My Ancestors

Today I thought I’d change tack a little. I found myself writing something that wasn’t tied to one particular ancestor, but about a topic that I keep noticing in my family history travels, and that’s the topic of money.

Wills are useful documents that help confirm family units long before the census returns allow us to do that. They often do this by naming the deceased’s spouse and children at the time the Will was written; they sometimes provide married names for daughters; and they also sometimes include the names of grandchildren, nieces or nephews. They also help paint a picture of our ancestors’ lives by describing their possessions… and just sometimes might reveal interesting family dynamics.

In 1700 my 7 x great grandfather, Alexander MILSON (c1684-1721) inherited £10 under his father’s Will. The question that then comes up is, ‘Was that a lot of money or not?’

Today’s post looks at how a family historian might go about answering that question. But it felt like this page might be a bit different to most of my other blog posts to date, and because one of my aims here is to develop my IT skills, I thought I’d have a go at creating a page, rather than a post, and then that meant I had to go back to tweaking the design of the homepage so that it displayed pages as well as recent posts. All of which of course took longer than it should have done, but, hey, that’s what learning’s about isn’t it?

Hopefully you can see the link on the right hand side of the updated homepage, but to make it even easier here’s a direct link https://wordpress.com/page/myancestors.blog/239. I also added links to my Ancestry homepage, and – a bit off topic – to an Instagram account with some of my walking and travel photographs (another interest and project).

Oh… and as for Alexander’s inheritance, I think the most helpful current comparison figure is just under £30,000 (using the relative income value approach I describe on my new page).

I hope you find some of this interesting, but let me know what you think?