First Day at the Archives

Rather than keep everyone in suspense, I'm going to blow the secret ending to this story right here, right now:
They let me in, and my research will be able to proceed as expected.
I was up at around 4:15 this morning, not because of jet lag, but because I needed to chat with someone on Facebook (we had actually agreed to meet at 3:00, but I slept through that by accident).  The conversation was entirely worth waking up at that time for, but it left me pretty tired for the rest of the morning.  I went through my morning routine, ate breakfast, and walked off to the Rue des Ursulines, where the Departmental Archives are located.
When I arrived there, at around 9:10, I learned that, in fact, I was in the wrong place: there archives of the Indre-et-Loire region has two sites, and I had mistakenly gone to the one containing all of the the archives before mid-1940.  The archivists kindly explained the situation to me, and directed me to the bus-stop.  I made it to the bus just before it left, and hopped on for a 30-odd-minute ride.
My destination was located by a dirty-looking concrete slab with car dealerships, as opposed to the more secluded, floral setting of the archives of the Rue des Ursulines.  These were the right archives, though, and, miraculously, the archivists were expecting me!  One showed me around, explained to me how to access documents (mostly off of a computer).
I got right to work, and got an almost-uninterruped six hours of document-reading.  The collection I'm beginning with deals primarily with the aryanization of Jewish businesses, and is mostly communications between the German authorities and the French prefect.  Just as I was leaving, though, I happened across a remarkable series of documents, which excited me enormously: when I have the complete story to tell, I hope to devote a blog entry to it.
On day one, I went through about 140 documents, of the 700-some in just collection 10W66.  There are many more collections, though: I will need to work very hard over the next two months.
Peace out for now!

~JD

"Like most of the rabbis of the time, Rashi accepted no compensation from the community for his services, and he probably lived from what he earned by viticulture.  Once he begs a correspondent to excuse the shortness of his letter, because he and his family were busy with the vintage.  'All the Jews,' he said, 'are at this moment engaged in the vineyards'" (Maurice Liber, Rashi).