Oklahoma City National Memorial Museum archives event highlights preserving artifacts
April 15, 2026 | In the PressFrom OKCFox.com (https://okcfox.com/news/local/oklahoma-city-national-memorial-museum-archives-event-highlights-preserving-artifacts)
As Oklahoma prepares to recognize the 31st anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing and the 168 lives lost, the Oklahoma City National Memorial Museum is holding its monthly “Better Conversations” event leading up to Sunday, focused on preserving the artifacts that help tell the story of April 19, 1995.
The discussion highlighted the importance of safeguarding items ranging from chunks of rubble to the fire chief’s helmet.
The Oklahoma City National Memorial Museum archives now house more than two million items, each connected to the bombing, the rescue and recovery, and the lives affected.
Hanna Cox, co-head of the memorial archives, said the archives remain central to the memorial’s work even 31 years later.
“So the archives is really the foundation of everything here in the memorial. It's where we store all the artifacts, important pieces of history and stories that we ultimately tell in the museum,” Cox said.
“So different artifacts become exhibits. And our CENO, the Center for Education and Outreach, we have rotating exhibits quarterly where we get to show new stories that may be mentioned in the museum and we get to tell new faucets of them or maybe have never been in the museum and you get to see them when you come to events here.”
Jane Thomas, the founding archivist and curator of the Oklahoma City National Memorial Museum archives, said she began collecting items because she understood their importance in preserving the story for years and decades to come.
“If I thought it could speak, I brought it in,” Thomas said.
Thomas said she did not set out as an archivist, but was tasked with finding what existed and what had been saved.
“I am not an archivist. I was simply assigned to find out what's out there. Research is what I really did. Find out what's out there,” Thomas said. “And so I set about finding out what had come into Oklahoma City, what had been saved to this point, the story of the rescue and recovery.”
“There wasn't anything I wouldn't go after,” Thomas said. “I was relentless about gathering this entire story, all facets of it.”
Thomas said she collected items with an eye toward what would be needed to tell the story in a museum, even when she could not know what would ultimately be most valuable.
“I kept thinking about a museum and what you would need to show, to tell the story in a museum,” she said. “And that's why I collected things like glass and Venetian blinds and elevator doors and whatever, because I didn't know what would be needed.”
Today, Cox and Skye Conley run the memorial archives. Cox was not alive for the bombing, and Conley was only a baby, but both emphasized the importance of keeping the memories of the 168 lives lost alive through the items preserved from April 19, 1995.
“So many Oklahomans have never been, even if they lived through the event, and so many Oklahomans now were born after the event,” Cox said. “We think this is just a really important part of our history for people to connect with during this week of remembrance.”
Conley, the registrar and director of research at the Oklahoma City National Memorial Museum, said continuing the work Thomas began is essential to the memorial’s mission.
“Being able to speak with Jane Thomas and getting her perspective on building an archives from scratch and comparing it to what we're doing now is so important, especially because everything that we do here in fulfilling the mission is about bringing new generations along,” Conley said. “And it's important to keep having these conversations because we just want to remember and to educate for as long as possible.”
Conley said the stories tied to the bombing and its aftermath must continue to be shared.
“Everything that's resulted as a result from the bombing, the good, and not necessarily the good because so many people went through so much. It's important to keep telling these stories,” Conley said.
