My Trails into the Past

This is a continuing story about the Official Personnel Folder for my great-aunt Beryl Johnston Russell. [1] See part 1 here . I had always known that my great-aunt Beb (that was what we called Beryl Johnston Russell) had worked for the federal government and lived in Greece. I had no idea who she worked for, but guessed it was the State Department. However, she worked first for the Department of the Army, Corps of Engineers. She had been working for the Bureau of Reclamation in Sacramento on the Central Valley Project. On 11 July 1948, she accepted the position of Clerk-Stenographer, CAF-4, at $2992.50 per month. This money included a differential to begin when departure from the U.S. Once at the Apergis Hotel in Kifissia, Greece, she filled out an application for employment in the Foreign Service of the United States. This is the best application as it had all of her previous employment history. It also had the addresses of the previous ten years. None of these addresse...

Today I received a thick envelope from the National Personnel Records Center for the civilian records of employment for my great-aunt, Beryl Johnston Russell Taylor. [1] It measured at one-half inch think, probably about 125 pages. I haven’t counted them yet but I have looked at every page. So how did I get this file? I wrote a letter to the National Personnel Records Center at the address in Valmeyer, Illinois asking for the Official Personnel Folder (OPF) of my aunt who worked for the federal government for about 30 years. I gave all of her names (she was married twice), her birth and death dates, and her Social Security Number. One of many of the forms in Beryl's file I had known little about her work. I knew that she worked a year or so in Greece after World War II (from her passport) and that she worked in Sacramento until her retirement (from her obituary). But I didn’t know what she did for a living. I will keep the pages in the order in which they came...