Unlike Your Ancestors

Unlike your ancestors, you will probably never have to:

1. Make all of your own clothes
Although craft and fabric stores still offer a wide variety of cloth, patterns, and thread for the purpose of creating clothing, and homemade is making a bit of a resurgence, for most people sewing is just a hobby to supplement a store-bought wardrobe.  In the past, though, every garment had to be hand-sewn, at least until the sewing machine and some mass-produced clothing was introduced in the mid-1800s. In fact, many families would have sewn all of their own clothes well into the 20th century. Of course, those with money often employed others to do the work for them – but the task of ordering fabrics, choosing designs and undertaking measurements would have still been much more time-consuming.

2. Travel by ocean liner, steamboat, or horse-and-buggy
If you get frustrated with the length of your daily commute, imagine how your great-great grandmother felt when it came time to travel from her farm into town in a horse-drawn wagon or by foot, or spend days or weeks on dangerous roads and boats to visit family, or move to a new place.  Before the spread of airliners in the 1950s the only way across the ocean was spending weeks on a ship, and travel was costly as well as time consuming.

3. Correspond with those you love entirely by mail
Years ago the only way to connect with loved ones was through a hand written letter that could easily take weeks - or months if travelling overseas - to arrive at its destination. That was the reality for your ancestors.

4. Read about your postal tardiness in the newspaper
Home mail delivery has had a relatively short life. Years ago, mail was sent from post office to post office, and only delivered elsewhere for an extra fee. That’s why you’ll sometimes see notices in 1800s-era newspapers warning a list of local folks to pick up their mail soon or risk it being sent to a “dead letters” department.

5. Sit for a formal portrait
Genealogists cherish the brittle old tintypes and cabinet cards of our ancestors, with their rigidly posed and unsmiling subjects. It won’t be long, though, before our descendants equally cherish our own (often-awkward) family portraits, because sitting for a formal family photo has largely become a thing of the past. Why herd the entire crew to a stuffy studio when you can just use a selfie stick to capture a digital image? Unless you’re printing and framing (or at least digitally preserving) these treasures for future generations, the classic family portrait may cease to exist.

6. Wear a corset
Remember that scene in Gone With the Wind when Scarlett holds on for dear life to her bedpost as Mammy forcefully tugs the strings of her corset until Scarlett achieves her famous 17-inch waist? Corsets were a common component of women’s fashion for more than 500 years–until the early 1900s, when medical professionals finally put an end to the painful practice by announcing the health risks of shifting internal organs and restricting breathing.

7. Use an Icebox
Before we had the fridge ice was harvested from colder areas and shipped for storage in specially constructed ice houses. Homeowners could pick up or request delivery of ice blocks to their homes, where the blocks were kept in wooden or metal boxes lined with straw or sawdust. In fact, ice boxes were common into the 1930s and beyond. It was the only way to keep food cold and prevent it spoiling.

8. Let blood
Bloodletting (thankfully) went out of fashion in the 1800s, but prior to that, a bad headache or practically any other ailment may have led to your physician cutting into a vein and letting a few pints of blood drain out to cure your ills. Today’s researchers believe that excessive bloodletting led to the deaths of King Charles II in 1685 and U.S. President George Washington in 1799.

9. Die from TB, smallpox, measles, yellow fever or cholera
Thanks to improved sanitation and health care many diseases that shortened the life spans of our ancestors have been eradicated. Today the average worldwide life expectancy stands at a robust 72 years, compared to the 30- to 40-year expectation of our 18th and 19th century predecessors.

10. Wait days or weeks to hear the latest news
These days, instant notifications and “breaking news” banners on our various screens alert us to what’s happening in the next town or across the globe within minutes. But before radios and televisions, news traveled through word-of-mouth, mail, and newspapers–at a significant delay for those in rural communities. Imagine not knowing about the death of a family member, the election of a president, or a declaration of war for weeks. 

11. Use an outhouse at home
Portable public toilets may come close, but they’re not constructed of splintery wood, filled with spiders and situated in our backyards. And while we often associate outhouses with fun camping trips and iconic homesteads, the reality of sewage disposal before modern plumbing was anything but pleasant. Chamber pots  are also thankfully no longer a necessity.

12. Manage a funeral and burial
As if the grief of losing a loved one wasn’t enough, our ancestors were once tasked with preparing bodies for viewing (usually in a home’s living area or parlour) and digging and closing the grave in the family or town cemetery.

13. Employ child labor
As children, our ancestors were often awoken at daybreak to work on the family farm, help with daily chores, and perhaps even report for duty at a factory or a mine. Many families relied on the extra income a child might be able to earn or the extra labor they could provide to a cottage industry or farm.  Older children might also be expected to stay at home to look after younger siblings while their mother went out to work.

14. Have dental work without pain relief
Imagine having a tooth extracted with no pain relief. Modern dental care was unknown to our ancestors, and the only remedy for badly decayed teeth was extraction, often with little provision for numbing the pain.

15. Travel away from family and friends forever
While many of us today will travel far from home to make a new life, we have the ability, in most cases, of visiting home and family again quite easily. But for many of our ancestors, a big move meant saying goodbye to family forever. It was a steep price to pay for a chance at a better future, but many did it.