Old words are words that people once used, and no longer do. As I learn them, they become new old words. These are not to be confused with words that were never used by anyone, such as the late George Carlin’s example, “Would you please saw my legs off.” Here are some old words that are new to me.

Felloe. This refers to a circular rim, such as the part of a wagon wheel, to which spokes are attached. A metal rim might go around the outside of the felloe. I find references in the 1800’s to people whose occupation is “felloe-maker” and “felloe-bender.”

Gutta percha. This is a form of natural rubber (chemically different from natural rubber, but having similar properties) introduced to the west in 1843. It came from trees, like rubber does. I find these occupational variations:

• foreman gutta percha
• gutta percha
• gutta percha carriage cloths
• gutta percha worker
• gutta percha works
• gutta perscha worker

It was popular enough that they made golf balls out of it.

Puddler. These workers use the Welsh method to convert pig iron into wrought iron by puddling – or melting the iron. Think of them as metalworkers, like steelworkers in the 1950’s.

A year after gold was found at Sutter’s Mill, San Francisco “public crier” Charles Kimball published a city directory. I found some interesting occupations in it.

• Beer man. They hadn’t even invented pro baseball leagues, but SF had a beer man. Well, several. I think it is short for “beer manufacturer.” But it’s a great job title.
• Whitesmith. I’ve heard of blacksmiths, but a whitesmith? Turns out, the guys who work with the “white” metals, like tin, aluminum, and pewter, are called whitesmiths. Most of their work is done with cold metals, unlike their blacksmith buddies. If you have a pewter cup around the house, it might have come from a whitesmith.
• Wm Light was a “billiard table.” I’m thinking that this is an imprecise description of his occupation.
• Capt Edw King was a “boarding officer.” That’s something, an officer, a captain, and a king.
• There were many bakers, but only Wm Hoar was a “cake baker.” Specialization rears its ugly head. J Joseph is a “soda cracker baker.”
• Sam’l Price was a consul, for Chili. I think they mean the place we call Chile today, but a chili ambassador is a terrific job.
• I’m not saying that they had mental issues, but there were dozens of counsellors. One Atty at law. Many Counsellors.
• They had the normal mix of coopers, chandlers, and draughtsmen.
• There were several daguerreotypists. I can’t even say the word. They took pictures.
• Wharfinger. I like that. A guy that runs a wharf is a wharfinger. His helper, like H G Isaacs, would be a “deputy wharfinger.”
• Philip Ramez and Thomas Watson are each occupied as a “gentleman.” I’m sure there were lots of roughmen, but they assume you know it already.
• You might expect hair dressers, but Jame McGowan was a “hair braider.”
• Chas Smith was a knickerbocker. I don’t know what one of these does. I can imagine the teasing his son must have endured on the playground.
• I found almost a dozen guys listed as “lighterman.” I’m thinking that they light street lamps. Then again, there are “boatmen” and a lighter is a kind of boat. The lightermen never hang out with the tanners.
• We have “mariner” and “master mariner.” There are also pilots, who must be specific: “outer harbor,” or “Sac and San Joaquin Rivers.”
• A number of people referred to their profession as “refreshments.” That’s … refreshing.
• Orrin Bailey was a “scrivener.” If you have a scrivener, a sadler, and a shingler, you have the beginnings of a joke. “A scrivener, a sadler, and a shingler walked into a bar …”
• I don’t know what you do if your occupation is “sporting.” I’m thinking – gambling? Big game hunting? Discus throw? Dart throwing?
• Mark Palmer got nothing from Oz that he didn’t already have. Yes, he was the Tinman. I didn’t find a cowardly lion.
• There were 3 artists, one woodcut engraver, 3 musicians (Andrew Truper couldn’t avoid the trade). I’m not sure whether a painter was an artist or not. I’m not sure whether golfers are athletes, either. I’m sure that dart throwing is not a sport. No dancers. No singers. There are personnel at the Dramatic Museum, but no one claiming to be an actor.
• I saw two carpenters named Sawyer. I don’t believe in fate. None of the masons was named Mason.
• Three men were “measurers.” Since all three worked at City Hall, it looks like political favoritism to me, and I’m skeptical about the veracity of their work. I got no idea what they measured.

