THE DOLLAR SIGN
Untangling Company Histories; Tracing Corporate Roots
by Marydee Ojala
If you have ever had an interest in personal genealogy or been fascinated watching Henry Louis Gates, Jr. trace the family histories of celebrities on the television show Finding Your Roots, you may have explored databases from FamilySearch or Ancestry. You might even have had 23andMe analyze your DNA to give you information on your geographic origins and health details. Researching company histories is equally interesting and is similar in that it requires putting lots of little pieces together to build a fuller picture. However, the sources for information are different, and the family trees can be vastly more complicated.
The urge to investigate company histories is sometimes triggered by personal genealogy. Someone discovers that an ancestor worked for a particular company and wants to know more about it. Alternatively, it’s the discovery of an object in Grandma’s attic or at a garage sale that, channeling Antiques Roadshow, someone thinks might be valuable. But how old is it? It had to have been manufactured while the company was still in business so the dates when it was a going concern help determine the object’s age.
It’s not just personal curiosity that gives rise to questions about company histories. There could be patent implications. At issue could be a company that is a patent assignee for a patent filed long ago. What happened to that company, and who now owns the patent? Other legal issues might involve land ownership. What company owned a piece of land that is now in dispute due to pollution claims, drilling rights, or fraudulent deed transfers? Town historians often want to investigate how companies, particularly those that might now be defunct, shaped the development of their town.
As with most company searches, whether historical or current, public, listed companies are vastly easier to research than privately held ones. The ancestor worked for Ford Motor Company? Easy. The company still exists under the same name. How about Allegheny Airlines? Slightly more complicated, but traceable through merger and acquisition activity as first becoming USAir, then US Airways, and now American Airlines. The corner mom-and-pop grocery store active in the 1940s? That’s not so easy, and the emergence of a comprehensive company history is highly unlikely.
MERGENT/MOODY’S
For public companies, a good starting place is Mergent Online. It has the digitized version of the Moody’s Manuals that used to take up considerable shelf space in many business libraries. Now known as Mergent/Moody’s Manuals, they are invaluable for tracing the corporate roots of publicly traded companies and contain more than a million historical documents. The online collection provides access to corporate history, business descriptions, and detailed financial information compiled from annual reports, 10-K reports, and news releases and mirrors the print volumes for Industrial Manuals, Bank & Financial Manual, International Manual, OTC Industrial Manual, OTC Unlisted Manual, Public Utilities Manual, and Transportation Manual. Coverage ranges from 1909 to 2022.
Note that not all the text is searchable. For example, a search for Gulf Oil gives two possible company names: Gulf Oil Corporation and Gulf Oil Corp. The difference is that the former has searchable text, and the latter does not.
Hoover’s is another possibility. Dating back more than 20 years, the Hoover’s Historical Collection of Handbooks provides insights into the most influential public, private, and state-owned enterprises in the world. Gary Hoover, who started Hoover’s and sold it to D&B, has a long-standing interest in company and business history. He is now the executive director of the American Business History Center (americanbusinesshistory.org). He’s also the entrepreneur-in-residence at the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin.
The purpose of the center is “to create a nexus or hub for the study, popularization, and celebration of business and entrepreneurial history.” On its website, you can view articles and newsletters and charts and data. The latest article, dated Nov. 17, 2023, is about Sam Walton. Interactive charts exist for the 20 Largest Employers U.S. Public Companies, the most recent of which covers 1994 to 2022. You can pause the animation with the green button at bottom left and then use the little arrow to its right to move to any year.
The center also has a search box. My search for Gulf retrieved the article “Gas Station Wars: Rockefeller to Dinosaurs to Tigers in Tanks,” which in addition to text has some historic photographs. If the available information seems a bit sparse and you notice a gap between information uploaded between the end of 2022 and now, there’s a good reason. Hoover’s home and library (of 70,000 books) burned to the ground in October 2022 and was a total loss. That he could recover from such a devastating event and turn his attention back to the center is remarkable.
WEB SEARCHING
If you don’t subscribe to Mergent or any of the databases that include Hoover’s data, you could try a simple web search on the search engine of your choice. Google’s SGE (Search Generative Experience) provided this summary for history of gulf oil:
Gulf Oil Corporation was formed in 1907 from a number of oil businesses, including:
- J.M. Guffey Petroleum Company
- Gulf Pipeline Company
- Gulf Refining Company
The company’s name comes from the Gulf of Mexico, where Beaumont, Texas is located. The company’s origins date back to 1901, when an oil well was discovered in Spindletop, Texas. The well was
funded by the Mellon family, who are known for their banking interests in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
But do you trust an AI-generated answer? In this case, it accurately summarizes the origin story of the company and very likely derives its data from the extensive treatment of the company in Wikipedia. Reading about all the various owners, which differed depending on what part of the world the mergers and acquisitions occurred, reveals the possible twists and turns in tracing corporate family trees. It’s often more complicated that a family genealogy.
