
52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks
Week Six - February 5 - 11, 2024
Earning A Living
Undoubtedly when I reflect upon the occupations of my ancestors, I have concluded that the job of coal miner comes immediately to mind. The maternal side of my family hails from, within the last 125 years, Northeast Pennsylvania which was the premier geological area for rich veins of slow-burning anthracite coal.

Coal miners are prolific in my family tree. Other ancestors farther back before the time of commercial coal mining were also miners. They were tin, copper, and ironstone miners in Cornwall and Devon, England. Some of these men eventually died from the effects of this, hazardous, strenuous, and low-paying occupation.
Among my direct and collateral ancestors who mined the earth hundreds of feet below the surface were:

Irvin O. Lord (1875-1941) – maternal great-grandfather – Coal miner (he later became a blacksmith), Pennsylvania.
Joseph T. Harris (1850-1923) – maternal 2nd great-grandfather – Coal Miner, England

William H. Harris, Sr. (1875-
1941) – maternal great-grandfather – Coal
Irvin O. Lord
Miner, Pennsylvania
William H. Harris, Jr. (1907 -1975) – maternal granduncle – Coal Miner, Pennsylvania
John Matthew Harris ( 1822- 1873) – 3rd great-uncle – Engine driver in the mines, England
John B. Harris (1858 - unknown) 1st cousin 4x removed - Mine boy (Breaker boy), age 13, England
John Harris (1788 – 1840) 4th - maternal great-grandfather, Tin miner, England
John B. Harris (1858- unknown) - 1st cousin 4x removed – Copper miner, England.
William H. Harris, Sr.
Henry White (1850 – 1926) - maternal 2nd great-grandfather – Ironstone miner, England

Thomas Manuell – (1782 – 1855) maternal 4th great-grandfather – Mine Agent, England
There are many others among my ancestors. It is important to see their names in print to honor the occupations at which they labored for our eventual benefit. The industrial, institutional, and practical modernization of the United States was contingent on the labor and the lives both lived and lost in the Anthracite Coal Regions of Pennsylvania and of the copper,

Henry White
tin, and ironstone miners of England.
Notice that all these men were either born in England and immigrated to the United States in the 19th century or were born in Northeastern Pennsylvania. That had me thinking about how that happened. Here is what I found:
British coal miners immigrated to the United States in increasing numbers during
Wheal Mine in Cornwall
the U.S. Civil War decade. Their movement from the collieries of England gathered momentum in the early war years and reached its peak in 1869. In 1862, almost all of the immigrants entering the United States who listed their occupation as “miners” were from Britain.
Immigrants to the United States came to the coal mines through a variety of means. Some were attracted by labor agents stationed in major ports of entry who often resorted to elaborate and deceptive descriptions of living and working in the mines of America. Others

followed friends and relatives to coal towns and camps.
My ancestors were primarily natives of coal, tin, copper, and ironstone mining regions of Great Britain, Ireland, and Wales. Later eastern and southern Europeans relocated to the coal mining camps and towns. Demands for mine labor and the demands of miners for better pay and working conditions increased, and coal mine operators began actively recruiting
Early Coal Breaker
immigrants from these regions to increase their labor pools and foster linguistic, religious, and cultural divisions intended to complicate the efforts of miners to organize.

These divisions, often exacerbated by the physical separation of ethnic groups within coal mining towns and camps, occasionally resulted in violent clashes. Indeed, my mother told the story of my maternal great-grandfather having been “beat up” in the mines in the 1930s when she was a child. She said he never went back to work after that incident. I have been working on that story for a while but have not yet been able to qualify it. More research is needed.
19th Century Miner
Working in the mines of the 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries was a hazardous, dirty, and unhealthy job. Family members who suffered along with the miners were subject to living in

“company” houses and buying their provisions from “company” stores, both of which kept them obligated to the coal company owners causing the families to remain poor and reliant on the “company.” Male members of the family, both young and old, were required to work in some capacity in the mines to feed, clothe, and shelter the family.
If you were from a mining family one of the worst occupations often fell to younger
Company home of coal miners
male members of the family. In the late 19th century, young “breaker boys” worked in the anthracite coal mines in Pennsylvania and the United Kingdom removing impurities such as slate from the coal. Sitting on wooden seats, hunched over conveyor belts they separated coal with their bare hands for hours at a time, a typical work week for a breaker boy was six days a week and ten hours a day for extraordinarily little pay. Most breaker boys were between the ages of eight and twelve years old.

Being a breaker boy was a tough and dangerous job, as were the jobs of their miner grandfathers, fathers, uncles, and brothers. Sharp stones of the coal would cut their fingers leaving them bleeding and subject to infection. The buildings they worked in were filled with coal dust
contributing to diseases such as asthma,
Young Breaker Boys
black lung disease, or lung cancer. There were few safety measures and many breaker boys lost fingers or limbs that became caught in the conveyer belts, some lost feet, hands, arms, and legs as they moved among the machinery having been entangled under belts or gears. Some were crushed to death, their bodies retrieved from the gears of the machinery by supervisors only at the end of the working day. Others, caught in the rush of coal were crushed to death or smothered. The boys were known for their fierce independence and rejection of adult authority.

One estimate had 20,000 breaker boys working in Pennsylvania in 1880 and 24,000 by 1907. By 1920 the practice of employing children largely ended because of the National Child Labor Committee, sociologist and photographer Lewis Hine, and the National Consumers League, all of whom educated the public about the practice and succeeded in obtaining passage of national labor laws. Breaker Boys at work
Imagine being the wife and mother of these miners, support workers, and breaker boys. It certainly was a hard scrabble life for almost all who labored in the mines, including their immediate families. I have more than one of these young boys among my ancestors.
From this cloth were cut, my maternal ancestors. I can see that this adversity made the following generations stronger and more determined to rise from hazardous occupations and circumstances contributing to the “true grit” of my family tree. Thankfully, my ancestors were able to change their occupations to grocers, agricultural workers, stone masons, and railroad employees in the years that followed.
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