The Family Archives
The Rockefeller Archive Center, an independent foundation that was until 2008 a division of Rockefeller University, is a vast three-story underground bunker built below the Martha Baird Rockefeller Hillcrest mansion on the family estate at Pocantico (see Kykuit). Along forty-foot-long walls of shelves on rails, maintained by ten full-time archivists, is the entire repository of personal and official papers and correspondence of the complete family and its members, along with historical papers of its numerous foundations, as well as other non-family philanthropic institutions. These include: the Commonwealth Fund, Charles E. Culpeper Foundation, Lucille P. Markey Charitable Trust, and the John and Mary R. Markle Foundation.
In total, it holds over 70 million pages of documents and contains the collections of forty-two scientific, cultural, educational and philanthropic organizations.
Only the expurgated records of deceased family members are publicly available to scholars and researchers; all records pertaining to living members are closed to historians. However, as Nelson Rockefeller's researcher, Cary Reich, discovered, in the case of Nelson's voluminous 3,247 cubic feet (91.9 m3) of papers, only about one-third of these files had been processed and released to researchers up to 1996. He reports that it will be many years before all the papers will be open to the public, despite Nelson having died in 1979.
The Center maintains that this repository of records, covering 140-plus years of the records of the family, in addition to non-Rockefeller philanthropic collections, gives unique insights into United States and world issues and social developments in both the 19th and 20th centuries.
Records in the collection are only available up until the early 1960s, generally 1961. Major subjects in the collection include:
- Agriculture
- The Arts
- African-American history
- Education
- International Relations
- Economic Development
- Labor
- Medicine
- Philanthropy
- Politics
- Population
- Religion
- Social Sciences
- Social Welfare
- Women's history.
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