The Shocks of War

 Three economists -- Dora Costa, Noelle Yetter, and Heather DeSomer -- have investigated "when and how health shocks reverberate across the life cycle and down to descendants." They examined "the impact of war wounds on the socioeconomic status and older age mortality of US Civil War (1861-5) veterans and of their adult children." Among other things they found that "fathers' severe wartime wounds affected daughters', but not sons', socioeconomic status."

Even though every family is different, knowing the general trends can help us understand those trying to find their way through the postwar "Gilded Age." And, in another frame, it can remind us that no decision to go to war should ever be taken lightly.

"The Impact of a Wartime Health Shock on the Postwar Socioeconomic Status and Mortality of Union Army Veterans and their Children," National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 25480, Jan. 2019 (http://www.nber.org/papers/w25480)

Could genealogists investigate how local economies disappeared in the 20th century?

Once upon a time -- about 100 years ago, when my grandparents were younger than my children are now -- small towns and small cities were real economic entities. Their very city directories were often locally (or regionally) published. Purdue historian John Lauritz Larson wrote in The State of Indiana History 2000:

"At the turn of the nineteenth century, Indianapolis and half a dozen smaller cities in Indiana boasted hundreds of factories, mostly family owned. In towns such as Lafayette, Terre Haute, Evansville, and Fort Wayne, one could buy bread flour, buggies, and even locomotives of local manufacture. Everything from automobiles to bicycles, boots, baking powder, caskets, cheese, cigars, doorknobs, furniture glassware, grits, handbags, harnesses, hats, lawn mowers, pianos, pork-and-beans, roller skates, sheet music, and wagon wheels was available -- all marked 'made in Indiana.'"

What happened? Some few entrepreneurs got big and eventually elbowed the rest out of the way -- they had easier access to capital and made things shinier and cheaper than their competitors who stayed local.

But how did it happen? What were the left-behind manufacturers thinking and doing as the levers of power moved out of town in the 1920s and 30s and 40s? What about the family capitalists? Once they were local decision-makers, who were settled for the duration and who belonged to the place -- now their "successors" run multinational corporations that have little loyalty to any particular nation, let alone any smaller place. Most local businesses (by dollar volume) are franchises or chains whose bosses have none of the same local commitment or clout.

Did someone say "family"? Actually, genealogists might be in a position to contribute to answering these questions. (To my way of thinking they are microhistorical questions, in that don't primarily deal with issues of relationship or identity, but the methods are much the same.) Studies of these families, conducted with these questions in mind, might be very interesting. It wouldn't surprise me if some have already been done. The interesting ones will stick to the facts and avoid big-picture assumptions, either positive (that it was all a painful but inevitable and wonderful change) or negative (that it was some kind of dastardly plot).



John Lauritz Larson, "'Striving after Wind': The Changing Sources of Hoosier Prosperity," pp. 249-271 [quote on p. 255], in Robert M. Taylor, Jr., ed., The State of Indiana History 2000: Papers Presented at the Indiana Historical Society's Grand Opening (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 2001).


Harold Henderson, "Could genealogists investigate how local economies disappeared in the 20th century?," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 20 November 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

What was $12 worth in 1814?

Anyone who studies the past soon comes up against the question of what the money amounts mentioned really meant. There are a number of sites that will "tell" us, but translating 200-year-old dollar values into today's economy is a very difficult and dubious task. I proposed some alternatives in a blog post last year and recommended the site Measuring Worth if you're determined to try to make such a statement.

But for several reasons it seemed more reasonable to compare apples to apples and describe purchases from back then that we might be able to grasp in in-kind terms today.

So when I wanted to know what it meant for a War of 1812 soldier to be paid about $12 for a couple months' service (two separate hitches), I went looking. I found that that in 1812 in near-frontier Cincinnati that amount of money would have bought

"more than 250 pounds of beef.¹ In Jefferson County [New York] some 20 years later it would have bought about 100 pounds of maple sugar.^2"

 

1 Thomas Senior Berry, Western Prices Before 1861: A Study of the Cincinnati Market (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1943), Table 23, “Median Annual Prices of Fourteen Leading Commodities in the Ohio Valley, 1786-1817,” pp. 568-69; digital images, Food Timeline (http://www.foodtimelines.org/prices1786-1817.pdf : accessed 9 April 2013).

