By David A. Fryxell
What was business as usual for your ancestors could yield big genealogical payoffs for you. Achieve maximum returns by taking our career-searching advice.
Think of all the paperwork you generate at your job: countless memos, reports, requisitions, invoices and more. But that's just the beginning. Every employee requires a small mountain of human-resources forms and files, pay stubs and accounting records, Social Security and unemployment documents, insurance and benefits rigmarole. You might take up some ink in employee newsletters, annual reports and other industry publications, as well. A job is a paperwork-producing monster, gobbling up trees and (these days) bits and bytes like the shark from Jaws.
Your ancestors' occupations may have been simpler — “mill worker” or “miner,” say, rather than “assistant subdirector of inventory maximization analysis” — and the resulting paperwork less onerous and Byzantine, but their jobs still generated records. And buried within those records might be the clues you need to break through the brick walls in your research.
True, most of the memos and such cranked out at your job — or your ancestors' — lack any obvious genealogical value. But family historians often struggle simply to uncover an ancestor's name and to prove he or she existed. Some descendant of yours might find just what she needs in your memo explaining how losing the Maxcorp account wasn't really your fault.