MyHeritage, the leading family history and DNA company, researched its 35 million family trees and 8 billion records, and discovered 10 professions that no longer exist in the 21st Century. Here is the list:
- Scissors-grinders (street merchants who sharpened blades of scissors and knives).
- Hemp dressers (they separated the coarse part of flax or hemp with a hackle).
- Bobbin boys (boys who brought bobbins to the women working the looms in textile mills). Steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie and poet Robert Frost worked as Bobbin boys.
- Book peddlers (door-to-door salesmen of books)
- Breaker boys (boys who separated impurities from coal by hand in the coal mines)
- Gandy dancers (railroad workers who methodically laid railroad tracks)
- The Iceman (he collected ice from lakes and rivers which was stored in ice houses then sold in blocks).
- Switchboard operators (connected phone calls from house to house by inserting phone plugs into the appropriate jacks).
- The Knocker-up (usually an elderly man or woman who used a stick to knock on doors or windows to wake people up in the morning during the Industrial Revolution.
- Lectors for factory workers (they would read books or newspapers out loud to the workers while they worked).
[Andrew Carnegie was a bobbin boy in his youth]
