Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Time Capsule Fun

It’s time for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun with Randy Seaver and this week’s challenge involves some time travel:

1) Go to the dMarie Time Capsule Website – http://dmarie.com/timecap/

2) Select a date in your family history that you want to know about. You might pick a birth date or wedding date of your parents or grandparents.

3) Enter the date into the search form, and select the news, songs, toys, books and other things that you want to feature.

4) Share the date, why you picked it, and the results of your Time Capsule study on your own blog, in a comment to this post, or in a comment or post on Facebook.

I chose 17 August 1893, as it is the day my paternal grandmother was born in Passaic, Passaic, New Jersey. I remember using birth dates of other grandparents for other challenges and they were pretty boring dates in history!

Nana’s birthday was more interesting and dMarie Time Capsule is a totally new website for me. I’ve never even heard of it.

First of all, Nana shares her birthday with none other than Davy Crockett, which is really neat.

Two of the top songs of 1893 are definitely classics. I remember singing Git Along Little Dogies when I was in elementary school. Plus, the most sung song in history debuted in 1893 – Happy Birthday to You!

Grover Cleveland was president and Adlai Stevenson was his vice president. I remember Adlai Stevenson Jr., but not his father.

The biggest surprise was the price of common items. In 1893, we could expect to pay 3 cents for a loaf of bread, 18 cents for a gallon of milk and a house only cost an average of $5,250. On the other hand, the average annual income was only $630, which puts those prices in better perspective!

When my grandmother was only a couple of weeks old, on September 4, Beatrix Potter introduced the world to Peter Rabbit.

This is a really fun website! I’ll be playing around with some more dates. Thank you, Randy, for this week’s Saturday Night Genealogy Fun. 🙂

3 thoughts on “Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Time Capsule Fun”

  1. Comparing 1893 to 1938, it’s interesting that the price of milk went from 18¢ to 50¢/gallon but the cost of a house went from $5,250 to $6,420, and income went from $630 to $1,808/year. It seems that 1938 would have been a better year to buy a house.

    I thought this was a really fun website but I noticed that the information was slimmer the earlier the date. I wonder if they’ll keep adding information or whether they’re done.

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