National Underwear Day: Even underwear can lead to an ancestor’s workplace

August 5th is National Underwear Day, an observance invented in 2003 by someone with a hosiery budget and a slow news day. Most years it gets a coupon code and nothing else. I’d like to ruin that low bar for you.

Underwear had to be made somewhere, by somebody, and that somebody might be sitting three branches up your family tree with a job title you’ve skimmed past. Yes, even the unmentionables have paperwork.

National Underwear Day: What the Census Actually Called Them

Think about what “dressed” meant in 1900 versus 1950. Corsets gave way to bras. Union suits gave way to briefs, and somewhere in between a lot of determined women swapped whalebone for elastic, which if you ask me deserves its own holiday. Every shift meant new factories, new machinery, new hiring. Someone cut the fabric. Someone ran the sewing machine. Someone packed the boxes headed for the mail-order catalog. If your ancestor’s census entry says “seamstress,” “cutter,” “presser,” or the gloriously unhelpful “factory operative,” congratulations, you’re looking at a garment worker, and garment workers left a paper trail most researchers walk right past.

Start with the occupation column, but don’t stop there. A census taker in 1910 might scrawl “shirtwaist maker” or just “tailoress,” and the exact wording matters less than what’s a few columns over: the industry. “Underwear mfg.” “Corset factory.” “Knit goods.” Unglamorous as it looks, that phrase is your search term for everything that follows.

National Underwear Day: Payrolls, Union Halls, and Other Boring Miracles

Factory payrolls are where this gets fun, in the specific way only a genealogist finds a ledger fun. Payroll books survive more often than people assume, quietly filed away in historical societies, university special collections, and regional archives near old mill towns. They list hire dates, wages, sometimes piecework rates and home addresses. A payroll ledger doesn’t care about your ancestor’s citizenship status or their creative spelling of their own last name. It just wants to know who showed up and what they were owed, a more honest relationship than most of us have with our current employer.

Union records go further. If your ancestor worked in garment manufacturing between roughly 1900 and 1960, a local of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union or the Amalgamated Clothing Workers may have a folder with their name on it. Membership cards, strike rosters, grievance filings, none indexed and waiting like a census record with a bow on it. Most of it lives in labor archives like Cornell’s Kheel Center or state historical societies in textile-heavy states like Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. You write, you call, sometimes you show up and charm a very patient archivist.

National Underwear Day: The Address Is the Real Clue

Here’s the technique that pays off again and again: take the factory address and interrogate it like it has something to hide. It usually does.

Say your ancestor is Rose Kaplan, and the 1912 New York City directory lists her at 118 East 4th Street, occupation “operator,” employer a shirtwaist loft at 45 West 17th Street. Pull a Sanborn fire insurance map for that block. You’ll see the building’s footprint and floors, sometimes a note on what kind of manufacturing happened on each level, because insurers wanted to know exactly how flammable your workplace was before they’d touch it. Now cross-reference the industrial directory for that year, published by the chamber of commerce, which lists manufacturers by street address and product line. That loft might turn up as “Feldman & Sons, Ladies’ Waists and Underwear.”

Now you have a name. Search Feldman & Sons in trade journals like Women’s Wear or the Dry Goods Economist, which reported on hiring, fires, and strikes at named firms with the enthusiasm most people reserve for gossip columns. You might find a walkout notice at that address in 1913. You might find nothing about Rose specifically, and that’s fine too, because now you know her workday and who stood at the machine next to her.

National Underwear Day: When the Neighborhood Talks Back

Here’s where context turns into a genuine breakthrough. Rose’s block on East 4th Street is heavily populated by families from the same shtetl outside Bialystok, because that is how immigrant neighborhoods worked. Pull the city directory for that block year over year and you’ll start seeing other Kaplans, other operators, other pressers, clustered within two blocks of both home and factory.

One of them, a David Kaplan listed as a cutter at that same 17th Street address, turns out to be the man who signed as sponsor on Rose’s ship manifest three years earlier. Not a coincidence. He likely got her the job, and possibly the apartment too. That’s chain migration doing what it always did, mill floor to mill floor, and the trail sits in directories most researchers skip because nobody’s built a shiny search box for them.

National Underwear Day: Skip the Same Five Databases

Which brings me to the point, so pour more coffee: stop searching the same five databases everyone else is already searching.

State factory inspection reports are public, often digitized by state archives, listing company names, addresses, employee counts, and safety violations, sometimes by name if there was an accident. Department store and mail-order catalogs, the kind Sears and Montgomery Ward printed by the truckload, occasionally credit manufacturers, letting you connect a factory to a product your ancestor may have literally stitched. Sanborn maps cover nearly every industrial town and are free to browse at the Library of Congress and state libraries. Trade journals sit uncatalogued in university special collections, which means you call the reference librarian and ask, kindly, what’s hiding in the stacks.

None of this shows up in a keyword search on the big subscription sites. You have to go looking, address by address, the way Rose’s neighbors once went looking for work.

Next time someone jokes about National Underwear Day, don’t let it go. Ask what your family sewed, and who they sewed it next to. There’s a decent chance the answer is a relative you didn’t know you had, standing at the next machine over.

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Author’s Note: I want to be transparent that this content – National Underwear Day: Even underwear can lead to an ancestor’s workplace – was created in part with the help of an artificial intelligence (AI) language model – Claude Sonnet 5. The AI assisted in generating an early draft of the content, but every paragraph was subsequently reviewed, edited, and refined by me. The final content is the result of extensive human curation and creativity. I am proud to present this work and assure readers that while AI was a tool in the process, the story, style, and substance have been carefully shaped by the author.