52 Ancestors Week 12: Technology

Question

From Amy Johnson Crow: Week 12

The theme for Week 12 is "Technology." When we think of technology today, we often think of computers, genetics, or the Internet. But technology for our ancestors would have been something we take for granted today, like electricity or indoor plumbing. How did technology affect the life of one of your ancestors?

A lot can happen in one hundred years. Hell, a lot can happen in just twenty with the rate we're going.

Comments

Even an old dog can learn new tricks: https://allroadhaverhill.blogspot.com/2024/03/52-ancestors-week-12-technology.html

Answer 1

How did technology affect the life of one (or two) of my ancestors?

My father and his sister worked in the printing business. My father had to manually pick the individual letters out of a tray of letters to form the words on a page if the job was to be printed "letter press".

His sister had to often type a paragraph several times to get a reading on a typewriter that had the ability to justify lines if the job was printed on an offset press.

But in the fall of 1986, a Macintosh computer was bought that simplified the process of generating words on a page while justifying them.

Answer 2

Charles Richards my 2 x GGF owned a nut and bolt manufacturing business. 

This picture was taken sometime in the late 1890s, showing a horse and carriage outside the factory. 

This picture was taken probably about the 1950s showing not only the different technology/ machinery that was available but a woman working at a modern machine

Answer 3

My granduncle John Ashton Prichard (1875-1927) was a telegraph operator. That was a new form of technology which began in the 1840s and lasted until the late 20th century. The average person could send a telegram half way around the world.  In our day email and text messages made telegrams obsolete, new technology replacing old technology.  My rascal relative, calling himself  "Prich" was a drinker and always hitting up his dependable sister Frances Prichard for money.  Here's one of his telegrams.

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When my parents were married (1937), a friend of my father who worked as a telegraph operator was having a slow shift and sent them dozens of congratulatory telegrams signed by world leaders and the rich and famous of the day, each in its own envelope delivered by a telegram boy.

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That's hilarious, Ray. 

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What an extraordinary story!!

Ray, you seem to have encyclopedia of intriguing family stories.  I'm looking forward to reading more.

Answer 4

Among the sons of my 3GGF John Frederick Leyde (1773-1843) were my 2GGF Frederick Leyde (1802-1890) and his brother John George Leyde, Sr. (1798-1875).  Each named a son "Frederick Alexander Leyde" - Frederick’s son my GGU Frederick Alexander Leyde (1832-1907) and John George’s son my 1C3R Frederick Alexander Leyde (1830-1904).  Both were born in Pennsylvania and later lived in Minnesota.  Their records seemed hopelessly intermingled on both Ancestry and FamilySearch.  Technology helped me separate them, although their profiles are still a work in progress.

John Frederick Leyde, like his Revolutionary War veteran father John Lyde (1732-1810) before him, was a farmer in Somerset Township, Washington County, Pennsylvania.  Both were involved in the Whiskey Rebellion (Insurrection) of 1791-1794. After his father died, the family moved to Ohio as the U.S. frontier expanded westward.

John Frederick’s sons took different paths.  John George ran a sawmill in Lawrence County, PA,  in 1850 and was a stone mason there in 1860.  That family branch moved to Minnesota before the Civil War.

16-year-old Frederick, with 3 months of schooling, kept books in a store and post office where he later clerked and expanded into a mercantile business. He then set up a wholesale provision and supply business in Pittsburgh. Around 1852, 50-year-old Frederick purchased farmland and moved the family to Minnesota.

Why John George and Frederick both named sons born a year or so apart Frederick Alexander Leyde isn’t known, but it has caused confusion to family genealogists for a long time, including during a vast Leyde/Leyda family reunion in 1933 that undertook to build a thorough family tree.  I’ve certainly struggled with it 90 years later, but technology provided an answer, and not modern IT but technology of the day.

John George Leyde as a sawyer and stone mason was technically oriented. So it seems logical that his son Frederick Alexander Leyde would also be technically minded working in his father’s business.  At 24, he moved to St Paul, Minnesota in 1855, where he was a machinist and engineer.  Representing the firm of Wood, Tabor & Morse (South Otselic, New York), he introduced the first steam thresher into Minnesota. It was designed to burn either wood, coal, or straw.  He died on 10 Feb 1904 in Saint Paul, Ramsey, Minnesota.

