An archive’s gaps can show whose daily work was considered too ordinary to record.

What a record leaves out is itself a kind of statement. Ledgers keep the transactions and lose the person who swept up, the woman who kept the accounts, the apprentice, the neighbour who minded the children so the work could happen. That absence is rarely a conspiracy and usually a judgement, made without much thought, about which work counted as an event. Centuries later the judgement is mistaken for the truth.

Ask, when you read about any past, who must have been there for that to happen. Then ask the same question about the records you are keeping now.