These days it seems like a lot of folks live in public—between Facebook and Twitter and Instagram (and there are many others), blogging and other personal websites, texting and emailing, there is a massive amount of information “out there.”

But I’m not sure if our grandchildren, if they’re curious about us after we’re gone, will have an easier time learning about our lives because of all the data, or a harder one, given copyright and privacy laws. I’ve posted a lot of photos on Facebook but haven’t printed one to photographic paper in years, so I won’t be leaving a photographic paper trail. I’m self-employed, so the record keeping is up to me. I do a lot of it digitally, because it’s quicker and takes less room than committing it to paper. A hundred years ago—even twenty-five years ago—everything was on paper, and paper was stored.

It’s an interesting thought, one brought to my attention by the Irishman—who works in a company archive. Some of you may have spent some time tracing your genealogy in a state or national archive, so you might have already been exposed to an interesting story that popped up in such a place. The Irishman has lots of them.

“When I tell people where I work,” he says,

… many of them get a mental picture of that environment. A lot of it is accurate too—old books and company newsletters, sepia photos, maps and drawings, newspapers yellowed and creased, and ciné film encased in old, rusted cans.

There are shelves and shelves of files dating back to the 1920s, and we receive many and varied queries from inside the company: from our legal department, maybe looking for information about safety regulations in our older plants; payroll, perhaps looking for an employee’s starting date; or our superannuation department checking a retirement date.

From outside the corporate walls, we often get writers researching books, journalists checking facts, TV and film production companies looking for old footage, and sometimes queries of a more personal nature—folks looking for a photo of a grandfather, or perhaps they’re working on a family tree and are looking for information about a relative who worked for the company fifty, sixty, seventy years ago.

We deal with everyone from high school students to university professors and with people from all over the world from Cork to California.

Think about that for a moment. Think about the stories inside the archive’s walls … and the stories walking into the archive.

My friend Michelle Ule, a writer, scrupulously researches her novels in archives and libraries and museums. It’s called primary source research, and she’s written several wonderful articles about her research adventures (including this one). Michelle also once had a job reading through old newspapers on microfilm. “There were some wild stories,” she wrote me in an email, “like the girl allergic to boys (who was finally allowed to attend an all-girls school).”

Museums, newspaper morgues, and public archives like the one the Irishman works in are full of stories, and all of them are personal.

The Irishman’s heard a lot of those. As he says, “Every now and then something very real and personal reaches into our archive and runs its fingers along our dusty shelves.”

I recently received an email from a woman I’ll call Mary Ryan. She was looking for any information we might have regarding a man named Joseph McCann, who she believed was employed by our company during the rural electrification of Ireland in the late 1950s. He might have worked in the west of Ireland.

That isn’t much to go on, but we did what we could—checked old personnel files, staff journals, everything we had on rural electrification. There was nothing, not a mention. Sometimes we find something of interest, sometimes we don’t; it’s the nature of our work.

I phoned Mary and explained that although we had nothing it did not mean McCann never worked for the company; maybe his records were never archived, maybe none were kept. I offered some suggestions to help her continue her search.

Mary was very gracious and thankful for our efforts. Before we finished talking, I asked her one final question: “Was Joseph a relation of yours?”

“He might be my father,” she said.

It’s a sad story. But novelized, it could have all sorts of outcomes. (The true story told in a recent movie—Philomena, based on the book The Lost Child of Philomena Lee by journalist Martin Sixsmith—is a classic example of this type of quest plot.)

Perhaps you’re not close to an important archive, though. No problem! Many archives today are available online. Here’s one interesting place to look: the New York Times has its entire archives available—all the way back to the paper’s first issue in 1851. (Here’s a list of online newspaper archives.) The Smithsonian Institution has quite a catalogue, and so do many universities, states, and museums. Don’t forget to check major libraries, too; the British Library, for example, is full of stories that haven’t been written yet.

Maybe yours is next.

There are other articles in this series: parts 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.

UPDATE: There’s more on this subject here.

Tweet: Where do you get your story ideas? You might find one in an archive.
Tweet: If you’ve spent time on your genealogy in an archive, you’ve seen unexpected stories pop up.

Disclosure of Material Connection: I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the brands, products, or services that I have mentioned. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”