About the Official Register

A few years ago, I found a commendation from the War Assets Administration in some old family papers. The recipient was an ancestor of mine, but was he actually a federal employee, or just a contractor or some kind of temp? It didn't say.

But that got me thinking: surely there was a list of federal employees somewhere? This seemed like the very essence of public information. So I went looking and found the United States Official Register. Even better, I learned that many Official Register years included information on where the employee was born!

I found my ancestor by downloading several of the large PDFs and looking for his name in the index. But the process was cumbersome, not least because each surname only appears one in the index to save space. I knew there had to be a better way.

So I spent the second half of 2025 creating a pipeline to chop the PDFs up into columns, OCR them, and then proofread the resulting text. The work is still ongoing as of May 2026, but I now have the first few years available to search.

If you would like to support further work on this project, feel free to Buy Me a Coffee.

— Nick Kocharhook