My colleagues find this funny and I have stopped explaining why it is not.
I teach people to read a register: volume numbers, the difference between place of registration and place of birth, why the guardian field often holds an official rather than a relative. I am good at it. It is the skill I have, and it is the skill that made my own search feel safe, because a searchable thing is a solvable thing.
The document I finally got about myself is a admission notebook entry, roughly nine lines, in handwriting by someone writing quickly in a room that was cold. There is a date. There is a name that is almost certainly not my name. There is a city that is a district, which is not a city. There is no register number, because whoever wrote it did not know it yet.
What being the expert did not protect me from
- Hope on a bad reading. I read a two-letter word as a family name for a year. A colleague said, gently, that it is a preposition.
- Refusing to be a client. I would not hire the lawyer I refer people to, because that would mean the case was not mine to solve.
- Doing the boring work last. I indexed four hundred documents for other members and sat on my own folder.
I hired the lawyer in March. I have asked someone else to read my page. Both were the correct professional action and both felt like a defeat for about a week.
If you do what I do: your own file is not a file. You are allowed to be bad at it. That is not a weakness in the method, it is the method working on the only subject it cannot be objective about.