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Mullin' Marrow & Ponderin' Pith

A genealogical blog of reflections about my family history and my experiences as a genealogist.

LOTS of SMITHS!

12/5/2017

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My maternal grandfather was a SMITH.

Off and on I have toyed with the thought that perhaps one of my ancestors had been a blacksmith and thus, adopted the SMITH part for a last name.

Blacksmith.
​
The word brings to my mind a dude with a grimy soot smeared face swinging a ten pound hammer onto a piece of red hot metal to shape a horseshoe.

​Or something like that. 
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Image courtesy Foto-Rabe via Pixabay
Or maybe he was a tinsmith....

Recently, while perusing the Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness website, I ran across a page that listed occupations of old.

To my great surprise, there were TWENTY kinds of SMITHS!

What the what the?!

While I had heard of various kinds of “smiths,” archaic occupations aren’t my wheelhouse and I had never heard of some of these.

Of course there was the “smith”—a metal worker—okay, my blacksmith. Who was also known as an assistant coachsmith, a brightsmith or a forgeman.
​
Then there were the ones you could figure out what they were:
  • anchor smith
  • angle iron smith
  • anvil smith
  • arrowsmith
  • bladesmith
  • bucklesmith
  • shoesmith

Then, the metal dudes—coppersmith, goldsmith and silversmith.
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Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons
But there were also colors:  brownsmith, greensmith, redsmith and whitesmith!

What did they do? Well, a brownsmith worked with brass or copper, a greensmith worked with copper or latten (a copper and zinc alloy), a redsmith was a goldsmith, and a whitesmith was a tinsmith.

The last three...I had no idea.

The jack-smith was a “maker of lifting machinery and contrivances,” the smugsmith was a smuggler, and the sucksmith was a maker of ploughshares.[1]

Perhaps one of my ancestors had been a smith.

I wonder what kind?!


[1]Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness, https://www.raogk.org/ "Listing of Some Early Occupations" accessed 4 December 2017.
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    Cynthia Maharrey
    Born and raised in a small town in West Virginia before the turn of the century, Cynthia has always been fascinated by the intricacies that make up her own family history.  As a result, she has been researching and studying it since the late 1900's.
    Memberships

    -Association of Professional Genealogists
    -African American Genealogical Group of Kentucky
    -Kentucky Genealogical Society
    ​-Kentucky Historical Society
    -Greenbrier County (West Virginia) Historical Society
    -Monroe County (West Virginia) Historical Society

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