Occupational Records
Ancestors’ jobs can reveal so much about their lives. Occupations help you guess at a person’s income, daily life and social status. Work can explain migrations, and it places people in communities of coworkers.
As such, work records can contain a wealth of genealogical clues. Whether you’re looking for your relatives’ stories or family tree details, it’s worth the work (on your part) to look for records about theirs.
DETERMINING OCCUPATIONS
Before finding occupational records, you need to know what your ancestors did for a living. You may already have this piece of information in various records, including:
Censuses: Beginning in 1850, the US census population schedule includes details about the respondent’s occupation. (The earlier 1820 and 1840 censuses asked only about what category of industry the respondent worked in.) The 1880 census also asked how many months the person was unemployed. Starting in 1910, two columns described employment and three columns assessed whether the person was an employer, employee, self-employed. The 1940 census also inquired about participation in emergency work projects and total income in 1939.
Ancestors’ year-to-year employment details often appear in city directories. These may list the type <> and MyHeritage <>, and a smaller but growing collection at the free website FamilySearch <>. Local libraries often have print collections of their old directories.
