It might be a typo or transcription error for the word "cranesman".

Early steam shovels needed a crew of four to operate -- an engineer to operate the steam engine, two firemen to stoke the boilers, and a craneman whom operated the controls for the excavator bucket itself. Furthermore, some early steam shovels did not have treads, but rather used a set of tracks that had to be pulled up and place back down whenever the machine was to be moved -- this required another team of trackemen to constantly pull up and relay the tracks anytime the excavator needed to be moved more than a short distance.

So my guess is that "panesman" is some sort of mistranscripton for "cranesman", and that your relative was a crane operator for a steam excavator sometime before 1930. Do you know when these documents are from? Steam shovels were mostly commonly used in the period 1880-1930.