Why am I writing this blog?

Let’s be real for a minute here. Why am I writing this blog? I’ve never done this before in my life. Blogging is fun, sure. But I had pretty much every other social media program- Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.- at my disposal before this summer came along. I didn’t need to blog. Also, between two internships, training for a sprint triathlon, finishing an oral history project, and doing extra work for a fellowship, PLUS trying to read (for fun, actually), I barely have time to blog. When we had our meeting at the end of the 2012-2013 academic year about blogging for our internships, we were told that our blog could be whatever we wanted it to be. Okay, so obviously we HAVE to do this for our program. Clearly we were supposed to talk about what we were doing with our internships, but other than that we were pretty much given free rein. And as an equestrian, I know all about free rein. I might take it a little far with memes and Despicable Me gifs in my posts, but if we’re going to be completely honest, this blog wouldn’t be me without them. I guess the real question is, after never blogging before, why am I enjoying this process?

Oh! Bankruptcies and Depositions and Civil Cases. Oh my!

I’ve been dealing with soooo many law type things at NARA these past two weeks. Lots of dockets. Bankruptcies. Depositions. Civil cases from the district court at Chicago. So much legal-ness.

Last week we worked on bankruptcy cases. I went through bankruptcy dockets (giant books, well, kind of like glorified binders actually, containing bankruptcy cases) and looked for cases dealing with large steel manufacturing companies. Doug, my supervisor and the Director of Archival Operations at NARA Chicago, also asked me to keep track of farming cases (to my surprise, I found only two). In looking at the steel cases, my job was to aim at highlighting the variety of jobs in the steel/metals/manufacturing industry, specifically for Republic Steel Company, Youngstown Sheet and Tube, and Jones & Laughlin. These were all dockets from the district court at Cleveland, Ohio.

My lovely cart of dockets