Wordless Wednesday- Working at Upper Canada Village

Wordless Wednesday- Brockway

Ten Ways To Find Your Ancestor's Occupation

How do you find what your ancestor’s occupation was?

1-    Census Records

How often have you paid attention to the occupation line on a census record? For many of us we’re going to find keeping house, farmer, laborer and such repeatedly. However, even these can indicate something about our ancestors. The girl listed as keeping house has likely completed her schooling and will be marrying in the next few years. The laborer is somebody just starting out. Does it mention farm or an indication of another career he will be entering? Also, often in rural areas an occupation will be listed for somebody that works partly as a farmer and partly as something else. Don’t overlook this obvious source!

2-    City or Rural Directories

We often think of city directories as they list the person’s occupation and who they work for. You can discover not only the occupation, but also their associates this way. However, did you know that some areas produced rural directories at various times as well? Although often not every year like a city directory, these will list people in rural areas, both farmland and small communities, just like the city directories do.

3-    Wills and probate

Occasionally a will might list a person’s occupation. More often than not, though you have to read between the lines to determine what their occupation was. Look through the entire probate packet, paying special attention to inventories and any property that is disposed of. Did they have a lot of acres? That could be indicative of a farmer. What items are listed on an inventory? Can any of them be associated closely with a particular occupation or are there people owed or who owe the deceased money? Determine what these have groups have in common and you can discover indirect evidence of your ancestor’s occupation!

4-    Compiled genealogies and biographies

Many times in a genealogy or a biography about your ancestor, the occupation is a prominent part of their story. Don’t forget that many of the county and local histories published in the latter part of the 1800s contained many biographies of not only the leading citizens, but also anyone who was willing to subscribe to their publication!

5-    Directories of occupations

Sometimes you can find a list of people that followed a certain profession or in earlier times, there were often apprenticeship records.

6-    Obituaries     

An obituary is like a mini biography of the deceased person. This is a place where I find many people’s occupations that I hadn’t known about or was uncertain of before then.

7-    Cemeteries

Did they have something carved on their stone that might represent a given occupation? Occasionally a cemetery record might list an occupation of the person to differentiate people with the same name. I’ve never actually seen this, but I wouldn’t rule it out either.

8-    Draft registration cards

When registering for the draft in WWI and WWII the cards asked for your usual place of employment.

9-    Marriage records

Some, not all marriage records have a place to record the groom and bride’s occupations.

10-Newspapers

Beyond the obvious listings, look for advertisements that your ancestor might have placed for their business. Look at police articles. I once found one where my father complained of getting flat tires on his delivery truck due to kids throwing glass bottles into the road and shattering them. If I hadn’t already known he delivered fuel oil, I would have found that and an idea of one area of his territory from that article. If you can’t do a search on a name, scan all articles in a newspaper, as you never know what they might have been up to!

Crafts and Skills of Our Ancestors and Ourselves

How many people as they start diving into their ancestors’ lives wish they knew what a typical day was like? What did the people do on a day-to-day basis? What were their interests and how did they actually do certain things?

Often when visiting a living history museum such as Old Sturbridge Village, Williamsburg or Genesee Country Museum, you will see re-enactors going about their day. Men are doing farm or other vocational chores. There are demonstrations of blacksmithing, gunsmithing, wheelwrights and others. The women are gardening or in the homes cooking a meal. They are spinning and weaving cloth. All kinds of crafts are being demonstrated by people throughout the village in the way they would have been typically done during that time period. The jobs were usually done by either one gender or the other with little overlap, which is why men are typically found in some places and women in others despite the fact that today, either gender would be likely to be interested in and doing a particular skill.

Unfortunately, in today’s modern world, we often don’t have time for this slower pace of doing things. Caught in the hurried shuffle of life, we never learn these older skills that can now be done by machines, or if we do, we push them aside and forget about them as we go about our busy days.

It would be interesting for people who are able to do these skills to be able to present them to fellow genealogists so that we could learn more about their ancestors. I’m not sure how this would be done. Would it be a hands on demonstration at a meeting? A YouTube video? Maybe a booklet or lecture talking about that craft? I’m not really sure, I was just thinking that it would be interesting to find out more and have a chance to learn these for yourself if you wanted to.

I have learned some of the older skills, as I’m sure most of us have from time to time. I can cook from scratch and have done some cooking over an open fire while camping, so am confident I could put together at least a basic meal in that manner. I have been slowly teaching myself to can and can now do water bath canning and am eager to learn more about pressure canning when I get a chance. My gardening skills are somewhere in the intermediate level and would be better if only I had more room for a garden! In the needlework area, I do counted cross-stitch and a few embroidery stitches along with basic sewing and mending techniques. I would love to advance into making clothes and quilting, but need somebody to help with one-on-one instruction in that area. I’ve also done countless crafts over the years thanks to my talented mother.

