Your Genealogy Matters

It's a what? If its Monday, it's Family Car day here on Your Genealogy Matters. Today's car picture comes from the Malcolm and Turner families of Crawford County, Ohio.   In the driver's seat is young Kathryn Malcolm, "off to pick up Earl" according to the back of the image. The bigger question is what is Kathryn driving? Katheryn is the behind the wheel of a 1926 Nash Advanced Six sedan.  Instead of steel disc wheels, it sports the optional wooden "Artillery" wheels that many owners preferred over the early steel disc wheels, which gave a "harsh" ride. So our second question is - for those of you too young to remember - what is a "Nash" and isn't that an odd name for a car? The Nash was a product built by the Nash Motors Company, or Kenosha, Wisconsin.  Originally the Jeffery Motors Company - incidentally the company that built the first "Rambler" automobiles in the early 1900's, Nash was named f...

Part of being able to identify a car in any family picture means that you have to be able to understand something about the automobile industry, from 1900 to 1980. In those eighty years, American drivers watched cars evolved from trouble prone, limited range mostly open crude machines - and that is exactly what they were in those early days, crude machines -  to very sophisticated, large vehicles with creature comforts.  But lets take a "QUICK" look at how cars evolved by the Automotive decade, from 1900 to 1932 today, because cars have never evolved in sync with calendar year decades, which are off a few years to the calendar. 1890s to 1915 During this era, there were more than 400 companies making automobiles, and they all looked very much like one and other.  The life span of a car company could be six months, or longer, though most were insolvent after the first year of production.  Cars of this vintage were open, meaning that riders were in the elements, us...