---
title: "Berenice Kellaway-Duguid, 96, Would Not Sign For 91 Boxes She Never Saw Burned."
dek: "In February 1973 a records custodian was asked to certify by telephone that ninety-one boxes had been burned. She declined, filed two paragraphs of non-concurrence, kept the carbon, and was moved. The boxes were never destroyed."
kind: obit (Obituary)
desk: Shadow Governance
author: Marcus Oyelaran (fictional)
published: 2026-08-24T06:00:00Z
url: https://theyburied.com/article/obit-berenice-kellaway-duguid
tags: obituary, records management, MK-Ultra, National Archives, Maryland, civil service
genre: satire
status: fiction — nothing in this story happened; every person, source and document is invented
---

# Berenice Kellaway-Duguid, 96, Would Not Sign For 91 Boxes She Never Saw Burned.

*In February 1973 a records custodian was asked to certify by telephone that ninety-one boxes had been burned. She declined, filed two paragraphs of non-concurrence, kept the carbon, and was moved. The boxes were never destroyed.*

Block 8 of the certificate is blank.

Everything above it is filled in. The accession number, 71-3308. The quantity, ninety-one cubic-foot boxes. The description, *financial vouchers and supporting papers*. The date, 9 February 1973, and the branch chief's signature above it. Block 8 is headed *Witnessed by (custodian)*, and it has a printed rule under it and nothing on the rule.

Berenice Kellaway-Duguid was the custodian. She was a GS-9 at a federal records centre in Maryland, she was asked to countersign that certificate on the strength of a telephone call, and she declined.

She died at her home in Takoma Park on 2 August, aged 96. Her daughter and the death certificate give the cause as congestive heart failure. This newspaper's obituaries record the manner of a death and decline to draw an inference from it, and there is none to draw here. She was ninety-six and she died in her bed on a Sunday afternoon.

> **Figure:** Ninety-one boxes, and every hand they passed through — see https://theyburied.com/article/obit-berenice-kellaway-duguid

## The two paragraphs

The memorandum is one page, two paragraphs, no adjectives.

The first states the requirement: the schedule provides that the custodian shall witness destruction and countersign. The second states the fact: she had not witnessed it, had received no report from the contractor, and was therefore unable to certify.

That is all of it. It is not a protest. It does not use the words *improper*, *irregular* or *concern*. It ends with her name typed under her signature and the word *cc*, and the carbon under that *cc* is what her daughter handed us in a supermarket bag on 6 August.

The top copy is not in the accession file. We have asked where it went.

## What she was told

Hester Vandevoort-Okine worked the same aisles from 1969 to 1984 and signed certificates of exactly this kind herself, which she volunteers unasked.

"The telephone was how it was done," she says. "You took the call, you signed, you went to lunch. She took the call and she read the schedule, and reading the schedule was the unusual part."

She remembers Kellaway-Duguid being told she was being difficult about a formality. She cannot remember who said it.

> A brave clerk makes a scene. She made a memorandum, two paragraphs, no adjectives, and filed it where it belonged.
>
> — Ellery Whitmore-Fensham

## The rest of a life, which is most of it

Eleven months later, on 4 January 1974, she was reassigned to a different centre. Her Official Personnel Folder gives the reason as needs of the service and nothing else. Two other custodians moved in the same window for reasons the folder does record.

Her union local filed a grievance on her behalf in March 1974. She withdrew it in June. Her daughter asked us to print that, because "she withdrew it, and that is part of it."

She spent the next seventeen years processing pay records: hours, deductions, retroactive adjustments, the least interesting paper in the building. She received a commendation in 1981 for clearing a backlog of 14,000 cases and a second in 1988 for training. She retired in 1991 as a GS-9, the grade she had held in 1973.

She sang in a choir. She kept bees for six years and stopped when the arthritis reached her hands. She did not talk about the boxes at home, and her daughter learned of the memorandum from the carbon, in a folder marked *warranties*, in the week after the funeral.

## Forty years of saying no to us

This newspaper wrote to her twice, in October 2019 and in March 2023. She replied both times, by post, within a fortnight, politely, at three sentences.

The 2019 letter is the one that matters. She has nothing to add, she writes, to a document she wrote in 1973; she did not save anything and does not wish to be described as having saved anything; and she would rather not.

She was right that she had nothing to add, and this desk wrote to her anyway for six years.

She was wrong about the other part, and it is the man who ran the branch who says so, below, which is not the way we expected to be able to put it.

## Where the boxes are

They are on a shelf, and any reader may see them.

Accession 71-3308 was reported destroyed on 9 February 1973 and counted, still boxed, in the centre's own inventories in 1973, 1974 and 1976. Nobody reconciled the two documents for six years. By the time somebody did, the disposal authority had lapsed, and in September 1979 the boxes went to the national archive by default — re-numbered, accepted, shelved.

Eighty are open. The reading room takes requests on Tuesdays and does not require an appointment.

Eleven are withdrawn under an exemption cited by paragraph and not explained, and our appeal was lodged on 14 August.

This newspaper has published eleven stories out of those vouchers, including [the surviving cost centres of a programme whose substantive files were burned on schedule](/article/mkultra-subproject-index). Every one of them rests on a signature that was not given.

