newspaper during the critical period in history would not necessarily prove that they worked on the project, only that they were on the ground in that state at that point in time.
I know this is very frustrating for families. Another possibility is to contact the Oak Ridge Public Library to see if they have compiled an employee records list: (https://orpl.oakridgetn.gov).
I sincerely hope you are able to find what you are looking for, but let’s be honest up front and say that it might very well be too difficult to pull off without some mad research skills and the willingness to spend money on travel or paid assistance.
Photo credit: The Guest House at Oak Ridge, Tenn.—long abandoned—where scientist Robert Oppenheimer stayed on visits to Oak Ridge in the 1940s. Copyright © 2012 Joseph D’Agnese