Volunteer Program Highlight 2004

One of the highlights for visitors of all ages to the new Manzanar National Historic Site Interpretive Center is a 10’ x 9’ model of Manzanar War Relocation Center crafted and donated by a generous group of former Manzanar internees.

After hearing that the NPS lacked sufficient funding to include a model in the new exhibit, the Manzanar High School Reunion Committee approached the National Park Service with an offer to make one. In all, thirteen graduates from the classes of 1943-45 worked on the project. The reunion committee paid for materials and the group devoted 1,482 hours.

What started out a small project turned out to be a media hit. TV and newspapers in Southern California and Japan picked up the story. Words cannot express our gratitude for this group of volunteers whose work supplements the visitor experience at Manzanar National Historic Site in a powerful way. After looking at the model, visitors are consistently astonished by the magnitude of the camp, the sheer number of buildings and the number of people they represent.This model is a very important part of the exhibits for two reasons: 1) its accurate depiction of what was here 2) it was a gift from a special group of former internees.

Volunteer Program Highlight 2003

In the spring of 2003, a dozen volunteers were recruited to create a digital version of the War Relocation Authority's Manzanar Roster. The project was labor intensive, requiring volunteers to decipher nearly 300,000 entries from a poor-quality reduced-sized photocopy of the roster. The data was entered into a spreadsheet program.

Once data entry was complete, volunteers assisted in proofreading the spreadsheet and creating a list of names from the spreadsheet for interpretive exhibits. Currently, a volunteer is creating a searchable database of the information to be used by park staff and researchers. A test version of the database will soon be available to visitors in the interpretive center.