## What this desk takes from it

Mr. Whitmore-Fensham's reply runs below and it is better than this obituary. He denies that anything improper happened, explains at length why nothing did, and then explains what a certificate is for: not a description of the world, but an instruction to the world to catch up.

She declined to give the instruction. That is the entire act. It took a morning.

Berenice Kellaway-Duguid is survived by her daughter, two grandsons, a great-granddaughter born in June, and ninety-one boxes that outlived every man who wanted them gone.

## Sources (invented)

- Marguerite Kellaway-Duguid Ansah, Her daughter — Interviewed at the house in Takoma Park, twice, and by telephone since; gave us the carbon and read this piece before publication (August 2026)
- Memorandum of non-concurrence, 9 February 1973, Carbon copy, two paragraphs, one page, her file number in pencil at the head — Given to this newspaper by her daughter after her death, unconditionally (Received 6 August 2026)
- Accession file 71-3308, including the certificate of destruction, Open file, national archive, 41 sheets — Read in the reading room over two days and photographed at the desk rate (11 and 12 August 2026)
- Hester Vandevoort-Okine, Records custodian at the same centre, 1969–1984; retired GS-11 — Interviewed at her daughter's home in Baltimore, with a niece present at her request (August 2026)
- Ellery Whitmore-Fensham, Chief, Records Disposition Branch, 1970–1981; retired — Sent the full draft by post with no deadline and no conditions; replied in longhand, nine pages (August 2026)

## What we could not confirm

- Who placed the telephone call on 8 February 1973. The file records it as 'per telcon' with two initials that four readers of this newspaper's staff read four different ways. The branch's own telephone logs for 1973 were destroyed in 1980 under a schedule that did require a witness, and that certificate is complete: the block is filled in, the hand is legible, and it is not hers.
- What is in the eleven boxes of accession 71-3308 that the reading room will not produce. Eighty are open and we have been through them. Eleven are withdrawn under a statutory exemption cited by paragraph and not explained. We appealed on 14 August 2026 and the acknowledgement gives twenty working days. This is the door that is still shut, and it is eleven boxes wide.
- Whether the memorandum caused the reassignment. Her personnel folder gives 'needs of the service' and nothing else, eleven months separate the two events, and two other custodians were moved in the same period for reasons the folder does record. Her daughter believes the two are connected. So, privately, does this correspondent. Neither of us can show it, and a belief is not a finding.

## Right of reply

**Ellery Whitmore-Fensham, Chief, Records Disposition Branch, 1970–1981** (Replied in longhand on 19 August, nine pages. Printed entire and unedited, including the parts about this newspaper and about our correspondent.):

> I do not remember accession 71-3308 and I would distrust any man of my age who told you he did. I signed several hundred of those certificates and I could not now name one of them. That is the first thing you should print, and you will not like where it leads.
> 
> Here is the practice, since nobody in your trade has ever asked a man who ran the branch. A disposal authority came down from the agency that owned the paper. The centre held the paper. The two were in different buildings and, after 1968, in different counties, and the destruction itself was done by a contractor with a furnace under a schedule of his own. The certificate travelled by mail, or it travelled by telephone and then by mail. It was not a photograph of a fire. It was an instruction to the record to stop showing boxes that the government had finished with.
> 
> So when your correspondent writes that a certificate was signed 'on the strength of a telephone call' as though he has caught somebody, he has caught the ordinary Tuesday of the entire federal records system between about 1966 and about 1979. I would guess that four certificates in five went out that way. Nobody hid it. It is in the manuals.
> 
> Now. Was the schedule's language on witnessing complied with? No. It says the custodian shall witness. It was written in 1951 for a building with its own incinerator in the yard, and by 1971 there were three centres, one contractor and no yard. Everyone in the service knew the clause was dead and nobody had the appetite to amend it, because amending it would have required somebody to write down what we were actually doing.
> 
> That is the whole of the wrongdoing you have found, and I am content to have it printed under my name. It is not a crime. It is a clause that outlived its furnace.
> 
> What I object to is your treatment of Mrs. Kellaway-Duguid, and I object to it in her favour. You have made her brave. She was not brave. She was correct, and correct is rarer and much less comfortable, and if your desk cannot tell the two apart it should not be writing obituaries. A brave clerk makes a scene. She made a memorandum, two paragraphs, no adjectives, and filed it where it belonged. I have read it now for the first time and it is a better piece of administrative writing than anything I produced in eleven years.
> 
> I am told I said she was being difficult about a formality. I do not remember saying it and it sounds like me.
> 
> One last thing, and it is the part I would keep if I were you, because it is the part that is true. You have written — what is it, eleven stories? — on the strength of voucher files that came out of my branch, and in none of them did you name my branch, and now you have named me. Very well. Understand what you are looking at. If she had signed that certificate on the ninth of February, I would have reported those ninety-one boxes destroyed, and they would then have been destroyed, in the ordinary way, in the following quarter, because a certificate is not a description of the world. It is an instruction to the world to catch up.
> 
> She declined to give the instruction. So the world never caught up. You may make what you like of that; I have made what I can of it for a fortnight and I find I cannot get round it either.

---
They Buried is a satirical newspaper. Every story, source, document and person in it is invented. It reports from a fictional world in which the conspiracy theories are true, with the method of a real daily.