Rhonda Bracey: At Random

Still on genealogical research, I came across this apprenticeship contract in the notes attached to one of my family tree records. It’s from 1861, and while it’s interesting reading, the parts of highlighted in yellow caught my eye. Talk about harsh!

(click on the image to view it larger)

BTW, my relative was 14 or 15 years old when he signed this, and he was indentured to this ‘master’ under these conditions until he was 21 or 22. (Note that his father [aged 41 at the time] couldn’t write and left a mark.)

Can you imagine any such contract being agreed to by a 15 year old boy these days?

Every so often, I work on the British side of my family tree (finding the Dutch South African and German/Prussian sides is too hard!). Such was the case on Friday, when I filled more gaps as a result of the continued release of 1911 UK Census data on Ancestry.com.

And while doing that I found evidence of tragedy, just in the dates of birth and death recorded in my family tree software.

In this family of 12 children (all third cousins of mine, three times removed…), four children (I highlighted them in yellow) died in infancy (there’s no record of miscarriages or perhaps stillbirths, so it’s possible this family lost even more children) and another three (highlighted in red) were killed in World War 1.

I couldn’t find death records for two of the females. It’s possible one (Ella) was married or working in service to another family at the time of the 1911 Census as she would have been 19 years old then. However, Florence is a concern as she would only have been 13 at the time of the Census, so either she had also died, or perhaps was staying/living with relatives on Census night.

Two of the male children were likely too old to fight in WW1, and one was too young.

Of those 12 children I could find records for, only a possible five survived past 1918.

How does a family cope with that sort of loss?