My Trails into the Past

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...