Two skills that I would love to have, but have never been able to learn are crochet and knitting. My mother, although usually a great teacher, cannot teach me. Every time she has attempted over the years, she has gotten impatient that I don’t catch on immediately. How could I not be able to do this being her daughter? I need to have time and a patient teacher who is not related to me to teach me those skills.

I’d also love to learn more carpentry and basic repair type skills. Although I can do simple tasks in these departments, I cannot do anything very complicated.

What skills and crafts would you like to learn? Did your ancestors do them as well or would it be a completely new arena for you? Any of the skills that I have, have been ones that my ancestors would have definitely done. The household tasks, of course, and I know that many of my ancestors have done crafting over the years, especially Mom. As I descend from many, many farmers, the carpentry and repair skills are definitely there, not to mention that my maternal grandfather was a skilled carpenter! So, I am not looking far back to find others that have done the same type of thing. Learning these crafts and finding how things have changed over the years can be an exciting adventure!

Saturday Challenge- Occupations

From Randy Seaver: For this week's mission (should you decide to accept it), I challenge you to:

1)    Geneablogger Diane Gould Hall posted WORKDAY WEDNESDAY – What kind of work did your ancestors do? on her Michigan Family Trails blog last year, and I thought the topic could be used as an SNGF post.

2)  Please go back several generations (say parents or grandparents or great-grandparents) and list the occupations that they had in the records you've found for them.  You could do this, say, by ancestor table number.

A field overlooking Owasco Lake

I wondered how to go about answering this Saturday challenge. I can answer the question for most of my male ancestors with just one word: “farmer”. My father left the farm, worked as a mechanic/tow truck driver for a short time.  Then worked for his uncle for a while as a salesman for a Sinclair oil distributorship before taking it over from him. He then ran this business as his own for the rest of his working career, but was always a farmer at heart.  My maternal grandfather was a carpenter by trade, although in later years he also worked for the school district as a janitor. The women for the most part were housewives, supporting their husbands in their careers; especially those who were farm wives. My maternal grandmother was a Registered Nurse. There is not much variety to write about.

Then I read a blog posting from Michael John Neill where he took exception (and rightly so) to somebody saying that an ancestor was just a farmer. That made me think about the fact many people may not realize what the occupations of farmer and farmer’s wife entailed, and often still do today.

The farmer is the one that gets up while its still night to milk the cows and feed all the animals. He may not have had much sleep, as he had been in the barn just a short while before checking on an animal that was sick or about to give birth. Maybe there were new baby animals of some sort to tend to already that morning.

He is the one that gets all the crops planted while checking the weather for storms and cold spells that will hurt the tender plants. Have you ever watched a haying crew scramble to get the hay from the field on a hot summer day when a storm is brewing? They are working at a frantic pace, but organized and knowing exactly what to do.

I use the pronoun “he” above. However, not all farmers are men. And did you notice what was happening right along side that farmer when there was a crisis going on or any type of extra work needing to be done? Yes, that is the farmer’s wife jumping in and helping where needed. When I posted a picture of my grandparents’ barn a while ago, one comment was made by my older brother about something that was missing from the scene. The ’48 IH pick-up truck pulling up to the barn with a load of hay to be unloaded-- driven by Grandma.

The farmer’s wife’s traditional sphere was the kitchen. Getting meals on the table, washing the clothes and keeping the house. Preserving the harvest for use next winter, mending clothes or sewing entirely new outfits. All the time while keeping an eye on the children and making sure they were safe. It was also helping and getting everything done that her husband might not be able to get to. They were a team.

At other times a farmer is doing many other chores around the farm. The job, if a written description were made, would go on for pages and pages and scare any sane person away. The farmer is part veterinarian, part butcher, part mechanic, part electrician, part carpenter, part meteorologist, part business person, part bookkeeper, part salesman, part store clerk, part horse-trader, part blacksmith, part cooper, part herbalist… part many more things I have missed. Whatever needed to be done on the farm needed to be done by him his wife or children, often at a moment’s notice, without a chance to call for help unless it was to his nearest neighbor- another farm family.

So, yes most of my ancestors were “just farmers” and I’m proud to say that I descend from many, many generations of farmers. None of the current generations farm other than a small garden or such, but many of our cousins still do.