2 Henry H. Lyman, “Sugar-Making,” in Memories of the Old Homestead: A Story about Lorraine, NY (1900; reprint, Historical Association of South Jefferson, 1999), 23rd paragraph; digital image, Adams, New York History and Genealogy (http://www.adamsny.net/lyman.html : accessed 9 April 2013).

These were the most intuitive comparisons I could find on short order. I was reminded that prices were very local back then, and how few things are directly comparable. (I hardly ever have occasion to buy that much beef or maple sugar.) If others have found useful sources for this purpose I'd love to hear about them.



Harold Henderson, "What was $12 worth in 1814?," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 22 May 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]  

Railroads, Economic History, and Your Ancestors

Neither of the following sources is new on line, but they're both new to me, and perhaps to you.

The EH.net Encyclopedia of Economic and Business History, part of the Economic History Association, has more than 140 articles by good authorities writing on topics they know about, including agriculture, apprentices, banking, bankruptcy, the 1893 depression, the Dust Bowl, Freedmen's Bureau, fur trade, Gold Rush, indentured servitude, insurance, the Confederate economy, the Revolutionary War, slavery, turnpikes, and toll roads. It's comforting to know that if you need a history of the US carpet industry, it's here. Not to mention fire insurance, or Sweden's economy from 1800.

I do not recommend quoting them as gospel, for three reasons. One, each article is followed by a number of references so that it's possible to do some comparative research and not just a lookup. Two, these are economists and sometimes they can have a rather blinkered view of human actions and motivations. Three, the site's terms of use seem rather strict. All in all, it's better to understand multiple sources, put that understanding in your own words, and cite. (Each article comes with a suggested citation.)


The University of Missouri at St. Louis has the American Railroad Journal, a weekly, issues 1832-1857, 1865-1878, 1887, 1888, and 1890-1900. (Hat tip: Internet Scout Report.) It's well presented and easy to navigate and search, but has little descriptive material about the site or the gaps in holdings. The periodical is every word searchable and it has unpredictable amounts of information on plank roads and canals as well as business and technical arcana about railroads in general as they were growing up. (Other sites, including HathiTrust Digital Library, have some issues -- and some that UMSL lacks -- but are more difficult to navigate, and seem to have included different magazines under this one title.)

Even genealogists with one-track minds will find material here. The magazine, usually based in New York City, included marriage and death notices in many of its 1833 issues. Its title changed over time, beginning as Rail-Road Journal (January 1832), and changing variously to American Railroad Journal and Advocate of Internal Improvements (January 1837), American Railroad Journal and Mechanics' Magazine (January 1842), American Railroad Journal: Steam Navigation, Commerce, Mining, Manufactures (January 1853), The Railroad and Engineering Journal (January 1887: "the oldest railroad paper in the world"), American Engineer and Railroad Journal (January 1900), and more.

What I have seen indicates a closer focus on railroad business and stocks and bonds than on those who worked in the business, but there is a great deal to explore here -- and a wealth of as-it-happened information and speculation that is often painted over in large-scale histories. And you've gotta love the cute woodcut mastheads from the early days!



Robert Whaples, editor, "Encyclopedia -- Custom," EH.net (http://eh.net/encyclopedia/ : accessed 10 August 2012).

"American Railroad Journal, Full Text, 1832-1900," John W. Barriger III National Railroad Library, St. Louis Mercantile Library, University of Missouri - St. Louis, University of Missouri Digital Library (http://digital.library.umsystem.edu/ : accessed 10 August 2012).


Harold Henderson, "Railroads, Economic History, and Your Ancestors," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 12 August 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

The Pioneers Had Major Government Help: Lessons from La Crosse

I'm looking forward to reading Skidmore College historian Eric J. Morser's Hinterland Dreams. It looks like he has landed another roundhouse punch on the myth of the government-free pioneers. From the very beginning, prosperity and growth depended on federal, state, and local government activism. Morser builds each episode up from an individual story, and summarizes the book's thesis in his prologue.

