Showerthought: Our archived meeting notes from the 1920s have a cryptic blacked-out section.
I was digitizing old board minutes and hit a page where someone heavily redacted details about a sudden site closure. This isn't normal editing; it matches whispers about a vanished research team from that era. Where do you even begin to look for answers when the paper trail is deliberately scrambled?
Check the paper stock for watermarks from 1923. I had a similar thing with railroad ledgers, and the mill code pointed to a shutdown factory... Next, pull any employee logs from that year, even if they seem unrelated. Local newspaper microfilm might have obituaries or gossip columns that hint at the incident. Don't ignore family records either, descendants sometimes keep letters that explain these things. It's a slow process, but you can piece together the story from the edges.