Glimpses of Everyday Life

 

Just gotta love the tidbits that pop up when researching ancestors in the local newspaper. While working on the Nevin family for our county's First Families program, I spotted an insertion in the November 20, 1914, edition of the Stockton Daily Evening Record. Granted, it was buried toward the bottom of page seven, but a search for Eugene Henry Nevin, one of Nathan Nevin's sons, through the digitized newspapers for that city yielded a glimpse of everyday life for this family. Newspapers can be good for that.

Under the headline, "Record Ad Restores a Lost Black Cat," ran this grateful reader's explanation.

"I want to thank the Record for finding my cat," said Mrs. Eugene H. Nevin, of 837 North Lincoln street, over the telephone to the Record the other evening. "I lost a valuable black cat and I inserted a lost ad in the Record. That evening Miss Ella Henderson, who lost an antique gold brooch, was looking over the classified ads in the Record to see whether her pin was advertised as found and she read my ad. A few minutes later she stepped out on the street and saw a large black cat. 'I'll bet that's the lost cat which I saw advertised,' she said. She called to the cat and it came to her. Then she rang me up. Sure enough, it was my cat."

Reading that brief insertion in the local newspaper woke me up to the fact that I had some assumptions about life in 1914 in the California town which the Nevins called home. Looking at a city directory for a much later date showed name entries along with residence addresses, but no phone numbers. However, that did not mean there were no phones in those households.

I went looking for more information on this simple question about the everyday life of our ancestors. Specifically focusing on telephone communication, which I had presumed wasn't yet a widespread part of everyday life for folks in 1914, I learned that there was estimated to be about one "working telephone" for every ten people in the United States. One phone company's blog mentioned that thirty five percent of American households likely had a telephone by 1920.

But how evenly spread was that distribution of "working" phones? While a timeline of the rollout of the telephone made for detailed reading, it didn't answer my specific question. Still, an article from the website of a California museum revealed that, at least in the state where the Nevins lived, the telephone was "so enthusiastically received by Californians" that nearby San Francisco became the third city in the world to open up a telephone exchange.

In 1878.

For those who wish to find such answers about our ancestors' daily life, leave it to the census bureau to provide far more information than we could ever use. However, it answered my question. On page 480 of a mind-numbing hodgepodge of bureaucratese, on "Telephone and Telegraph Systems," a table revealed that precisely in 1914, there were 100.6 telephones per one thousand population.

That still doesn't answer my questions about the particulars of distribution of the innovation in San Joaquin County, California, but it is apparent that not only did Mrs. Eugene H. Nevin have a phone, but Miss Ella Henderson did, too. 

I'd be tempted to ask, next, whether Miss Henderson ever found her antique gold brooch, but that's a task for another family historian.

Image of newspaper article from Stockton Daily Evening Record, November 20, 1914, page 7, above, courtesy of Newspapers.com.