The more I learn about the past, the more I’m amazed that we’ve lasted this long. Today, I looked at hundreds of occupation names that real people had in San Francisco in 1850. The unexpected discovery is my favorite kind of learning. Some time I’ll dig up the occupation codes invented for the 1850 census, and we’ll see if we can have a laugh.

Google Books has some city directories. I found the one for San Francisco in 1850 interesting. You might recognize the date as being right on the heels of the discovery of gold in them thar hills.

I try to understand what life was like for people in other times. It requires some imagination, and some familiarity with the particulars. No electricity, no pavement, no cars … that means mud and horse manure in the streets. Geez, I don’t think they even had TRAINS in San Francisco in 1850. Here is the publisher’s preface, describing the challenges of creating a directory for that time and place:

It is not to be expected, in a City like this, where whole Streets are built up in a week and whole Squares swept away in an hour—where the floating population numbers thousands and a large portion of the fixed inhabitants live in tents and places which cannot be described with any accuracy, that a Directory can be got up with the correctness that they are in older and more established cities. We have scarcely a house numbered, and what there are will puzzle quite as much as assist.

The “floating population?” I can imagine lots of people living in ships and boats at the time. It’s a vivid image.

The other subject is that of bell-ringing as it is now practiced for our churches. We have seen the whole congregation of a religious meeting start from their seats at the ringing of the bells of other churches, supposing it was for fire; and how are our firemen to know whether the bells are ringing to call them with all their powers, to fight the devouring flames, or,with their most devotional feelings, to attend a prayer meeting. How widely different the objects, yet the same summons, put forth in the same manner, calls them to both. This is certainly wrong, and we think our City Council should make it the duty of bell-ringers, in all cases of business or for Church, to set the bells at regular intervals, as they do in the Atlantic cities.

I don’t hear much public bell-ringing, beyond that Big-Ben-type quarter-hour thing that we used to have at A&M. In modern life, we don’t empathize with bell-ringing related issues. Outside of Quasimodo, most people can’t name a bell-ringer. But if we’re going to live in close proximity, we’re going to need some rules. Someone is going to have to decide whether we pass on the right or the left. Someone is going to have to set the clocks. That someone is all of us, in the persons of governmental officials.

Fires and fire alarms have been a constant subject for people. There hasn’t been a “great fire” in over 100 years in the US, and we can lose sight of it. Recently, a fire destroyed many documents at the Indiana Historical Society. We all know that the past was different from the present. This book has a couple of vivid examples.

One of my favorite sources for genealogical and historical research is the City Directory. If you’ve not seen one, they are the precursors to the phone book – only without the phone numbers.

City Directories have more than just names in them. In many ways, they contain unique information about the cultural heritage of a place. The 1869 Salt Lake City directory was published by Edwards & Co of Chicago IL. After the classified listings in the back of the book, they included a great deal of history and many ads from the Chicago directory – but that’s a story for another day. This story is a “Sketch of Mormonism.”

I am not a member of the LDS Church. Many of my friends and colleagues are. Is it for their enjoyment that I extract this pearl. History changes, over time. Here’s a look backward, from the vantage point of 1869, at the founding of the LDS church.

With no further editorial comment, and with apologies in advance for typographical errors, I offer the following historical note.

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There has been much discussion of late, centered around the coming day when there is a complete, free collection of US census records online. I have expressed the belief that researchers and publishers should be discussing what records they would like to have next. Today, I’d like to suggest a few ways that publishers could improve on a complete, free census.

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What will a post-Census online genealogy research world look like?

Genealogy has been propelled to new heights during the past decade, by the availability of digital databases such as those found on Ancestry.com and Genealogy.com. In my view, this industry is maturing, as evidenced by the wide availability of US census and UK census collections.

