Operation Babylift Collection

The Operation Babylift Collection is one of the most significant and most human archives of the Vietnam War era.

Comprising more than 33 boxes of original documents, photographs, correspondence, and records from the 1975 Vietnamese child evacuation, the Collection holds the origin stories of thousands of children born during wartime Vietnam, many relinquished to orphanages by birth mothers who were themselves navigating poverty, loss, displacement, and the impossible calculus of survival in a country at war. These children were cared for, and the adoptions were processed through organizations such as Friends For All Children, Holt International, the Pearl S Buck Foundation, World Vision, and others who worked alongside the Vietnamese government and U.S. agencies to place them with families abroad. On April 4, 1975, as Saigon fell,

Operation Babylift became one of the largest emergency child evacuations in history, and the records that document it were kept, box by box, for decades by Sister Mary Nelle Gage, a volunteer working with the children and refugees since 1973. Sister Mary Nelle and Devaki Murch, herself an Operation Babylift adoptee and survivor of the April 4th C-5A Galaxy crash, are now working together to process, describe, and digitize these records in preparation for transfer to an official repository, where they will be secured, professionally preserved, and made permanently accessible to adoptees, researchers, and the communities they belong to.

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Those children are adults now.

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They are filmmakers, writers, researchers, advocates, parents, and community builders spread across the United States and around the world and many are only beginning to understand the context of their origins. "Archives in Love and War" is how we describe this work, because these records exist at the intersection of both.

The processing work that Sister Mary Nelle and Devaki are doing is not simply archival. It is relational. It means opening boxes that have been closed for fifty years, reading documents with care and context, and ensuring that what is preserved reflects not just the administrative history of an evacuation but the full humanity of the people it touched. Our methodology is Love Ethic Archival Practice (LEAP): a trauma-informed, community-centered approach that puts the dignity and agency of survivors first - not institutions. 

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Invisible Threads is our collective gathering of the films, stories, projects, and work that adoptees are creating and sharing with their communities, a living testament to who we are, what we carry, and what we are building together. If this work moves you, you can support it by donating to StoryScope Studio through our fiscal sponsor Torrey House Press, joining us at the Invisible Threads gathering in Boulder, Colorado, this April 9–12, 2026, or simply sharing our story. Every contribution helps ensure no adoptee has to search for themselves alone.