RootsChat.Com
General => The Common Room => The Lighter Side => Topic started by: Erato on Thursday 03 November 22 22:25 GMT (UK)
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If you had anyone involved in the rape of the pine forests of North America, here's an interesting article with (good photographs and excellent links) on logging camps in northern Wisconsin. I scanned the faces but I don't see my g-grandfather who spent several years, around 1862-1866, up around Lac Vieux Desert logging during the winters and herding the oxen during the summers.
https://recollectionwisconsin.org/lumber-camp-life
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What a great collection of photos, they are so clear too. A fabulous archive of social history. Just imagine what it would be like, to find an ancestor at work or play in one of the photos.
I don't suppose there are too many photos of leather dyers, shoemakers or blacksmiths in any of the UK archives. The best one I have found of a relative was a picture of a bandleader in a music supplement.
Thanks for sharing Erato.
Carol
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You're right, it's hard to find pictures of ancestors doing their working class jobs. I do have a few farming pictures including one of gg-uncle Henry Charles Chapman standing next to his corn which was as high as an elephant's eye, higher, in fact.
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They were certainly kept well fed!
I have a few posed pictures of groups of workmen, which include my grandfather and great grandfather, both carpenters.
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For anyone interested in this subject, the novel "Barkskins" by Annie Proulx is a great read.
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They were certainly kept well fed!
There is a downside to that;
https://www.shorpy.com/node/7794
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Oh dear - poor man!
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"They were certainly kept well fed!"
Tales of Paul Bunyan
Paul's axemen ate so many flap-jacks they couldn't supply the demand. Ole, the Blacksmith, made a griddle so large you couldn't see across it when the smoke was thick. Sourdough Sam had fifty men with pork rinds tied to their feet skating around the griddle to grease it. The batter was mixed in large barrels and it took a strong cook just to turn the flapjacks, let alone get them to the table.
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I found a relative’s photo in a newspaper article about his work as a blacksmith, showed him in his smithy.
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I have a large mounted photo of a great-uncle, born in 1870, who worked as a piecer in a woollen mill. He and a couple of other fellow workers in the picture had dirty bare feet and ragged shirts and could barely manage a smile for the photographer. Sadly he died young from a lung related illness, no doubt caused through breathing in the fibres and other working conditions in the mill. All his 10 siblings worked in the mill from the age of 10. His sister, my grandmother, died at the age of 45 from a similar cause. I never knew her. (Sorry, nothing to do with logging camps!)