Not only does Ancestry.com have a full US census collection. So does Heritage Quest (only available through libraries). Footnote has published 1860 and 1930. I recently saw most of the censuses between 1850 and1900 on FamilySearch.org, with images linked. The fee to access this information on that site is … free.

Ancestry’s recent IPO has apparently resulted in some “me too” decisions by companies to create similar sites. Footnote has announced that they will complete the US census. Other companies are quietly working on digitizing census records. To the genealogy researcher, the impact is that the prices will fall, until it gets all the way down to … free.

And what will happen then? Large genealogy publishers will not want to close up shop. They will need to publish something else. There is a significant amount of immigration and military record data going online.

The titles that publishers digitize fit into two broad categories. Some of them, like census records and civil war pensions, are complete collections in one place. These records have a single records custodian, such as the National Archives. Others, like gravestones, are fragmented, located in dozens, hundreds, or thousands of places. There are many records custodians.

The challenge for publishers is that they are rapidly approaching the point where all of the “complete collections” for markets like the US and UK are online, and the day that they’ll be free is clearly coming. They have little choice but to go forward with fragmented titles.

American researchers have been somewhat spoiled by the availability of Ancestry’s census collection. One web site. Every record. In the UK, it was split over four sites, until recently, when Find My Past completed a UK census collection. UK researchers can counsel their american colleagues about what happens next.

I’ll speculate about three kinds of fragmented US records that I think will be increasingly available: vital records, gravestones, and historical newspapers.

Vital records are kept by the states. This creates increased complexity for publishers, because the rights and the media come from 50 places, instead of one. The truth is, it’s more complicated than that. In some states, the counties are the records custodians. And with states such as Massachusetts, the state only has records after a certain date, and there are unique collections of records in many towns. There is no central index of vital records for the US. That’s one of the attractions of the census – it’s an implied birth record, by showing the child with the parents, and the age of the child at a certain date. There is a nice index of deaths in the SSDI, but it has very few entries for deaths before 1962, and many people did not participate in social security (such as state employees like teachers, and federal employees like … social security workers!).

Gravestones are about as fragmented as a collection of records can be. They are literally all over the US. Many sites, both paid and free of fees, contain some gravestones. There is no centralized index of gravestones. They make a good vital record, often containing information about birth dates, death dates, and even names of relatives.

Newspapers were once the primary means of distributing and receiving news, and there were many more newspapers in the past than there are today. Some of them have been lost. Some of them are in the hands of large publishers today, such as Gannet or Hearst. Many have been collected by NewsBank, and are available to genealogy researchers through GenealogyBank.

There are two kinds of problems with creating a central index over fragmented records. While the first is to achieve any degree of thoroughness, the other is to achieve a degree of consistency. Not all vital records contain the same information. Many existing databases contain partial information extracted from the records, and the parts in one database are not the same parts as are in others.

The same is true of gravestone databases available today.

And newspapers? For the most part, newspapers are OCR’d as a large “text blob” for each page. If you search for “Brown” you will find that the word is used in many contexts, and most of them are not as a family name. If you’re lucky enough to be a Sharbrough, your searches that turn up exact hits are always interesting, but if the OCR quality or the spelling isn’t just right, you will be unable to locate the articles you like. In short, current newspaper processing methods don’t identify name parts, date parts, connections between persons and employers, and the like.

There is a great deal of useful genealogical information left for publishers to sell us. At present, it would seem that they have a difficult decision to make. Perhaps it would be helpful if researchers could tell publishers more about what kinds of records they want most, and in what format they want to find, organize, and share them.

Originally published 07-Mar-2001 in the Ancestry Daily News [link]
This series of Spreadsheet articles is supported by material found here [link]

RootsWorks: Spreadsheet Basics

A lot of the information we come across just doesn’t line up neatly into rows and columns. Intuition tells us we can’t put our records into spreadsheets. Practice, on the other hand, has shown that putting our records into rows and columns is great for two reasons: (1) it helps us see what’s missing, and (2) it helps us understand what’s there! Most people have a spreadsheet programs on their computers, and it’s time to put these programs to work on our family history mysteries.

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