Stories of Homuth and Whelan Kin

                                                    What Our Family Occupations Reveal These two charts provide a glimpse into the lives of Steve’s and my Canadian ancestors and the world in which they lived. By tracing occupations back through five generations to about the 1850s, they reveal not only how our families earned their living, but also how society itself changed over time. (we do have some family lines in North American much earlier than these charts.) The first impression is how both families were connected to the land and why our families immigrated to Canada. In the earliest generations (the mid 1800s), the farm was not simply a workplace but the centre of family life, providing food, income, housing, and identity. Success depended on hard physical labour, cooperation among family members, and the ability to adapt t...