NARA Catalog MCP server

nara-catalog-mcp

<!-- mcp-name: io.github.ianderso/nara-catalog-mcp -->

An MCP server for genealogical research in the US National Archives Catalog. Find an ancestor's pension file, service record or census page, read what machines and volunteers have transcribed from it, and fetch the page images you will cite.

It works the way a careful genealogist does. A catalogue description is a finding aid, and OCR text, transcriptions and tags are somebody else's reading of the page: all of them are leads. The page image is the source. The tools say which is which, and the server tells the model to read the image before citing it.

Nothing here writes to the Catalog, and nothing here keeps a family tree. The server finds and reads records; what you conclude from them belongs in your genealogy software, or in a family-tree MCP server running alongside this one.

The tools work on any record the Catalog describes, so a historian or a journalist can use them too. The examples throughout are about tracing people.

This is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or supported by the National Archives and Records Administration.

Tools

The server publishes 18 tools. Seventeen only read, and are annotated read-only for the client. One, downloadpageimage, writes a new file to local disk; it never overwrites one.

Finding a record

Reading a record

What machines and other people read in it

Everything in this group is somebody else's reading of the document. It tells you which page to open. It does not tell you what the page says.

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.