Your ancestors probably labored as CHILDREN. From coal mines to textile mills, in workhouses, and around the house, farm, or as apprentices to their own fathers, they worked. This means that your ancestors as children contributed to the household economy as well as the economy of their village, settlement, town, and country.
IN CONDITIONS THAT WE CONSIDER TO BE ABUSIVE and 3RD WORLD TODAY...
FAQS ORG/CHILDHOOD CHILD LABOR IN THE WEST full excellent article
EXCERPT:
Life imposed heavy burdens of work on all members of immigrant farm families in North America. Life was even harder for a huge contingent of single immigrant children who migrated from the United Kingdom to Canada between 1869 and 1919. Seventy-three thousand neglected children from urban areas, "unaccompanied by parents and guardians," were transferred to Canadian families, often on remote farms. Ten times as many families as could be provided with a British child volunteered to take one into their homes. The reason for this was that in preindustrial and rural Canada families needed children for the work they could do. The immigrant children worked as farm laborers and domestic servants.
How were the conditions for child laborers in industry compared with agriculture? In France, research shows that industrialization intensified work for some children, as workdays in factories were long and more structured. On the other hand, rural life in late-nineteenth-century France was rigorous and primitive, and young men from certain rural areas were more often rejected for military service than young men from cities, challenging the "misery history" of industrial child labor.
Another historical myth is that industrialization broke down traditional family ties and dissolved working-class families. A case study of what was the world's largest textile plant at the turn of the twentieth century–the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company in New Hampshire–dispels the myth and illustrates how families adapted to changing work patterns and survived. In a sharecropping village outside Bologna, Italy, a local textile mill strengthened family unity by promoting coresidency of children and parents. Rather than passing their childhood as apprentices and servants in the houses of relatives or strangers, children of peasant families now had the opportunity to live at home with their parents while working in manufacturing.
