My point was that using an inflation calculator defers to someone's idea of what a basket was, and that may obscure the lack of data, so it might be better to study a few different things that people used both then and now and come up with your own reference point.

I'm not saying there's any alternative, ultimately, to the concept of an average consumption basket, just that methods of determining it might be different. When you have really limited data, you can look at it more closely, and you probably need to, to leverage the context because it's not going to be an unbiased sample.