Pretty darn poor

One of the interesting things about genealogy is finding out how wealthy our ancestors were. If you're like most people, you may be surprised to find that they weren't wealthy in any sense of the word, that in fact, they were poor. Subsistence was how most of our ancestors got along, if they were lucky. (Sure we all like to trace ourselves to some long dead king or prince, but that's usually a stretch, often an absurd one.) But then something happened, and it usually had less to do with bootstraps than it did with larger trends. My mother's side of the family escaped poverty through the Homestead Act and then the New Deal. My father's side got out from under thanks to the Congress of Industrial Organizations. None of those things exist anymore, but hey, we still got our bootstraps - mine are getting a bit frayed.

Photo: "Subsistence Fishing" Havre de Grace Maritime Museum, Havre de Grace, Maryland.

Canon EOS 5D