The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection
John F. Kennedy was killed on November 22, 1963. Almost 30 years later, Congress enacted the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. The Act mandated that all assassination-related material be housed in a single collection in the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).
The resulting Collection consists of more than 5 million pages of assassination-related records, photographs, motion pictures, sound recordings and artifacts (approximately 2,000 cubic feet of records). Most of the records are open for research.
There are several ways to research our collections online:
- Search the JFK Database.
This is an index to records that were open pursuant to the 1992 JFK Act. The database currently contains 268,116 records. See also the Database Search Hints.
- Review the JFK Collection Register.
These are general lists at the series level, with numbers of boxes for each item. - Examine Folder Title Lists.
These finding aids describe all records in the Collection that are not included in the JFK Database.
- Search ARC for 194 Digitized Assassination Collection Documents and Images.
The digitized documents are from the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Office of the Secretary of the Army, and relate primarily to Vietnam and Cuba. The digitized images are of well-known artifacts collected by the Warren Commission, such as:- various bullet fragments
- Oswald's rifle, revolver and clothing
- the windshield of the President's limousine
- the camera belonging to Abraham Zapruder that produced the famous moving images of the assassinations