Apprenticeships

[Asa]

How did people find someone to apprentice their children to?

I have a Sarah Youen from Aston Upthorpe in Berkshire born 1758 who was apprenticed to a milliner Martha Savage of Devizes in 1775. Usually, I can see a connection with town or business but not in this case, other than Martha would appear to have been apprenticed in Newbury, Berkshire. I don't think Martha was any relation and I wondered if anyone knows how these things worked?

[Olde Crone]

Poor law officials could always find someone willing to take an apprentice! As for the rest, I suspect it went by word of mouth or perhaps by advertising.

I must say I am continually surprised at how far and wide relationships reached back then. I have families who live in different counties, apparently strangers, but who are related in some complicated long-ago way.

OC

[Asa]

Thanks, OC. I think the family were fairly well off so there probably is a connection somewhere - I usually find one. Although in this family's case, they were so intermarried, I struggle to believe any of them ever married out of a 5 mile radius.

I have some relatives that stayed in the same village or nearby villages for many years. Yet others, not many, but some travelled far and wide; and it has never ceased to surprise me that they travelled through several counties, and some even to Wales and to Scotland from England, considering the difficulties and hardships there would have been with travelling and transport in the 1700s and 1800s.

[Olde Crone]

My biggest surprise was a humble ag lab, from generations of humble ag labs in the same village for centuries, who suddenly popped up in the Turks and Caicos islands!

OC

[Janet in Yorkshire]

Originally Posted by Olde Crone

My biggest surprise was a humble ag lab, from generations of humble ag labs in the same village for centuries, who suddenly popped up in the Turks and Caicos islands!

OC

Like one of my sons of a Norfolk family of chimney sweeps who turned up in Norfolk census with a wife born in India and eldest child born in the Falkland Islands. They all disappeared and eventually I found burials of all the family members in Punto Arenas, Patagonia.

Jay

[Asa]

I've a lot who travelled about - although nowhere as exotic as OC and Janet It was more about apprenticeships

[anne fraser]

I found a group of Somerset coalminers who spent five years working in the Pennsylvania coalfields. They had all returned by the next census and I only found out by reading some old parish magazine extracts.

I found one chap doing a weekly commute by train from Oxford to London in the 1890's. He wrote a weekly letter home to his mother in Shropshire on the Friday night train.

[Chris in Sussex]

I have one, Samuel son of a Yeoman, born in a small village in Worcestershire who was apprenticed to a Mathematical Instrument Maker in London in 1790.

The Lord of the Manor paid the 'consideration' when he was apprenticed and as the same Lord had set up the local school I do wonder if Samuel had attended and shown 'promise' or it was just something the Lord was in a habit of doing.

Chris

[Shona]

Although there can be a family link, there was also a tradition of pauper apprentices paid for by the parish or sometimes via a charitable endowment. From the late 17th century, the pauper apprentice had settlement rights in the parish in which they were placed. There was suspicion some parishes used this as an opportunity to offload their difficult cases.