StoryScope Studio · Boulder, Utah
Records for adoptees evacuated from Vietnam during the war, and the families looking for them. The only comprehensive archive of Friends For All Children operational records in existence.
"█████████████████. I have that she is from █████████████. Her name in the orphanage was █████████████████, but we had no birth certificate for this name so we gave the name: █████████████████████████ for which we had a certificate."
"I shouldn't know you again if we did meet, but if you had a different name, would you be different?"
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass (1871) · The question this archive exists to ask
If You Came Here Looking
Access to the OBC is governed by Love Ethic Archival Practice (LEAP™) consent tiers. All sharing is relational, not transactional. The path to your record begins with a conversation, not a form submission.
If you were evacuated from Vietnam between 1962 and 1975, or believe a family member appears in the OBC, start here. The intake form opens an intake conversation, not an automated lookup. Your record belongs to you.
Begin a request →Academic researchers, journalists, and documentary makers may request access to de-identified materials under the LEAP research protocol. Requests are reviewed case by case. IRB framework applies.
Open an inquiry →Libraries, archives, universities, and cultural institutions interested in data-sharing, co-processing, or deposit of complementary materials are invited to start a conversation. Diaspora-wide documentation requires cooperation.
Open a conversation →After you write, you will hear from Devaki to begin an intake conversation. There is no automated response. The intake is not a barrier. It is the beginning of the work.
The Operation Babylift Collection (OBC) holds the only comprehensive primary source records of the 1975 Vietnamese child evacuation. 4,816 individual records. Handwritten. Fragile. Processed through Love Ethic Archival Practice, a methodology that returns records to the people they were made about, not the institutions that held them.
The collection →Love Ethic Archival Practice. Finding, Receiving, Processing, Sharing. 93% community satisfaction. Zero retraumatization incidents. Not a technique. A posture. Grounded in bell hooks's love ethic and Hawaiian cultural values. The archive exists to serve the people it was created about.
The methodology →Archives in Love and War is bigger than this collection. It inhabits coexisting spaces and times in our minds and is demonstrated in our choices and actions. The goal is empathy, for those before us, with us, and beyond us. For the planet that holds all of it.
The full project →You did not choose what you are carrying. But you are carrying it, genetically, culturally, familially. The history of how you came to be where you are is not out there. It is in you.
The full project →You hold something that will disappear when you are gone. Not the documents. Those are in 33 boxes in Boulder, Utah. What you hold is the context. The why. The how. What it felt like from the inside. This project is asking for it before the window closes.
The oral history project →Archival Sources for Origin Stories
The Vietnamese departure record spans sixty years and multiple legal and humanitarian frameworks. The Operation Babylift Collection holds the records for one slice of that record. These are some of the institutions whose holdings sit alongside it. The full diaspora-wide source list is still being built.
4,816 transcribed records. 33 boxes. Original Friends For All Children documents spanning the full child evacuation pipeline out of Vietnam, 1962 to 1975. Passenger manifests, intake records, correspondence, medical files, photographs. Entrusted by Sister Mary Nelle Gage.
operationbabylift.org →The largest collection of Vietnam War-era materials outside the National Archives. Around 7 million pages of digitized documents, photographs, oral histories, maps, and moving images, freely accessible through the Virtual Vietnam Archive.
vva.vietnam.ttu.edu →USAID, State Department, INS, and military holdings from the 1960 to 1975 period (RG 59, 84, 286, 469, 472). Official government records that form the institutional context for the OBC. Includes the Office of Civil Operations and Rural Development Support (CORDS) files.
archives.gov/research/vietnam-war →National civil rights organization founded in 1979 as the Indochina Refugee Action Center, serving Cambodian, Laotian, and Vietnamese American communities. Resettlement records, advocacy archives, and community documentation across the post-1975 diaspora.
searac.org →National Archives Center I (Hanoi, colonial records), Center II (Ho Chi Minh City, Republic of Vietnam records), and Center III (Hanoi, post-1945 DRV records). The U.S. State Department's Office of the Historian maintains current location and access information.
history.state.gov/countries/archives/vietnam →Academic and university collections, additional in-country repositories, and community organization archives across the fourteen receiving countries are still being assembled. If you steward a collection that should be listed here, write to Devaki.
devaki@operationbabylift.org →All external links open in a new tab. Inclusion is not endorsement. The OBC operates under LEAP. External sources operate under their own protocols.
Archives in Love and War is grounded in one belief: that empathy, for those before us, with us, and beyond us, is how we change the patterns history has repeated for one hundred years. The records are fragile. The people are here. The time is now.
Fiscally Sponsored by Torrey House Press · EIN 39-4105983 · All donations tax-deductible