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Have you ever examined your ancestors’ census records and noticed the dollar amounts in columns relating to the value of real estate and value of personal property? Have you wondered what those values would be in today’s dollars?
Get some perspective on the financial standing of your ancestor by using The Inflation Calculator. This site adjusts any given amount of money for inflation, from 1800 almost to the present day.
For example, using the 1870 census for Martin Low in Gentry County, Missouri (image below), we find the value of his real estate has been placed at $500. According to The Inflation Calculator, that’s $12,940 in 2010 dollars.
Notice the value of Evan Lewis’ property, listed above Martin, is $160. That’s about $4,140 in 2010 dollars. Another property owner on the next page has his land valued at $1,000 ($25,880 in 2010). Those are the top and bottom values in the entries near Martin.
Don’t stop there. Document your findings by noting the results in your genealogy program or attaching some commentary to your census document.
Of course, this project raises other questions:
• How much land did Martin own?
• What was the cost of living for a farmer, like Martin, in this time period and locality?
• How is the land in that area used today? Is it still farmland?
• What did Martin pay for his property?
• What was it eventually sold for and to whom?
By doing exercises like this, we begin to better understand our ancestor’s wealth, relative socioeconomic status in their community, and lifestyle. I hope you take the time to look at these kinds of issues when researching your ancestors.
© Michelle Goodrum 2012
This is a great approach that goes beyond the basics. Some additional possibilities:
* Find out what he grew on the farm by looking him up in the agricultural schedule of the 1870 census.
* Compare his numbers over time in both the population (1850-1870) and agriculture schedules (1850-1880).
* Check the purchase and sale price in property records, as they may differ radically from the figure that was told to the census enumerator. (We don’t know who told him that figure, either.)
* Recognize that there is no one simple way to equate prices in 1870 and in 2012. Not only are there different ways to measure inflation, 1870 was not just today with lower prices. Other on-line calculators give different figures, discussed at http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com/2012/06/my-ancestor-had-1000-in-1860-was-he.html.
Excellent suggestions Harold! The observations you make in your blog post are spot on. These things are never as simple as they seem on the surface are they?
No, it just seems to be mysteries all the way down!
Harold Henderson recently posted..Some Private Laws of Indiana Relating to La Porte County
What a fun idea to foster historical perspective. We see these numbers in our research, make thorough note of them, and then move on – rarely remembering to return and analyse what those numbers meant for our ancestors.
Rather than trying to move my lines forward, lately I’ve been trying to fill in their life and times. It makes for a richer understanding of who they were as opposed to just the where & when they were.
One letter in my collection has continued to niggle at me as it mentions “…but that was back in the more prosperous days…” Now these folks were never poor so I’ve always wondered whether their ‘station’ in life had really declined or was it more perceived.
This post is fresh inspiration to jump back onto that story…Thanks
You’re welcome Rorey.
You might try examining local and even national histories for the time period in referred to in the letter in your collection. You may find out why their more prosperous days declined. Perhaps there was an extended drought or a national recession.
I agree that filling in our ancestors life and times gives us a richer understanding of who these people were. Plus sometimes we get clues that we might not find otherwise that help us fill in our family trees with new members.