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.
Web site helps dispel how cheap things were back then
This story was published April 12, 1998
About 1915, our grandparents or great-grandparents could buy a spanking new, shiny, black Model T Ford for about $385.
Sounds pretty cheap, doesn't it?
And it was, compared with what other automobiles were selling for in those days. Introducing a car the average family could afford was part of Henry Ford's genius, and it helped transform America.
I thought about some of what Ford wrought while on a recent vacation, a little jaunt from my Pullman home to San Francisco, San Diego and Salt Lake City.
Ruth and I zipped over 2,902 miles of mostly darned nice, but sometimes crowded, highway in eight pleasurable days.
Since I'm involved in research about my father, who owned a truck line and hauled fruit between Wenatchee and California's orchard country, I thought a lot about the state of trucks and highways seven decades ago, and spent a few hours in the Salt Lake City library poking into that history.
Recently, I wrote of my mother's travels between Seattle and Hover, near Kennewick, before roads were paved.
I gather back in the early '20s, her family was regarded as somewhere between upper-poor and lower middle-class. Her foster mother was a telephone operator and her foster dad worked in a laundry.
But thanks to Ford's Model T, and the competition it introduced into the automotive industry, they were able to buy a car.
When I rolled off the road last weekend, I dialed up the Worldwide Web and did a little more research. I don't know what my mother's family paid for their car, or even what kind it was, so let's use Model T prices here. New car prices.
To give perspective to what $385 amounted to in 1915, I pointed my browser to the the American Institute for Economic Research Web site at http://www.aier.org/ and clicked on AIER's cost-of-living calculator.
It's easy to use. Just type in the dollar amount you want to work with and select the years. You can inflate or deflate your figures for any years between 1913 and 1998.
I learned that $385 in 1915 is equivalent to $6,137.20 in current dollars. I doubt you can buy a new car worth driving home for that price.
Playing a bit, I discovered that $1 when I graduated from high school is equivalent to $5.94 in today's economy.
I need to imprint that where my mind can find it when I cringe at a $3 bill for a hamburger.
Similarly, I need to realize that when I pay $1.34 a gallon for gasoline today - and we have paid more than that here in Pullman -I'm paying the same price I paid in Utah in 1968, when the price then was 29 cents.
You can see how valuable a cost-of-living calculator is to anyone writing family history. When we read that an ancestor paid $5 for something in 1913, it's hard to know the value ($81.85 in today's economy).
But the calculators such as the one offered for free use on the AIER Worldwide Web page give us the perspective to understand what we're reading.
Often genealogists want to go back farther than 1913. AIER's calculator won't take them farther back, but Dick Eastman, of Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter, says a calculator called COLA is available as shareware. It will calculate the relative values of money from 1749 to 1990.
It can be downloaded from CompuServe's Genealogy Techniques Forum.
Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter is a free weekly summary of events. If you have access to the Web, you can read it free at http://www.ancestry.com/home/eastarch.htm
The site also includes instructions on how to subscribe (again, free) if you want editions sent via e-mail.
Be warned, this newsletter is sponsored by Ancestry, but there's a light touch on commercialization.
Eastman also manages the Genealogy Forum on CompuServe, is editor of Genealogical Computing magazine and author of Your Roots: Total Genealogy Planning On Your Computer, published by Ziff-Davis Press.
Eastman is a good source of tips on valuable genealogical tools. His newsletter is where I found the AIER calculator.
Incidentally, I should warn you about the use of cost-of-living calculators. I brilliantly typed in my starting salary when I joined the Washington State University faculty in 1972. It told me that I work today for less than I received 25 years ago. This despite an unblemished record of above average performance ratings.
Ouch!
Wish I hadn't run that little calculation.