What Did Great Grandma Jennie Do?

When great grandma Jennie lived with the JB Crouse family In Hartland, Livingston, Michigan in 1880, she listed her occupation as “milliner.” Now, everyone knows that’s a hat maker, right? Not so fast. Up through the 19th Century, a milliner might, indeed, make hats, but she—and it was almost always she—might also be a seamstress, a designer, an entrepreneur. (Think Coco Channel, for one famous example!). In fact, the millinery was the forerunner to the modern day department store back before paper patterns, standard sizes and ready-to-wear.


In the milliner’s shop, any woman (thought most patrons were middle and upper class) could find anything from everyday hats to fancy gowns, from farmer shirts to aprons, from watches to table settings. The milliner sold just about anything related to women’s fashion, accessories and the home. There weren’t many occupations open to respectable women in the late 1800s. Being a milliner could be a ticket to independence. Small wonder only house maids were more plentiful among working women of the time. Most milliners were under 25. They spent up to seven years as an apprentice learning the trade, and there was a definite pecking order among the small group of employees in any millinery. (Most shops employed two or three people.)

By the time great grandma Jennie called herself a milliner in the 1880 Census, she was about 23 years old. Her father, Garret Garretson, a shoemaker by trade, had died about three years earlier. Her widowed mother Minerva still lived in Brownstown, Wayne, Michigan, where the Garretson family had been among the town’s leading citizens. Uncles, aunts and cousins—they all still lived there as well, but Jennie had left on her own and moved halfway across the next county.

Jennie may have learned the rudiments of the millinery craft in the Garretson family shoe shop. Most girls of that era were taught how to sew routinely at home in the 1860s and 1870s, so she may have learned there. Or she may have served an apprenticeship in someone else’s shop before striking out on her own. (Perhaps that was her role in Hartford?) I’m still checking on all that. By 1880 Jennie was living a county away from the rest of her family. She was boarding with a family and paying rent.

It was a heady era In the United States. People were beginning to recover from the depression of 1877. The transcontinental railroad was done. Edison had bought the patent for the electric light bulb, and Bell invented the telephone. Out west, the US Cavalry was still hunting for Geronimo…And in Hartland, Livingston, Michigan, my great grandmother had struck out on her own, independent in terms that most modern American women understand, making her own way in the world…