RootsChat.Com

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Encouraging young genealogists is something we can all do, maybe appreciating the importance of genealogy should be part of the citizenship curriculum at school ?

...Opinions vary but I would say that a child knowing his/ her 8 great grandparents with full event date/location details is a good standard of knowledge.

Although many of us would sympathise with this point of view, I think you might struggle to get it accepted on a wider basis.

There is so much that children today are expected to learn in the few years they are at school the idea of adding genealogy as anything more than a passing reference in a single lesson would be a hard sell (I think money and personal finances would score much higher on the 'what kids need to learn' scale)

There's also the ticklish issue of many children not knowing who one of their parents is, let alone all 8 ggparents. (I'd fail, as one of my 8 is always going to be an 'unknown')

I'd also think twice about making something compulsory because making children research their family history might put them off for life - in the same way you hear people (proudly) saying they have no interest in maths, geography, religion, or history because they hated it at school.

I think it is something better left largely as a hobby people come to of their own accord, with just small nudges in that direction from parents and grandparents.

It's funny to find someone still writing about 'programmes', which normally suggest radio or concert-hall.  Maybe we have to blame America, but since about 1970 anything loosely connected with computers has been a Program - same word but different flavour 

"Flavor", surely? 

About 10 years ago I noticed some organisations in the UK were starting to switch to 'programme'... but then everything became an 'App' instead.

I suppose my question would be: why wouldn’t they have used a cart or wagon?

Some probably did - but bear in mind lifting a plough on and off a wagon would be a two or three person job, and the wagon wouldn't neccesarily travel a great deal faster.

To us using a cart or wagon might seem the obvious solution, because what we would do today would be hitching a trailer to the car and loading the plough on the trailer, and then drive however far in airconditioned comfort.  The cart/wagon is the closest alternative to what we'd do.

But the day job for a ploughman would be ploughing at least an acre of land per day, which (depending on furrow width) involved a walking distance of (say) 10 miles.  More if he was using a larger team that could work faster.

So to the ploughman, walking 2 to 5 miles behind the plough to get to a ploughing match wouldn't have seemed out of the ordinary.

For a single furrow plough (typically used for match ploughing) you'd normally need only one or two horses - so if a team of three or four were being used it may be one or two were used for the journey there, leaving one or two fresh for the match work.

By the 1840's ploughs would commonly have wheels (but not universally), so it is plausible the plough would just be pulled along the road or tracks on it's own wheels to get to the match site.

The wheels were usually independently height adjustable - in most cases when ploughing one wheel would be set much lower to run in the furrow, whereas the other wheel would run 'on the land'.  For transport the wheels would be adjusted to the same height.

As the wheels were usually right at the front the ploughman would have to 'lift' the plough so the plough body would be clear of the ground.  Doing that for 5 miles would be hard work.