Frederick Leyde’s son grew up around the provisioning business and worked on the family farm. Yesterday I found a record that Frederick A. Leyde applied for a military 160-acre land warrant under the Scrip Warrant Act of 1855 (10 Stat. 701) on 10 April 1860 in Faribault, Minnesota, after service on the Ship Constitution ("Old Ironsides") of the United States Navy.  So he became a farmer.  Little else is known of him, but the farm in Faribault offers a clue for further research.

While I’m on it, a further source of confusion surrounding Frederick A. Leyde regards a “dark family secret”, a scandal so great that the Leyde/Leyda conclave of 1933 apparently tried to cover it up.  Enter my 2GGF Frederick Leyde’s daughter Harriett Williams “Hattie” Leyde Scholer Leyde.  After a very tough life that included the death of three of her children in Deadwood, Dakota Territory during the gold rush kicked off by General G.A. Custer of the 7th Cavalry's 1874 Black Hills expedition that found gold and stirred up the Sioux leading to the Little Big Horn Battle in June 1876, widowed Hattie married widower Frederick Alexander Leyde. Because some at the 1933 conclave thought that she married her brother they removed her from the list of her parents’ children.  In fact, 46-year-old Hattie married her 57-year-old first cousin Frederick Alexander Leyde on 25 Oct 1887 in Saint Paul, Minnesota, which others found equally scandalous.  They solved this conundrum by showing a "Harriett Williams Scholar" (her earlier married name) as married to my 1C3R Frederick Alexander Leyde, thus avoiding the odor of impropriety.

One last thing.  My 1C3R Frederick Alexander Leyde, engineer, seems to have been a very decent person.  He had been in the relief force at the Battle of Birch Coulee when Sioux warriors of Gray Bird (Zitkahtahhota), Mankato, and Big Eagle (Wamditanka) ambushed a detail of Minnesota Militia sent to bury dozens of victims of the New Ulm Massacre and besieged them for 30 hours in the deadliest battle of the Dakota War of 1862.  35-year-old Frederick married Mary Jane Esterling Colledge, the young widow of Sergeant John Colledge who was killed during the Battle of Birch Coulee, and raised her children as his own.

Comments

Love the photo! 

You've done an amazing amount of hard detective work on your family.  Congratulations on a unique and compelling story!

Answer 5

A brief story my aunt told me, about a when (sometime in the late 1920's) my grandfather bought a new car.  

... I can remember as a child when Mom got a Franklin ... Dad bought it for her ... and I remember we were coming back from Klamath Falls, and he said "OK. If you guys won’t tell your mother, we’ll see how fast this thing can go." And I remember holding on with all my might, after giving my vow I’d never tell, and we got up to 40, and I was so scared I thought I was going to die! And I came home, and I couldn’t tell Mom ...

Comments

Shortly after I got married, I offered to buy my wife a new car of her choice, provided, of course, that she got it from the dealership that I used for my company account.  She picked a Toyota Corolla loaded with extras and light green metallic paint.  All went well until the dealership said green would take at least six months to arrive from Japan but dark blue with all the trimmings was in stock.  Alas, when I told her that she'd have to take blue, she never let me forget Henry Ford's modified saying that, "You can have any color car you want as long as it's blue."

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Thoroughly delightful story!

Do you have a photo of the Franklin?

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Ray, another delightful auto story.

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A story my dad told was I think his father got a new car, likely a Model T. My dad's grandfather wanted to try it out, see what the fuss was. So he got instructions on how to drive his son's car, and went out for a little drive. He came back about ten minutes later, trailing a section of barb wire fence behind the car, and no idea how it got there.

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Oh Rob, I literally laughed so hard there were tears in my eyes!

Answer 6

On my mother’s side of the family, there were many who benefitted by the technology introduced by the industrial revolution.  They went from being agricultural labourers to railway labourers, and some of them went on to be draftsmen and engineers.  One even went on to become an instructor at a Polytechnic in London.

 But there were some who suffered badly from the changes.

 Henry John Daniels (Daniels-1722), born 1846, was married to my third great aunt.  In 1871 he was a farmer of 21 acres, employing one man. In 1881 he was farming 53 acres, and employing 5 men. But then things started to go down hill. In 1891 and 1901 he was a farm bailiff on someone else’s farm, and in 1901 sharing accommodation with 2 other families. In 1911 he and his wife were living in 1 room and his occupation  was “Attendant Lavatory Ilford Urban Council”, before dying at the end of that year.  i do not know what other factors may have been involved in his decline, but I suspect it was related to the introduction of new technology (e.g. harvesting machines) which changed farming from a labor intensive business to more of a capital intensive business.

