Ancestry.com: 9 Reasons Your Great-Great-Grandparents Were More Awesome Than You

An interesting item from Ancestry.com:

9 Reasons Your Great-Great-Grandparents Were More Awesome Than You

As 21st-century adults, it’s hard to fathom the kind of lives our great-great-grandparents led. While there were many difficulties they had to contend with, there were also many advantages to a pre-digital life in the 1870s and 1880s. . .

So how's it hold up?  Here, without the accompanying text, are the nine reasons?

1. They could probably ride and care for a horse.
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2. They wrote and received letters regularly.

3. They could get by without electricity.

4. They could make their own household goods.

5. They knew how to behave in different social situations.

6. They could get a good job without a lot of education.

7. They could get cheap household help.

8. They got to witness the earliest years of some of the most fascinating things in modern life.

9. They didn’t have to explain their facial hair to anyone.

Is Ancestry.com right?  Well, not too surprisingly, given that I find a lot of this stuff interesting, I've already addressed a bunch of these right here.  And, given that, I'd have to say that Ancestry.com doesn't do too bad, but they aren't 100% on the mark either.  Let's look at each one a bit more carefully.
  
1. They could probably ride and care for a horse.

Well, maybe not so much.

I've addressed equine transportation quite a few times on this blog.  The definative one, if there is one, is likely here:

Horsepower

 Remounts. World War One.

I've been doing a series of posts here recently on transportation.  I started out with the default means of transportation, walking, and then recently I did one on bicycles, the device that first introduced practical daily mechanical transportation to most people, most places, in the western world, and which continues to be the default means of daily transportation for a lot of people around the globe.  Here I turn to nearly the oldest means of alternative ground transportation (accepting that floating transportation was the second means for humans to get around, following walking), that being animal transportation. And when we discuss animal transportation, we mean for the most part equine transportation, at least in the context discussed here.. 

Having said that, this one is pretty relevant too:

Walking

For the overwhelming majority of human history, if a person wanted to get somewhere, anywhere, they got there one of two ways.

They walked, or they ran.

That's it.

Businessmen, Washington D. C., 1940s. Walking.

Alternative modes of transportation didn't even exist for much of human history. The boat was almost certainly the very first one to occur to anyone.  Or rather, the canoe.  People traveled by canoe before they traveled by any other means other than walking. . .

As explored here, and elsewhere, most people actually didn't ride that much.  Horses are expensive and require daily upkeep of some sort.

Now, for rural people, of which there were a great deal more then, than as opposed to now, as a percentage of the population, knowledge of equine transportation was certainly the rule.

So here, Ancestry.com  hits and misses.

2. They wrote and received letters regularly.

Ancestry.com is right on the mark here, that's for sure.  I've touched on this quite a bit too, including one fairly recent entry.  So Ancestry.com gets high marks here, and indeed, this topic is well worth writing about here again, and I likely shall.

3. They could get by without electricity.

Very true.  And a topic I haven't directly covered.  I'll have to add this one to the hopper.

4. They could make their own household goods.

Also at least somewhat true, depending upon the era and what we're addressing.  Actually, for most of us, it'd be more true of our great grandparents, or perhaps our great great grandparents, but even our immediate parents were generally handier than most people are now.

Another thing I'll have to cover.

Here's the actual entry from Ancestry.com:

Great-great-grandma probably sewed all her own household linens, complete with fancy embroidery, tatting, or other decorative embellishments. She could probably knit, crochet, or hook rugs. While some of these skills are becoming popular again, the ready availability of manufactured textiles has made most of them hobbies rather than essential life skills.

Cudos to Ancestry.com again. Another topic right on point for this blog that I've failed to cover.

5. They knew how to behave in different social situations.

This is one that wouldn't have occurred to me, but I think there's some truth to it.  Another one that I need to cover here.

6. They could get a good job without a lot of education.

This is an interesting one.  Here's the actual entry:

The movement for compulsory secondary education didn’t begin in the U.S. until the 1890s, so many adults in the 1870s and ’80s had only an elementary education. Still, they were able to find good-paying jobs in manufacturing — steel, meatpacking, and other major industries. Of course, these jobs didn’t pay nearly as much as most skilled labor jobs, which required years of apprenticeship prior to employment. A college education was mostly for the elite. Student loan debt was unheard of.

Very true again.

This is one that I have covered here quite a bit, in numerous different ways.   An older short one (which is hardly the only time I've covered it) is here:

Education

 Engineering Building, University of Wyoming, 1950s.

First of all, let me start off by noting that I'm not posting this as a screed advocating dropping out of school, quite the opposite.

Anyhow, this is my second social history post of the day.  The first one, posted just below, concerns weddings, this one concerns education.

Some friends and I were observing how the value of degrees has changed over the past couple of decades. The change is really quite remarkable.
7. They could get cheap household help.

I've covered daily living and the burden or household chores a lot, and in depth, here. But hiring domestic help I haven't covered.

Of course, a lot of our ancestors were probably working as domestic help as well, which is, and was, a pretty hard job.

But, once again, something to cover.

8. They got to witness the earliest years of some of the most fascinating things in modern life.

I think I've covered this, but as a matter of prospective.  That is, we think we live in a time with a blistering pace of change, but compared to earlier eras, but not all that long ago, not so much.

That can be a burden as well as a benefit, quite frankly.  That is, we shouldn't always assume that people enjoy these changes.  Some do, some don't, but its mixed for most.  Often its put just the way it is here, but perhaps we should be a bit more introspective on this one.

9. They didn’t have to explain their facial hair to anyone.

True. And another one I've covered a couple of times.

Well, Ancestry.com.  Nice job all and all.  And also, thanks for giving me ideas for some topics I need to explore.