Thanks, and what you say would also be interesting, but I'm just  
comparing out of curiosity, and to get a general idea. Even within  
the same time frame you can get an idea of wealth, one man's estate  
was worth $53,525.24, while another's was worth $6,891.56 [he had  
been a plasterer, died elderly for the time, and widowed, but during  
his life he had bought and sold quite a lot of land]. Yes, I did  
notice bedding seemed relatively valuable within the context of an  
estate, while kitchen tools were very cheap, cheaper than the  
woodworking tools many had. Horses were worth much more than cattle  
[and the wealthier had cattle, the middling to poorer people had only  
"hogges", everybody seemed to have "hogges"]. No one seemed to have a  
lot of cattle, usually a cow, a heifer or two, maybe a team of oxen  
or a bull. No "herds" like you see today out in the country. They  
never seemed to list fowl and poultry in inventories, I am assuming  
most people had at least a few chickens scratching around the yard.  
I've only found one instance in my small sample, with sheep [11].  
Land prices went up and down rather dramatically. 15 1/2 acres in  
Amelia County in 1806 was sold for a mere $2,290.92. Maybe the  
economy was still on poor footing from the Revolutionary War. The  
$53,525 estate mentioned above was from a few years earlier. In that  
estate, unfortunately, there were 5 slaves, 4 women and one young  
adult male, whose worth was $9,355.66. Why was land and the house,  
barn and other buildings never listed on these inventories, I wonder?

Nancy

-------
I was never lost, but I was bewildered once for three days.

--Daniel Boone



On Apr 29, 2008, at 7:08 AM, Martha Katz-Hyman wrote:

> Rather than spend time figuring out what something costs in today's  
> dollars,
> it might be more helpful to figure out what something cost as a  
> percentage
> of average yearly income.  For instance, in the last quarter of the  
> 18th
> century,  a journeyman tradesperson in Williamsburg, received, on  
> average,
> somewhere around 30 pounds/year.
>
> So if a bed and its furniture (mattress, hangings, pillows, etc.)  
> was valued
> at 10 pounds in a probate inventory of that period, and the  
> inventory total
> was about 100 pounds (not unusual), you could make the reasonable  
> conclusion
> that this was a pretty substantial investment, especially for a  
> person of
> middling income.
>
> There are, of course, exceptions and caveats to this example.  But  
> given the
> difficulty of translating prices across two-plus centuries, and the
> difficulty of comparing prices for things that were very valuable two
> centuries ago and do not have the same value to us, it may be more  
> useful to
> use the comparative method described above rather than try to compare
> pound-to-dollar values.
>
> I know Harold Gill can explain this better than I, and welcome his  
> comments!
>
> Martha Katz-Hyman
>
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