In total, we have spent more than 2.000 hours doing research in archives and records, in organisations both in the UK and in the US.
We have found out that the reason why we could not find records, either for the African-American troops that were stationed in the North, or for our target areas in England, was mainly because there was never any active research, so records were either destroyed or never dug out, digitalised or transcribed, and although we had many volunteers going through archives and records, it was quite clear that something was wrong, because nothing had been found.
Despite continuous requests for information related to the areas or to the troops, both National Archives, the British and the American do not have available easy ways of searching for materials.
If it isn’t available online, you are required to travel either to Kew, UK, or St Louis, US, with a request for an appointment, which can take many months and the possibility of staying there for many days, as data is buried in millions of other documents.
Most of the ones that are known to the Archives are not available online, and in many cases we have to pay to learn what type of document we are looking at, and only then we may learn (and pay again) what type of information is included in those documents.

Photographs of African-American troops are rare, not easily found and the ones that are available have been repeatedly used a thousand times by several websites.
Moreover, there isn’t any photograph of the troops in Yorkshire or Northumberland, which makes difficult to visualise how it was in those days.
Almost all the military sites in the UK have now disappeared without traces of them, many of the Black troops died in battle, most of the veterans have died.
And most of their families are very difficult to trace, as records are non-existent.
But the reason behind the lack of records is quite different and extremely sad.

In 1973, a disastrous fire at the National Personnel Records Center (NPRC) destroyed approximately 16-18 million Official Military Personnel Files (OMPF).
In terms of size and impact, none of the earlier fires or destructive events equalled the disaster of July 12, at the National Personnel Record Center in Overland, Missouri, as the destruction wiped out a significant chunk of global heritage and history.

Unfortunately, records about the African-American troops in the North of Britain, in the war period, were almost all lost and just a few were recovered, as he flames consumed 80% of Army personnel files for people discharged between Nov. 1, 1912, and Jan. 1, 1960.
For the Air Force, it’s estimated that files for 75% of personnel discharged from Sept. 25, 1947, through Jan. 1, 1964, with names that began after “Hubbard, James,” were lost.

Source: https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/st-louis-national-records-fire-july-12-1973

No duplicate copies of these records were ever maintained, nor were microfilm copies produced. Neither were any indexes created prior to the fire. In addition, millions of documents had been lent to the Department of Veterans Affairs before the fire occurred. Therefore, a complete listing of the records that were lost is no longer possible.

However, in the years following the fire, the NPRC collected numerous series of records (referred to as Auxiliary Records) that are used to reconstruct basic service information’ (https://www.archives.gov/personnel-records-center/fire-1973).

After almost one year annoying NARA, we were finally told that records of these type (WW2/African-American/England) were localised in their St Louis premises, but whilst pursuing such records we were met with this disastrous outcome:

‘Thank you for contacting the National Archives at St. Louis. Only 1%-3% of all records created by the US federal government are kept permanently. Rosters and morning reports were not meant to be kept for permanent storage, they were destined to be destroyed like most government records. Then in 1973 a fire ripped through our previous building and destroyed millions of Official Military Personnel Files. Records that were supposed to be destroyed were saved to prove service. We got lucky as some records managers were not destroying records in accordance with the records schedule, so rosters and morning reports that should have been gone before 1973 were not. The 1944-1946 rosters were destroyed when they should have been, prior to the fire. The records manager did what they were supposed to. They just didn’t realize that a catastrophic fire would destroy millions of records.’

Up to today, the center has partially reconstructed nearly 5.5 million records, but taking into account the periods involved, most of the veterans whose records were destroyed have likely died, and NARA hopes that family genealogists, historians and stubborn people like us, seeking to fill out those veterans’ histories and who they were, may, at least, give recognition to some.

Source: https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/st-louis-national-records-fire-july-12-1973

From the 57 organisations contacted by us to access information regarding the African-American troops in their areas or their records, only 19 of them replied, and from those, only 7 had any information or contribution for this project.
It was extremely frustrating for our volunteers going through records and not finding anything, before we learned about the fire situation, but we kept chatting about possible causes and learned how precious it is to learn about our past.
History belongs to us, it is part of a journey and we all agree that we have to do more and not give up.

It showed us how vital it is to collect the memories of the individuals and communities, as many of the veterans have passed, as-well as their spouses, and even some of their children, and so their mementos, their memories, what happened and how, it is slowly disappearing, and soon there will be no one to pass the many wonderful stories we have heard.

You will find a page here where all the links that we have used are included, along with some of the names of those that were so important for this project.
We are grateful to every single person.

This project will still include another section, dedicated to the Black troops from the ‘colonies’, which will be alive shortly, and it will continue to be fed by your contributions, either with testimonies or stories, or links to interesting websites.

Thank you for your collaboration.