The federal government
* "built military outposts that shattered indigenous resistance in southwestern Wisconsin,"
* "made Indians dependent on American traders for their welfare," and
* "financed explorers who advertised the commercial possibilities of the region."

State government in turn
* "invested in transportation projects that drew settlers to the middle western frontier,"
* "built a legal system that helped lumbermen flourish in places such as southwestern Wisconsin," and
* "granted municipal leaders in La Crosse potent new regulatory and financial tools."

Local government used those powers and
* built and policed "urban railways, electrical lights, and the local telephone system."

Lawmakers and judges
* "enabled organized workers and women in town to participate in La Crosse's commercial growth in new ways and to help redefine its political economy."

Rugged individualism -- actually, the pioneering work of linked families -- was real too, and took place within this framework. Our family stories ignore it at their peril.



Eric J. Morser, Hinterland Dreams: The Political Economy of a Midwestern City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).

Harold Henderson, "The Pioneers Had Major Government Help: Lessons from La Crosse," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 2 July 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

My ancestor had $1000 in 1860 -- was he rich?

As genealogists, we need to make the world of the past as understandable as possible to our present-day audience. One way is to translate dollar values from, say, 1800, into current money. Sounds simple? It's not.

According to Westegg, $100 in 1800 would be worth $1265.30 in 2010.

According to the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank, $100 in 1800 would be worth $1284.90 in 2010.

According to Measuring Worth, $100 in 1800 would be worth something between $1730 and $3,050,000 in 2010. It depends on exactly what you're valuing, and which of ten different measures you work with.

One problem with these translations is that the passage of time changes things in many dimensions. You could buy bread in both 1800 and 2010, but it was relatively more expensive in 1800. Not even a multibillionaire in 1800 could buy a car, a liver transplant, or a post on Facebook. Few people in 2010 could buy a buggy whip -- or a comfortable place to spend the night in a strange city without presenting an identity card. Not only have the items of the typical "market basket" changed, so have their values relative to one another. So even the best translations are unlikely to agree.

Of the three reputable sites above, Measuring Worth offers the most detailed and thoughtful explanation. Lawrence H. Officer and Samuel H. Williamson, both economists at the University of Illinois at Chicago, explain that it works best to use different measures to compare commodities, income/wealth, and projects over time. "There is no single 'correct' measure," they conclude, "and economic historians use one or more different indicators depending on the context of the question." On the site they use ten different measures -- check it out! You can measure by the Consumer Price Index or the proportion of Gross Domestic Product or the average laborer's wage, and get different results that highlight different aspects of the changes over time. (See the gasoline example at the bottom of this page: among other things, we learn that a gallon of gasoline is only one-sixth as great a part of the Gross Domestic Product now as it was in 1949.)

So even this piece of genealogical context isn't a simple lookup! I would suggest a couple of ways to use these tools without stretching them to absurdity, confusing your readers, or having to go back to school and major in economics:

(1) Focus on shorter time intervals. If your research target owned $200 worth of real estate in 1850 and $1,000 in 1860, how much of that was true gain and how much was inflationary? Many of the conundrums of long time comparisons do not apply to short-term comparisons, because the economic world didn't change radically during any single decade.

(2) Use cross-sectional comparisons -- where your ancestor stood relative to others, rather than trying for a precise dollar value. For instance, in the agricultural schedule of the US census for 1860, you can learn the cash value of your research target's farm -- and use Kennedy's 1864 statistical compilation of agricultural information from that census to calculate the average (mean or median, it could make a difference) value of a farm in their county. It may be more pertinent to learn how their farm stacked up against neighbors in that time and place than to get a dollar value in 2010, when farming is no longer such an omnipresent occupation.

In any case, studying the various comparisons gives us another sense of how different the past really was.


Lawrence H. Officer and Samuel H. Williamson, "Measures of Worth," Measuring Worth, 2010 (www.measuringworth.com/worthmeasures.php : accessed 24 June 2012).


Joseph C. G. Kennedy, Agriculture of the United States in 1860 (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1864); digital image, Internet Archive (http://archive.org/details/agricultureunit01kenngoog : accessed 24 June 2012).



Harold Henderson, "My ancestor had $1000 in 1860 -- was he rich?" Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 25 June 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]