Labor Day 2026

Labor Day resources

Hard to believe, isn’t it? It’s Labor Day 2026 already! Kids back in school, days growing shorter… fall is right around the corner.

As genealogists, we all appreciate Labor Day as a day off from work, a day when maybe we can sneak in a little extra research.

The Legal Genealogist proposes that we spend at least a little of that extra research time looking into the particular records of our particular ancestors who contributed to giving us that day off, and that research time.

Our labor union ancestors.

A century and more ago, we wouldn’t have had today off. We wouldn’t have had eight-hour work days, 40-hour weeks, paid vacations, employee health benefits, worker safety laws, compensation for on-the-job injuries or any of the other myriad benefits we think of today as perfectly ordinary and routine.

Each of these was fought for by our working ancestors and the unions they formed to stand up to big business. They fought for them, and sometimes died for them.

So… where can we find some of these labor union resources, records and repositories?

Well, there are some cool tools we can use.

First, we can use ArchiveGrid — a search tool that helps located archival materials held by more than 1400 archives, libraries and museums.¹

I did a quick search for the term labor union there this morning and got a “mere” 26,058 hits ranging from the labor union collection at the Cleveland Public Library to the records of the Cigar Makers International Union of America at the University of Maryland.

Or we can use the map.

This cool tool was created by Conor Casey for the Labor Archives Roundtable of the Society of American Archivists. Its title says it all: Interactive Map of Labor Archives in the United States and Canada: A Directory.² (Note: If that link doesn’t work, try this one or this one!)

Highlighting everything from the Labour Archives at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia to the Center for Labor Education & Research Labor History Archive at University of Hawai’i, this tool works like any other Google map: there are pins on the map showing the repositories and zooming in lets us choose which repository we want to look at if there’s more than one in one location, like New York City or Minneapolis.

The interactive map is based on another cool tool that Casey updated and put on the web: a listing called Labor Archives in the United States and Canada: A Directory, most recently updated in Spring 2021.³

Now… some caveats. First, either of these will take us directly to online collections we can poke around in at 3 a.m. in our bunny slippers. They’re tools that help us identify repositories. We’re going to have to do some work to find what’s available online. Second, the map and archive list links are now five or more years old, which means links are sometimes going to be broken. The pin to Dalhousie University’s collection produces an Oops! Page not found! response, but the collection is still there — at a different link.

With those warnings, in either case, we have the information we need to find repositories we need to begin to research our labor union ancestors.

Happy Labor Day.

Cite/link to this post: Judy G. Russell, “Labor Day 2026,” The Legal Genealogist (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : posted 7 Sep 2026).

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