Writing in the Genealogy How-To blog, Charles Rice Bourland, Jr. describes how to research the financial information of ancestors living in the 17th and 18th centuries. In those days, most residents of the United States used monetary units from the English world of pounds sterling, shillings, and pennies.
In order to create a reasonable description of the lives and times of those ancestors, it is often useful to describe their wealth or lack thereof, to envisage what a particular item cost in earlier times, and to relate those dollars or coin to today’s coin.
I suspect that British schoolchildren still learn the old monetary system in class, even though many of the terms used are now obsolete. Americans, however, typically never learn them until they become genealogists.
To learn more, start at the Genealogy How-To blog at http://www.genealogyhowto.com/2010/02/the-pounds-sterling-in-family-history for some of the information, then that blog article will refer you to http://www.measuringworth.com.
