The Costs of Living in Earlier Times - Prices and Wages by Decade 1700s-2000s

I happened upon the website, University of Missouri Libraries' Prices and Wages by Decade, a few weeks ago when I was trying to learn whether Abel Armitage's settlement from a court case against the city of Steubenville would have been enough for him to return to England.  (It definitely would have.)  It didn't take me long to immerse myself (that is, go deeper down this Abel Armitage rabbit hole) in the dozens and dozens of options to learn about the financial concerns of ancestors who lived decades and centuries ago.  The website's unassuming header and description don't give much of a clue about what's hidden behind the gold tabs.

When I click on one of the yellow/gold century tabs below the title, I'm presented with clickable links for individual decades, for example, 1800-1809, 1810-1819, etc.  Sometimes information will be available at this website, but for the most part, it offers links to where a researcher can find further information.  This collection of links to further information is organized by categories, which include, etc.:

• Wages in the United States
• Wages by sex 
• Wages by race
• Wages by occupation
• Wages by state
• United Kingdom wages
• Food prices
• Clothing Prices
• Health and Medicine prices
• Communication rates  
• Home, farm, and land prices
• Travel and transportation prices
• More prices in the United States include communication, household items, tools, guns & hunting, livestock, education, hotels, services
• Cost of living and consumer expenditures in the U.S.
• Foreign prices by country
• United Kingdom prices
• Quotable facts for the decade
• Analysis, calculators, and exchange rates
• Timeline -- Major economic events of the decade
• And possibly others, depending on the decade 

The website states, 

This guide points to prices and wages found in primary sources for each decade back to the 1700s.  Our preference is government sources though we also use commercial catalogs, travel guides, newspapers, etc.  We point only to publications that are freely available online....

Since information is based on what can be gathered from various sources, there may not be information for your ancestor in a specific location in a specific decade.  Sometimes, information can be generalized across a wider geographic area and broader expense of time, but as a family historian you'd need to decide whether to do that or not. 

Other ways to learn prices, wages, and more financial information for our ancestors' time is to digitally search or page through newspaper for ads and articles, and to research individual items and locations.  I don't see this website as an only-place-to-look kind of resource.

This is the kind of website that is endlessly fascinating to me.  With so many ancestors living in so many different decades, with so much influencing and effecting their lives, and with both female and male ancestors, this website presents information in some form or another for all of them.  When I learn from a census that an ancestor's property was valued at $4,000.00 and that his personal estate was valued at $1500.00, I can't help but wonder teh cost of food or clothing or transportation or other necessities, or even luxuries, during that time.  I think information like this helps me understand the circumstance of the lives of my ancestors better.

The only negative I see is that there is no search bar, so I wasn't able to ask the cost of an item or service in a particular year in a specific location.

—Nancy.

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