The Family Tree
By Terence L. Day
Terence L. Day, genealogist and journalist, is on the Washington State University faculty. He welcomes e-mail at genealogy@moscow.com, or regular mail in care of the Tri-City Herald City newsroom, P.O. Box 2608, Tri-Cities, WA 99302-2608.
Learning about ancestors is more than names, dates
This column was published Jan. 7, 2001
Did you know that there were no plums in the plum pudding eaten by our 19th century English ancestors?
I'm either sorry or pleased to inform you about that, depending on your attitude about plums and raisins.
You see, the fruit in 19th century plum pudding was not the fruit of the tree with which we are acquainted today. Rather, the British "plum" was a raisin.
That was just one of the delightful things I learned this Christmas, which will help me in my genealogical pursuits.
From time to time I stray from the straight and narrow trail of genealogical research, laying aside vital statistics (the skeletal bones of family history) to wander historical byways in search of understanding the lives that my ancestors lived.
Genealogically speaking, I'm like the husband who goes to the store for a loaf of bread and comes home with a marionberry pie, a nice fillet of salmon, some asparagus, a package of wild rice and the latest issue of Popular Mechanics - but without the bread!
It doesn't matter what I set off to find, it's almost certain I'll find a lot of things that I'm not looking for, and all because of an infernal curiosity and an innate need to know who my ancestors were - and knowing them is a lot more complicated than knowing their names and a few important vital statistics.
My most recent digression from the narrow genealogical trail began Christmas morning when my adult daughter, Elisabeth, opened her present from a friend.
It was a book, What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew: From Fox Hunting to Whist - the Facts of Daily Life in 19th Century England, by Daniel Pool, published in 1993 by Touchstone. It is as fascinating as its title is long.
The thickest strand of my genealogy comes through 19th century England, so - as you can imagine - I was predestined to snatch up the book as soon as Elisabeth laid it aside to enjoy her children's Christmas activities.
What Jane Austen Ate is much more than a glossary of terms, many of them important, if not essential, to the family historian. It has chapters on various aspects of life: farming, travel, games and money.
Pool's book will help you understand references you may encounter in old diaries or histories. For example:
* Whist was a card game for two couples. Other popular card games included quadrille, ombre, Pope Joan, patience and speculation.
* A furlong comes from the length of a plowed furrow in a standard English field, or about 660 feet.
* A quarter was a fourth of a hundredweight, but a quartern was something entirely different. A quartern was a standard size of a loaf of bread weighing four pounds. A quartern also was a fourth of an ounce, stone, peck or pint.
* A hogshead was a barrel or cask, capable of holding about 63 U.S. gallons of dry or liquid measure. That would be 521/2 English gallons.
* If your ancestor mentioned so many "ells" of cloth, you will be pleased to learn that an ell is 11/4 yards.
* I doubt that any of my ancestors had maids - although some of them may have been maids - but I'm sure they would have had a "maid-of-all-work."
As Pool explains, a maid-of-all-work usually was a young girl or teen-ager hired to do all the things that in a wealthier household would have been divided among several servants. This would include cooking, washing, scrubbing, cleaning, taking care of children, etc.
* Bitters was an alcoholic concoction in which various things - orange peels, wormwood, etc. - had been steeped. Bitters was taken for supposed medicinal purposes.
Perhaps we should finish off with a term of central interest to genealogists: in-law. In 19th century England, it was sometimes used the same way we use it today. But our ancestors also sometimes used the term to refer to step-relatives.
Thus, if I were a 19th century Brit, I might use father-in-law in reference to my wife's, or to my own, step-father. Ignorance of such important matters could lead a genealogist seriously astray.