United States Rail Road Retirement Board (RRB) Records

Did your relative or genealogy brickwall work for the railroad? If so we may be able to locate their retirement benefits records. The process is a little convoluted, but it requires checking with the US RRB to see if the have the records (full-time employees after 1936). The RRB provides retirement benefits much like Social Security does.

RRB files that have been inactive for more that seven years have been transferred to the National Archives & Records Administration (NARA). Unfortunately, you have to check with the RRB first so they can look up the file number, and then check with NARA.

All in all it is a bit of a process but the possible genealogy information these records may contain could be worth the trouble.

A recent file I pulled included marriage and birth records as well as other information that was unknown to my client and led us to research in a somewhat different direction.