The One Box That Would Settle It Has Gone Missing Five Times.
The collection's own finding aid records a box of club correspondence for the year of the Jekyll Island meeting. Five requests over eleven months have produced an apology, a search, and no box.
BRUNSWICK, Ga. — A missing box is usually a mis-shelved box. This one has been looked for five times by the person who knows the shelves best.
The finding aid for the Jekyll Island Club papers lists, at series 4, a box of general correspondence covering 1910. It gives a box number. It gives a linear-feet measurement. It is, in every formal sense, a box the collection says it has.
Ambrosine Delacroix-Whitby has searched for it in the run, in the two adjacent runs, in the oversize store and in the conservation queue.
"I have found four other things looking for it," she said. "That is normally how this goes. You look for one box, you find three others, and eventually the first one turns up behind something. This has not turned up."
The finding aid was compiled in 1994. The box was last formally audited in 2003 and was present.
We are not alleging that anybody removed it. Archives lose things, and a box that went astray between 2003 and 2026 has had twenty-three years and several moves in which to do so.
We record only that the one file which would settle what six men discussed in eleven days is the one file the collection cannot produce.
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Sources & Method
Who we spoke to
- Ambrosine Delacroix-Whitby, Archivist, coastal Georgia collections. Interviewed six times 2026
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