First Labor Day parade, September 5,1882--U S Dept. of Labor image Where was your laborer ancestor on September 5, 1882? If he was in New York City, he may have marched in the first Labor Day parade. A brief timeline of the Industrial Revolution shows us the progression from home production to mass production in factories. Factories needed workers and workers needed residences near the factories, thus cities grew. Many of our young, penniless immigrant ancestors found their first occupation in East Coast factories. Factory workers developed unions in an effort to improve working conditions but it also resulted in a social network of sorts. By the 1880s, concern for workers was more evident and the first "Labor Day" was suggested. On the morning of September 5, 1882, a crowd of spectators filled the sidewalks of lower Manhattan near city hall and along Broadway. They had come early, well before the Labor Day parade marchers, to claim the best vantage points from which to...

150YearsofCare.org website header Since most of what I view on Youtube are genealogy subjects, and I subscribe to some genealogy channels, much of what is shown at login is genealogy. RLP 378: Interview with Gavin Beinart-Smollan * showed up, and I wanted to listen because my most recent genealogy project is all Jewish immigrants and their descendants, who mostly came to New York City from areas then called "Russia." Wikipedia says, " The Pale of Settlement included all of modern-day Belarus and Moldova, much of Lithuania, Ukraine and east-central Poland, and relatively small parts of Latvia and what is now the western Russian Federation."  Part of what makes this population challenging to research is the difficulty in locating records, and the confusing, even overwhelming DNA data. This is a result of the laws and customs governing life in the Pale of Settlement, described by Wikipedia: "The Pale of Settlement was a western region of the Russian Empire... th...