Photo from lostboysreunited.com showing Lost Boys searching through the database at a 2010 conference in San Diego.
Thanks to the efforts of Save the Children International, Kirk Felsman, and the staff of the AZ Lost Boys Center in Phoenix, thousands of Lost Boys worldwide may now look up records of their childhoods.
The Swedish branch of Save the Children International conducted field interviews with Lost Boys in the Pinyido refugee camp in Ethiopia in 1989. These personal and war histories cover topics such as place of birth, details of family members, and remembrances of life at home and after separation. These records were nearly forgotten when, in 2004, American researcher Kirk Felsman found them in an Ethiopian warehouse. The records were then scanned and turned over in digital form to the AZ Lost Boys Center in Phoenix.
A group of volunteers worked to organize the documents in a searchable database, and these histories may now be ordered at:
You may read more about this project online at the New York Times and via Associated Press Reporting:
Lost Boys of Sudan Fill in the Blanks of Their Past by Marc Lacey for the New York Times.
The Lost Boys of Sudan: Records of Childhood by Amanda Lee Meyers for the Associated Press