Comments

Janet, have you seen the Victorian farm and other related programs?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victorian_Farm

They were all on BBC and I found them fascinating.

The series is a sequel to Tales from the Green Valley, shown on BBC Two in 2005.The BBC commissioned two follow-ups with the same production team and cast: Victorian Farm Christmas, which aired in December 2009, and Edwardian Farm, aired from November 2010. In September 2012 the same cast returned with the third instalment of the BBC Farm series: Wartime Farm. The fourth installment came in 2013, Tudor Monastery Farm. Various Christmas specials were also broadcast.

At least one of them perhaps the Victorian farm or maybe the Edwardian farm had sections that talked about changes in technology.

Answer 7

My rural McNairy County, Tennessee kin received electricity in Oct 1948. Jasper "Jack" Tull joined the Pickwick Electric Membership Corporative (PEC) in  Oct 1948. PEC was started in 1935, so it still took thirteen years for their rural community to receive electrical services. PEC Certificate for J. N. Tull

 This household would have included my great-grandfather, John Pink McIntyre. Their home was a two-room shot-gun style house with a big storage closet on the front porch. They cooked and heated with wood-burning stoves for the rest of their lives and the lighting consisted of a single light with a pull string from the ceiling in each room. They did have a small refrigerator. I don't recall a television or an electric radio.  They did have a telephone; however, I didn't find the service papers for that in Aunt Mary's purse, where all the important papers were kept and were still in pristine condition after being confined to the attic of our storage shed for at least forty years.

Comments

Hey, one year ahead of us. The REA finally hooked up the remote northern Minnesota area where my mom lived in 1949, they got electricity just before Christmas that year. Some places were so remote, it was easier to move the families than run electricity out there.

When I was growing up in that area in the 80's our neighbors included two old brothers (and their wives) on adjacent farms. Neither had indoor plumbing - one had hooked up the pump to electricity, so he just flipped a switch in the shed and got water to haul into the house. His brother never bothered with that, still had to pump it by hand. I guess they had gotten along without indoor plumbing while raising their families, and figured they didn't need plumbing just for themselves.

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Thanks for sharing. We take so much for granted. I failed to mention my family didn’t have running water or bathroom facilities either.

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My great uncle Arthur (Brown-68855) and his wife, Betty (Robinson-25204) in Oakham, Rutland, England, didn't get electricity nside their house until between 1960 and 1964.  They DID have a flushing toilet in an outhouse at the bottom of the garden.

Here in the US, I had neighbors (dead now) who did not have indoor plumbing, into this century. The Colvin brothers, Philip and Wyatt, lived in the family farm house that had been built in the 1930s. It had no indoor plumbing when it was built, and the never added it. By the time I knew them (1990s) they had one electric light in the kitchen, and tehy lived in the kitchen and the bedroom directly above. Philip died in 1994, and Wyatt in 2004.   Their 300 acre farm is now 29 houses. Here is an article about them.

https://historicprincewilliam.org/county-history/structures/colvin-farm.html

In the 1930s Nokesville was still a farming community, mostly dairy farms.  Today it is part of the "rural crescent", with minimum lots of 10 acres, but there are no more working farms.

Answer 8

I don't know if this fits in with this but... Yvette Marie Louise Rouquier-2 my mom hated computers. She had cyberphobia. She really hated computers. She didn't want to go into the library task for material. So, when she wanted a book, she saw or someone told her about she asked for my help Since I worked at a library. When the material was ready I would pick it up for her. She died still hating computers. Ps. We never had a computer in the home.

Answer 9

My 2x great grandfather Hendrik van den Belt (1879 - 1933) died in 1933 when he got off a tram and was hit by a car. Cars were becoming more comon, but certainly not something everybody was already used to. He was a bicycle dealer himself.

Answer 10

Well, my dad worked at NASA as a parts runner. So when they needed a part he would get it for them. He had the opportunity to drive all over NASA behind the scenes and got to see everything close up. I am told that somewhere in the house, who knows where, there is the wrapper that went around Apollo 13. Apparently, he was there when they were unwrapped it to put in on the rocket. He asked for it and they gave it to him. 

When my dad was working at IBM . IBM wanted to get the Personal Computer out to the public in the late 1980's. So they offered the IBM PC jr at a discount to their employee.

