October 23, 2017
My great-uncle Albert Henry Sawyer (1855-1944) was born on 16 September 1855 in New Hampton, Belknap County, New Hampshire. He was the brother of my great-grandmother Francis Lila Sawyer (1863-1958). Their family was a small tribe of 13 children.
He married Emma F. Marden (1862-1941) on 15 September 1884 in Woodstock, Grafton County, New Hampshire. I know from census records and my own research that he worked on the family farm, but I didn’t know much about Albert beyond that, so I decided to research him in GenealogyBank’s Historical Newspaper Archives to see what else I could learn.
I began by searching for “Albert Sawyer” in the old New Hampshire newspapers.
One of the first articles I found was this.
It reports:
“Albert Sawyer of Woodstock has made about 9000 gallons of cider this fall with his portable mill, going from house to house.”
Wow – that’s a lot of cider!
So, Albert was an entrepreneur as well as a farmer.
I did a quick internet search to see what else I could learn about early New England apple cider. The Old Sturbridge Village museum gave me a few interesting details about the region’s cider production in the 1800s:
“Cider mills operated throughout New England in September and October, converting most of the region’s apple crops into cider using horse-powered crushers and hand-operated screw presses… Most early New Englanders drank cider, with the average farm family making over 300 gallons of it a year.”
If the average family farm produced 300 gallons of cider each fall, Albert’s production of 9,000 gallons of cider using a small, portable mill is certainly remarkable.
A Wikipedia image search provided an interesting take on what Albert’s portable cider mill may have looked like in 1894 – the time period when Albert did his work.
Thank you GenealogyBank for giving me the rest of the story of the lives of my relatives. I’ll think of Great-Uncle Albert the next time I eat an apple.
Genealogy Tip: Newspapers are the chief resource for finding new details about the day-to-day lives of our relatives. Find new insights about your family’s history in GenealogyBank.com.
