I recently discovered the work of Ferdinand A. Brader, a Swiss artist who specialized in “creating large-scale (usually about fifty by thirty inches), bird’s-eye perspectives of farms in Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio. Hundreds of his works offer an extraordinary and intimate view of what rural life was like at the end of the nineteenth century.”[1]
This discovery came after I transcribed the Agriculture Schedule of the 1870 census for my ancestor John L. Miller. I was looking online to find articles about what farm life was like in Western Pennsylvania in the 1870s. It was so fun to see Brader’s depictions of family farms and imagine what the Miller farm might have been like in that time period.
If you have ancestors in Pennsylvania or Ohio that were
farmers, I recommend looking at Brader’s work.
You can see more at the Legacy
of Ferdinand Brader website.
[1] Dorothy Shimm, “Picturing the Farms of Ohio and Pennsylvania,” Humanities, May/June 2015; online archives, National Endowment for the Humanities (https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2015/mayjune/statement/picturing-the-farms-ohio-and-pennsylvania : accessed 19 April 2019), para. 2.
