Monday, July 4, 2011

Tools of the Trade

I have been thinking about the occupations of our ancestors and what tools that might have used. 

William Mathers came to America from Ireland about 1865. He had a shoe and bootmaking business in  New York City. Here are a few of the tools he might have used.


John Murphy was in Brooklyn in the 1870's.  He came from Ireland and probably had several different jobs because on a couple of listings in City Directories he was just listed as a Laborer.  Several years after that in the 1880 census he indicates he is a plasterer.  Here are some tools he would have used.


Another ancestor John Nelson Moore was born in Savannah, Georgia and became a telegraph operator for the Rail Road.  Around 1917 he brought his Mother and family up to New York City.  He work as a telegraph operator for newspapers, Western Union, and retired from Paine Webber Jackson and Curtis Brokerage Firm as their manager of the Telegraph/Ticker Tape room.  Below is a picture of an early machine that he would have used.




John Moore's wife Isabel Tierney worked  before she got married in 1918.  I believe that is how the two of them met.  She was a telephone operator on Wall Street.  Also her daughter Ruth, my mother, also worked as a telephone operator and met my father down in the Wall Street area.  Here is what they probably worked on.



James R. Mathews, my Dad, was an editor, and a ghost writer (he wrote articles and speeches for other people).  These were his tools.




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