I was so amazed at that thing when we first got it. All I had to do to start it was to stick DOS to get it started. lol. To work the word processor just stick the disc in it. Spell Checker was on its own disc. It got me through college. Those were the days.

Here is a cute video that was on my Facebook last night enjoy.

AT&T Archives: Introduction to the Dial Telephone (youtube.com)

Comments

Has anyone seen the video of today's teenagers trying to figure out how to use a dial phone?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHNEzndgiFI

There are a few different videos.

Answer 11

My wife's Italian grandparents arrived at Ellis Island into poverty in 1900 and raised seven kids in Providence, R.I.  Giovanni worked as a painter (printer) and later backtender in a bleachery while sons Nestore and Dullio worked in a machine shop while studying physics at night.  For the record, Carmela was a doffer in a silk mill.  Dullio became a precision toolmaker in an instrumentation manufacturing company in Rochester, NY, gaining a BS and Master’s in Physics.  He was employed as a physicist by the University of Chicago, working in Enrico Fermi's Metallurgical Laboratory (named the Argonne National Laboratory in 1946). Recognizing Dewey's innovative nature and machining experience, Fermi appointed him to head the Metallurgical Lab's machine shop where his unique skillset as both machinist and physicist meant that he could design and fabricate experimental, test, and production hardware.  “Uncle Dewey” was instrumental in converting theories into practice, including constructing and shielding the world's first artificial nuclear reactor, the Chicago Pile-1 (CP-1), demonstrated on 2 December 1942. Cautious by nature, Dewey chose not to be present during the actual test of CP-1.

We visited him just before he died and he gifted my wife a machined hollow lead ball about the size of a grapefruit. It was cut in half and designed to interlock.  The idea was that a pound or so of subcritical uranium 235 was in the hollowed portion of each half and they were placed at opposite ends of a tube.  A detonator would set off a conventional charge that would propel one lead hemisphere into the other bringing the fissionable material together in a body with greater than critical mass and a chain reaction would occur that would result in an atomic explosion.  This was for a nuclear fission bomb like the one that destroyed Hiroshima on 6 August 1945.

Please don’t try this at home.

Comments

Wow, that's a pretty cool gift. I doubt anybody else has something like that!

Answer 12

When I was hired at Ford Aerospace to work on the Intelsat-V telecommunications satellite program I was assigned an office with a one-of-kind 4-function calculator on the desk.  With a footprint the size of a modern microwave oven, this mammoth electronic marvel had a CRT display that followed your keystrokes, paused briefly, and then proudly displayed the answer.  It could add, subtract, multiply, and divide numbers; that’s all it did, but it could handle up to 20 digits and featured a floating decimal.  At first, I resented that it took up so much desk space, but as visitors marveled at it I came to see it as the museum piece that it was.

Back in ancient times (1961) Ford bought Philco and merged it (1963) with Ford Aeroneutronics to win the bid to implement the Mission Control Center at the new Manned Space Center in Houston. A few years later (1965), Philco-Ford bought out General Micro-electronics, the company behind the first desktop electronic calculator, the Victor 3900.  The calculator was rebranded the Philco-Ford 3900.  Then Texas Instruments released a hand-held prototype, followed by the development of the microchip, followed a few years later by the handheld microchip electronic calculators.  The 3900 died a quiet death.  Philco-Ford was rebranded Aeroneutronic Ford  (1975), Ford Aerospace and Communications (1976), and then Ford Aerospace (1988) before being sold to Loral in 1990.  You could tell how long a person had worked at Ford by what nametag they had.

So on my desk was a piece of corporate history, a decades-old fully-functioning prototype of the world’s first desktop electronic calculator.  Sometimes I wonder who has it now clagging up their desk.

Answer 13

Here's a picture in my grandmother's Aunt Helen's photo album, she may have taken the picture. It is only captioned as "cutting ice in Minnesota".

They would store the ice in dugouts built into hillsides, with a thick layer of sawdust on the bottom and between each layer of ice blocks. My mom talks about her uncle doing this on their farm. They would have ice at least until July, as they would use some to make ice cream on July 4th. They also preserved food by canning a lot of it, or drying and salting it.

You can see some blocks floating in the water, it looks like they have a grid pattern set up in the foreground, with more blocks ready to be finished & pulled from the water for the waiting wagons.

Answer 14

My father Ernest Ledger Stephens learned how to build roads using a Motor Grader.  Over the years of the 40-60's he saw several changes to the style and operation of the Motor Graders. One is pictured on his profile.