ORIGIN STORIES OF COMPANIES
Wikipedia often, as is the case with Gulf Oil, provides extensive histories for public companies, but that is not the only source a researcher can consult. Historical societies in Texas (tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/gulf-oil-corporation) and Pittsburgh (historicpittsburgh.org/collection/gulf-oil-corporation-records) provide digitized documents and photographs. The latter, Historic Pittsburgh, is hosted by the University of Pittsburgh Library System. It is worth checking with historical societies and archives in cities where your target company was prominent to see if any special collections exist. If local public or academic libraries maintain special collections for businesses, these collections can be another profitable avenue to pursue. If the company is prominent enough, you may find books detailing its history. They may even be in your own library.
Origin stories are particularly interesting when, due to mergers and acquisitions, dates change. I am thinking mainly about the date a company claims as its earliest incarnation. Gulf Oil claimed 1901 for its “birthdate”; Standard Oil of California cited 1906. But the predecessor company for Standard Oil was Pacific Coast Oil, operating from 1879 to 1906. Does that mean Gulf Oil can “backdate” its origin to 1879? It’s probably not important since it’s no longer a freestanding company. Closer to home, now that Clarivate owns ProQuest, which used its Bell & Howell antecedents to trace its origins back to the 1930s, can Clarivate say it began 90-some years ago? This is where the comparison of tracing corporate family trees with personal genealogy breaks down. People have only one birth date. It doesn’t vary based on, say, a remarriage of their parents.
COMPANY NEWS
In addition to checking directories, corporate websites, Wikipedia, and historical societies, for smaller companies, newspaper mentions may be the only datapoint available. If your library subscribes to any of the many newspaper databases available, from Factiva, ProQuest, and EBSCO to NewsBank, Nexis, NewspaperArchive, and Newspapers.com, you’ve got an excellent starting point. Keep in mind all those potential alternative company names, however, since you may well have to search each of them with an OR operator if the database supports that.
With NewspaperArchive, names are not standardized, making multiple searches mandatory. For smaller companies, stories in local newspapers do not always adhere to the exact name of the company. Quality control could have been a bit lax at weekly papers decades ago. Additionally, if the papers were digitized using OCR (optical character recognition), you may find strange spaces introduced in the company names. Newer digitization efforts result in much cleaner documents.
Company names can be deceptive. I used to work for Bank-America Corporation. It began life as Bank of Italy in 1904, and while it sounds like it should be the national bank of Italy, it was actually a commercial bank based in San Francisco. It became Bank of America in 1930. BankAmerica was the holding company name. Bought by NationsBank in 1998, the headquarters moved from California to North Carolina and took the Bank of America name. Company name changes can happen irrespective of any merger and acquisition activity. Just look at X, formerly known as Twitter.
IMAGES AND VIDEOS
Searching the image databases of web search engines can surface graphics of advertisements; photos of executives, buildings, and products; and company logos. Want to know what Indianapolis mapmaker George F. Cram looked like? Google images has photos of him and notices of his globes for sale on Etsy and other places. There’s even a link to his obituary.
I’ve noticed that the airline industry, at least in the U.S., is trying to reconnect with its roots. Airlines formed as the result of multiple acquisitions are now displaying the logos and livery of preceding airlines. You can glean more information about those logos and the companies behind them via an image search.
Video can also be useful. Search YouTube for history of [company name here] and you may find someone has uploaded a presentation on the topic. As with any YouTube search, it’s important to determine the video’s accuracy. Is this a historian, a student, or a company insider? Is it someone repeating rumors? Is it authoritative?
We’re talking history here, and with the increased emphasis on primary sources and more availability of digitized historical documents, my hope is that we will see more dissertations and scholarly papers on business history. Where are the digital humanities and digital social sciences researchers in this area?
The comparison between personal genealogy and untangling company histories to trace corporate roots works on the level of complexity. Both require searching multiple sources and formats. Neither one is a quick, simple, or uncomplicated endeavor. To some extent, to be completely comprehensive, the task is never done, as more data sources become available on a somewhat regular basis. I still can’t envision Henry Louis Gates, Jr. putting together a hit television show on company histories. Maybe Gary Hoover will do that.
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