From the feather man who went from town to town, cleaning bedding made of feathers, to the cat-meat men who fed the felines of London, to the rag and bone men who were some of the first recyclers, it was an eclectic group of people who made their living as pedlars, tinkers and hawkers in […]

Women’s Occupations in the Early Twentieth Century The logical starting place to learn about what occupational opportunities were available for women in the early twentieth century is by referring to the data collected during the 1900, 1910 and 1920 Federal Census.  For that reason, I turned to the report, Women in Gainful Occupations, 1870-1920: A […]

Like us, our ancestors, unless they were independently wealthy, had to work to put food on the table and to keep a roof over their heads. For our earlier ancestors, this often meant working the land or fishing the seas but when the industrial revolution brought change to the employment landscape, the growing number of […]

While there is no doubt in my mind that our earliest female ancestors worked, and worked very hard, their choices for paid employment were few. Young women of the working class mostly went into service, working as domestic servants or farm servants. Widowed women with a family to support, might have taken in laundry, worked at dressmaking, hat making or […]

On Wednesday, 3 January 1872, Thomas Macarte gave his last performance as Massarti the Lion Tamer in front of a horrified crowd of about 500 people at the Manders’s Menagerie in the Bolton marketplace in Lancashire. The menagerie had been in town since Friday, December 29 and Thomas Macarte had been one of the star attractions since he […]

The motion picture industry was in its infancy when my grandfather started working for General Film in Montreal. Although very new, dedicated movie theatres were extremely popular in Montreal and in the early twentieth century, several theatres had opened in Montreal including the Ouimet in 1906 and the Nationoscope in 1907. By 1911, when John Arthur Bond went to […]

And so it was that my fourth great-grandfather, Thomas Bulmer, came into the world in late December of 1782, just as the American War of Independence was coming to an end.  It had been a very expensive war for England to fight and Britain was in debt.  The British Parliament levied a Stamp Duty against […]

Flour was a very precious staple for our early ancestors in Canada and a flour mill would have been very welcome in any community. Farmers, within a day’s wagon ride of the mill would bring their wheat to be ground into flour. With barter being more prevalent than cash at that time, the miller would grind the […]

If you were a file grinder in nineteenth century Sheffield, then you probably rented one or more troughs in one of the many wheels located throughout Sheffield. Each wheel consisted of rooms called hulls and each hull had a number of trows or troughs. The trough was made of cast metal and contained the water in which […]

On 11 July 1778, W. Jackson, the proprietor of a store in High Street, advertised his wares in the Oxford Journal including a fine selection of stationery supplies. While the majority of the English were still illiterate in the late eighteenth century, certainly the upper and middle classes of the time were more likely than ever before […]