Okay...reading a bit more, here is what the website I linked gave me:
68,432 CP Index
74,183 GDP deflator
1,177,221 Unskilled Wage
1,814,374 GDP per capita
125,909,217 relative share of GDP
The two that look the most useful are CP and unskilled wage. Here are the descriptions:
The CPI is most often used to make comparisons partly because it is the series with which people are most familiar. This series tries to compare the cost of things the average household buys such as food, housing, transportation, medical services, etc. For earlier years, it is the most useful series for comparing the cost of consumer goods and services. It can be interpreted as how much money would you need today to buy an item in the year in question if it had changed in price the same as the average price change.
The Unskilled Wage Rate is good way to determine the relative cost of something in terms of the amount of work it would take to produce, or the relative time it would take to earn its cost. It can also be useful in comparing different wages over time. The unskilled wage is a more consistent measure than the average wage for making comparisons over time.
Here is an example they give of figuring out Babe Ruth's relative salary:
Babe Ruth's salary in 1932 was $80,000. In 2003 the CPI was 13.5 times larger than it was in 1932 and the GDP deflator 11.5 times larger. This means that if we are interested in Ruth's purchasing power of housing or meals, then he was "earning" the equivalence of about $1,000,000 today. The relative cost of (unskilled) labor is 42 times higher in 2003 than in 1932. So if we wanted to compare his wage to what someone selling hot dogs would earn, we could say his "relative wage" is $3,400,000.
GDP per capita and GDP are 80 and 187 times larger in 2003 than they were in 1932. Thus Ruth's earnings relative to the average output would be $6,430,000 today. Finally, as a share of GDP, Ruth "output" that year would be $14,900,000 in today's money.
So....yeah. And we are talking net worth here, not salary, so that makes this a little more odd. Based on other history surrounding this family member, the CP index number just doesn't feel right. This guy was a legislator and extremely wealthy...for that to be his relative net worth doesn't make as much sense to me as maybe the unskilled wage being his relative net worth. This is also not counting land...I am just going to ignore that. I don't see any way I could calculate that. Not worth it for this particular project.
I sure could use a piece of that....darn civil war eating family resources!