Exploring the Purchases of A Farming Family 1881-1932

Beginning in 1861, members of the Mason family resided and worked the same farm in Stanhope Township for the next 134 years. For at least nine decades, three generations of the family kept the receipts from all their purchases and the author spent some time sifting through these receipts and cataloguing them into chronological and theme-related categories. From this, a picture of the day-to-day life of the family, a sense of their relationship to their local community, their networking with the larger world outside, and the agencies which facilitated the bridging of these two emerged. This paper outlines the process involved and presents a snapshot of the life of this family gleaned from the receipts.