2024 Week 12: Technology

We live in a world where advances in technology are almost taken for granted. It permeates every aspect of our lives. Even as I sit here typing up this genealogy blog, I can remember that when I started my genealogical journey about forty years ago, there were no laptops, no software, no DNA testing. My journey started with a pen and paper, parish registers and librarians!

Even going back a generation to my parents, the amount of technological advance they witnessed during their lifetimes was astounding. Here are a few of the ways in which technology impacted their lives and my memories.

My dad was born in 1914 - according to Wikipedia the first affordable mass produced car was only produced in 1913! His parents never had a car, so my dad was part of the first generation to learn to drive and own many cars in their lifetime. (My mum, like many women in her generation, never learned to drive.) My dad was a civil engineer by profession. Initially for calculations, he used a slide rule, which he'd unsuccessfully tried to show me how to use. Latterly, he brought home a plug in adding machine! He also saw the advent of some sort of computing, as he used to bring home used punched tape for me to play with.

My mum was born in 1915 and brought up in a house with an outside toilet and a shared washhouse. Every neighbour had a day for washing, which was all done by hand with the use of a washing dolly to agitate the clothes. The first washing machine I remember her using was a big cream coloured Servis tub with a wringer, which had to be filled and emptied via a hose. And then she moved on to a twin tub machine, again not plumbed in.

Servis washing machine with wringer.

We also had a 'Hoover' vacuum cleaner - seemingly again, these were only commonplace after the Second World War.

My childhood was spent in a house with two coal fires, which my mum had to get up around 6 in the morning to 'set'. Although we swapped one out for a gas fire, we had no central heating at all in the house. The only heating in a bedroom was a very dangerous open electric fire. My mum got her first experience of a centrally heated house when she moved after my dad died in 1984.

My mum was a great baker. I can remember her excitement when around 1965 she got a Kenwood Chef for Christmas. She still had it and used it until her death in 2003. She would also have got her first microwave oven in the early 1970s.

Original Kenwood Chef mixer

I also remember us getting our first colour television, just in time for the World Cup in 1974!

My dad died in 1984, so he missed out on many other innovations my mum witnessed. She, however, was able to play simple computer games on our first Amiga console with our children in the 1990s and enjoy watching them play other console games.

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