One oft repeated lament of historians of education and childhood is the difficulty of archival retrieval. Despite children being the lynchpin of so much social life, both past and present, their imprints somehow slip past capture. This paper considers this archival conundrum through the study of Palestinian refugee childhood after the 1948 war in the expanded Kingdom of Jordan, and that central crucible of identity and experience for nearly everyone, education. By writing on the archival (mis)adventures in researching a history of education during this period, this paper turns to children in their most regular habitat, their classroom, and asks: what forms of archival collection allow us to see that site historically? Which children made themselves (or were made) visible? Whose voices do we fail to hear? How does one gather against this shifting visibility? Should one do so? What does the act of conjuring do, both historically and archivally? While centrally a story of the search of childrens’ histories of schooling and pedagogy, this paper also considers the archival traces or non-traces of the teachers, parents, bureaucrats and even the state and international organisations, tasked with their care. In the best of times, a search for a history of pedagogical life is vexing and undetermined. In aiming to write a story of schooling on the run, in displacement, under subjugation and dispossession, this paper argues that perhaps archival methodology is not so much, or only, in the finding or reading against a stable archive or collection, but in conjuring it into being, in unearthing ordinary treasures of extraordinary life.