Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: The Occupations of My 2nd-great-grandfathers

I'm sure I have most of the information for tonight's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge from Randy Seaver, but I don't know if I have it memorized.  I'm going to test myself.

Come on, everybody, join in and accept the mission and execute it with precision.

1.  Our ancestors had to work to support themselves and their families.  Do you know what occupations your 2nd great-grandfathers had?  Tell us about them.  If one intrigues or mystifies you, ask a free artificial intelligence tool to tell you more about the occupation in that place and time.

2.  Tell us about the occupations of your 2nd-great-grandfathers (and any AI created descriptions of those occupations) in your own blog post, in a comment on this post, or in a Facebook post.  Please leave a link on this post if you write your own post.

Okay, let's see how I do.

My eight 2nd-great-grandfathers and their occupations are:

Joel Armstrong (about 1849–?), laborer

James Gauntt (1831–1899), wheelwright

Frederick Cleworth Dunstan (1840–1873), file grinder

Simcha Dovid Mekler (?–before 1904), possibly carpenter

Gershon Novitsky (originally Gershon Nowicki, about 1856–1948), wood turner, Hebrew teacher

Victor Gordon (originally Avigdor Gorodetsky, about 1863–1924), businessman, furrier

Morris Brainin (originally Mendel Hertz Brainin, about 1861–1930), shoemaker, peddler, rabbi

And that's only seven of them, because I still don't know who my biological great-grandfather was on the Sellers line, so I can't know who his father was.  If I include Sellers, my adoptive line:

Cornelius Godschalk Sellers (1845–1877), printer

I actually did very well from memory.  I did not remember the birth years of James Gauntt, Frederick Dunstan, and Cornelius Sellers or the earlier occupations of Gershon Novitsky and Morris Brainin.  Everything else I knew.

I still don't know when Joel Armstrong died.  I've seen it listed in a few family trees as 1921, but I have seen no documentation of his death (I don't think I've seen a complete date).  I keep looking.

Simcha Dovid Mekler never came to the United States.  I'm happy to know his name.  My guess for carpenter as his occupation is because his son, my great-grandfather Morris Mackler, was listed as a carpenter when he immigrated here, and many sons follow in their father's occupations.

And I just noticed that all eight men had different occupations!

I know that a carpenter and a wood turner are not the same thing, but I decided to search for the difference to clarify what they each do.  Google now automagically returns an AI synopsis at the top of the results page most of the time.  It said:

"a wood turner focuses on creating symmetrical, rotational objects using a lathe, while a carpenter focuses on structural and functional wood construction [such as] framing [and] trim, and installing fixtures."

So Randy can be happy that I did an AI search for my post.