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Stephens-3935

https://www.wikitree.com/photo/jpg/Stephens-3935-4

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Thanks for the memory, Alice.  As a 15-year-old newbie with a small construction company, my first task was driving equipment from one site to another.  Several hours overdue driving a backhoe, my boss arrived and showed me how to double-shift out of 1st gear.  The next stint was driving a blade (Cat 12 road grader) 60 miles from Gallup to Grants, NM.  I handled the shifting fine (6 forward, 2 reverse) but alas the wiper blades couldn’t handle a thunderstorm so I tilted up the front window and stood all the way, arriving covered head to toe in mud only to be told to park up the next time a storm hits.  I also learned how to clean the cabin of a blade.

Answer 15

This time I went into the category Turing Award for Computer Science and was able to connect John Cocke with his ggrandfather Nathaniel Cocke.

Comments

That is great.

I knew John Cocke, he was a colleague of my father's  at IBM Research.  He was VERY eccentric, and some of his ecentricities were related to having a  lot of money.

He never washed his shirts, he just bought new ones.  In his office he had a drawer full of  brand new shirts, and another drawer full of worn ( sometimes for a week or more) shirts.

In the days before direct deposit was commonplace, he rarely cashed or deposited his pay  checks.. Over several years this became a big enough amount that the auditors would not give IBM a clean audit until it was fxed.  So they put a stop on all his outstanding pay checks, gave him a check for the full amount, and physically escorted him to the bank to deposit it.

He had a Patek Philippe watch which was a gift from his uncle.  (His uncle liked watching watchmakers at work, and had arranged to have a Patek Philippe workshop built attached to his house, with a glass window so he could watch from his living room.) Anyway, after many years it needed cleaning.  Tiffany's (the NY jewelers) were the US representative for Patek Philippe, so he took it there.  Once he showed them the watch Tiffany's said: "Oh, I'm sorry, we don't work on the EXPENSIVE Patek Philippe watches."

He was on a skiing trip to Vermont, when his car broke down terminally.  He went to a local car dealership and bought  a new car. They asked him if he wanted to finance it, and he said , no, he planned to write a check, and drive the car back to New York the following day. It was Sunday, so all the banks were cloed.  The dealership said "This is very irregular. Can you give us a reference who can vouch for your check?" John gave them the home phone number of Tom Watson Jr, the president of IBM.The dealership called him, and Tom Watson said: "Oh yes, John Cocke is good for it."

In spite of his wealth, he lived in a quite small (MUCH smaller than our house) house on Green Lane. I never went inside, but I drove past it on  regular basis.

He was a chain smoker. He had a very nice smile.

He and my father retired from IBM in the same year, possibly for similar reasons (the shift away from pure research).

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This sounds like a great biography, Janet ;)

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Thank you, Jelena, for selecting John Cocke and connecting him, and thank you to Janet for adding this interesting story to his profile.  Nice work by both of you.

Answer 16

Here's a great one. When was the first photo taken in your family? Mine? I'm not sure but I know that this family must have had to sit still for quite a while. That's why most folks didn't smile in older photographs. It was too hard to hold a smile that long! This is the family of my 3rd Great-grandfather, David Day and his 2nd wife, Mary Indiana Hastings. I descend from him and his 1st wife, Mahala Arsisla Byrd. I only know the tallest child in the background to be Lilie R. Day. This photo was sent to me by a distant cousin.

Comments

Do you know what year that was?

The oldest photograph that I know of in my family is this picture of my 2nd great grandfather, John Brown Brown-61526  (1835 - 1883).I do not have an exact date, but estimate it about 1875.

John Brown, Shepherd at Bughley Park.

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I would be guessing. Lillie, the eldest child, was born in 1880 and her youngest sibling pictured here was born about 1885, and David passed away in 1906, so I'm guessing late 1800's, or early 1900's. It was shared with me via e-mail so I don't know if the cousin who sent it to me had a date on it or not. Thanks for asking!

I just realized I do have an older photo that I found online. that family member is wearing a civil war uniform! I think I will wait for a military challenge to post that one! 

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Janet, do you have the original photo? He looks younger than 40 to me, but the size of the photograph could hold a clue. The earlier carte de' visite were smaller and on thinner paper. About 1870 the cabinet photos became more popular, they were bigger and put on cardboard stock. Of course, the switch over was gradual, so it's not going to be 100% before or after a particular year, but you get a clue this way.