Daily Archive: October 15, 2026

If you have colonial ancestors in your family tree, no doubt you’ve found records of purchases throughout their lives, whether it’s land, livestock, food, or various other items, as well as payments of taxes or services, and estimated property values in estate inventories. But what do those numbers mean, and what do they tell us where our ancestors were on the scale of wealth? Today’s blog will offer some explanations and resources to help you determine approximately how much colonial goods and services were worth, as well as approximate wage earnings of laborers and artisans. How to Determine Value First, we have to put ourselves within the frame of reference in existence at the time and place, because monetary values were relative to different colonies/states. We need some knowledge of currencies of the time and their equivalents in different colonies and states, and we have to understand that values were...