BALTIMORE - Born in 1909, Maurice Rovner lived over his hardware store. Even on his day off, customers came knocking because they knew where to find him. Would he sell them some mousetraps, three for a dime?

Born in 1960, his grandson Dave Rovner opens a laptop easily on his kitchen table, takes a cell phone call while out with his kids, checks e-mail while on vacation.

During this hard-working century, when productivity grew an average 2 percent a year, Americans increasingly toiled away from home: on factory assembly lines, in steelyards, in office cubicles. And home became the refuge.

But at the century's start and finish, workers such as the Rovners earned their keep from home, steps from their families, blurring the line between home and work and sometimes paying a price for doing so.

Work hovered over every minute of Maurice Rovner's day. Nowadays, his grandson totes it almost everywhere. Millions of workers fret whether to answer right away when the boss e-mails on a Saturday. Tele-work is clean and cutting-edge, but the technology that frees us to bring the office home shackles us, too.

Little by little, lines are being drawn. "People are creating more boundaries, not without difficulty," says Ellen Galinsky, president of the Families and Work Institute. "You have to invent it yourself."

In colonial times, work and home were one. Mostly farmers or craftsmen, men and women worked as full partners in supporting the family and raising children. Married women were called yoke-mates.

As this century opened, a majority of people depended on wage labor for the first time.

Even so, homes were still workplaces. In 1900, 25,000 New Yorkers took in "home work," finishing the manual work started elsewhere. It was an essential way to supplement family income.

Working conditions at home were primitive, but workplaces were sometimes horrific. And children's wages were crucial, since family income was often seasonal and injuries were common.

It took bloody strikes, lethal accidents and muckraking journalism to galvanize reform.

A patchwork of worker protections was born, first aimed at women and children. States enacted workers' compensation, restrictions on child labor and an eight-hour day in some industries.

It wasn't until the late 1930s, however, that reforms became national and applicable to all.

And even today, immigrants in New York or Los Angeles - like workers in many other countries around the globe - toil in filthy, dangerous sweatshops that earlier reformers sought to eradicate.

In these turbulent decades, homes evolved from work and social centers bustling with business partners, boarders and neighbors, to private family fiefdoms, notes historian Tamara Hareven.

"Separating work and home was something most people aspired to," says social historian Stephanie Coontz, author of "The Way We Never Were."

Maurice Rovner was a friendly, second-generation immigrant beloved in his Baltimore neighborhood. But he soon yearned to live away from his hardware store.

With the business open six days a week until 8 p.m., his wife, Stella, had to bring his meals downstairs or mind the store while he went up to eat. And there were those Sunday customers.

In the late 1940s, the family bought a house with a backyard, and they felt they'd made it. After that, Maurice brought a little bookkeeping home, and his wife occasionally took lunch to the store.

But mostly work stayed at the store, and Sundays were theirs, recalls Howard Rovner, the only one of Maurice's sons to make the hardware business his life.

In 1956, when Howard married Naomi, a Baltimore girl who had lived over a grocery store as a young girl, she worked as a clerk and secretary until the children came.

After that, work was work and home was home.

"He was out early in the morning, would come home late, six days a week," says Dave Rovner, owner of a flourishing computer consulting firm, Strategic Network Designs, based in New Jersey, far from his Baltimore roots. He's talking about his father, Howard.

It's 1999 now, and Dave Rovner is wheeling his BMW along a suburban street, ticking off the ways he squeezes work into his day. He totes his cell phone to the golf course. He takes his two youngsters to work on Saturdays, where they color while he catches up.

This way, he says, he can work hard yet see his family - something he believes his father missed.

Still, Howard notes that his son takes his laptop on family trips.

"He may as well not go on vacation," Howard muses.

Dave Rovner is struggling to draw the line.

"It's a compromise when I integrate family and personal and work," he says. "It's challenging to make it work."

On vacation now, he says he only reads the urgent e-mails.

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