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2024 52 Ancestors: Technology - The Nuts and Bolts of Wagons

As I piece together the family tree, it's interesting to think about my 3rd great grandfather, Alban Francis Dimond, who worked as a blacksmith in the mid 1800s and pieced together components of wagons. 

Unknown photographer, T. W. Magelssen and dairy wagon, circa 1880s.

Only in recent years did I discover Alban could not have been the biological father of my 2nd great grandmother, Emma Virginia Diamond. In fact, I'm fairly certain she was unaware of this misattributed parentage also, but it doesn't mean he wasn't her dad. The Dimond/Diamond surname will always remain a part of my ancestry.

What else will always remain are the patents filed by Alban in the 1870s with the United States Patent Office. He left behind a legacy of achievement in technology for his time. Initially, I only knew of two of his applications for patents via newspaper announcements:

The Pittsburgh Daily Commercial, "List of Patents," 16 Jan 1875.

The Tribune, "List of Patents," 20 Nov 1876.


I attempted to find the actual patents a few years ago, but the U. S. Patent Office's search database did not have scans readily available for certificates that far back in history. Today, their site does go back into the 1800s, however, there appear to either be some dates missing or their database results are too finely skewed.

But, a simple Google search for "patents" now returns a top result of Google Patents. This site makes it incredibly easy to strike patent gold. A few keystrokes later, you just may discover an ancestor who filed a patent! It's as simple as inputting a name or an invention and clicking a magnifying glass icon to weed through a few dozen PDF files of patents.



Not only was I able to find documents relating to the two newspaper mentions for Alban's inventions of Nut-Locks and Wagon-Standards, but I found an additional patent for Circular-Saw Teeth. 


Plus, I discovered a patent by another fellow in Pennsylvania in which Alban acted as a witness.


These documents are also great leads for future research on this ancestor. Due to his unusual first name and common variant of his surname, the known records for Alban have ranged in all sorts of spellings from Albert to Almer to Abraham to Alvin (and the list goes on, including using his middle name of Francis). The fact that all four of these patent documents corroborate his name as Alban F. Dimond, lets me know this was his preferred name and spelling for official documents.

These sources also give residences for Alban over a handful of years. They allow me to place him in different cities at specific points of time. And, in addition, by naming the witnesses, I now have a larger FAN (Friends & Family, Associates, and Neighbors) club to study for him. Perhaps someone in that FAN club could have been my 2nd great grandmother's true biological father (scandalous). I already know there's a possibility that one of his patent co-inventors, James A. Mullen, may be a familial relation. I suspect he may have been Alban's brother-in-law. However, that's a hypothesis to work out on another day.

It's pretty incredible to know there was an inventor in the family. It's also sad to think about the fact that Alban died very young at the age of 35, just a couple years after he witnessed the above patent. Think of all the ideas he likely had stored in his head for future inventions or improvements that were never able to come to pass!

About a decade after his death, Carl Benz applied for a patent for the first vehicle powered by a gas engine in Germany. Would Alban be a competitor in this race if he were still around by then? His expertise in wagon-building technology certainly would have given him a head start.

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