CHILD LABOR in THE WEST - EXCELLENT!

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.

DEFINING ORPHAN : IT'S LIKELY THAT SOME OF YOUR ANCESTORS WERE!

BE AWARE THAT IN THE 19th century and before, an ORPHAN was defined as a child without a father (to support the family) and if you hear that a child was orphaned in your family, their mother or a step-mother may still have been living, and also under pressure to remarry quickly and pragmatically.  Disease didn't respect class.  Women died in childbirth or because of child-bearing, especially while malnourished by today's standards.

Coming up ... Some interesting articles I found on the internet about ORPHANS. 

While you're reading, please consider how many children are living today homeless, malnourished, and impoverished.  Can we hope that their families will prevail as some of us who come from orphan heritage have?

Have your child-bearing ancestors died too young to raise their own children to adulthood?

Think about this question too when you think about who you will help ELECT by VOTING in the elections here in the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

C 2016-2025 Ancestry Worship -Genealogy BlogSpot

ISLAND OF HOPE - ISLAND OF TEARS - ELLIS ISLAND DOCUMENTARY by CHARLES GUGGENHEIM

Island of Hope - Island of Tears; Charles Guggenheim; National Park Service; AVA15996VNB1 1992 (1989); From 1892-1954, Ellis Island was the port of entry for millions of European immigrants.

Old footage of life in the agricultural old country.  How our ancestors left their villages to immigrate to the United States for work.

AN OLD POST ON ANCESTRY BOARDS BRINGS UP A STRANGE STORY

The other night I was trolling through some old posts I put up on Ancestry years ago, not knowing that they were actually going to be on the INTERNET (I thought only on the innards of the then small genealogy database) and which, frankly, I deeply regret posting.  I lost the password in to delete these myself and have to write to Ancestry to have them all taken down.

NOT ONE POST IN ALL THOSE YEARS EVER RESULTED IN ANY GOOD INFORMATION SHARING, just a lot of new researchers speculating and hoping that the social networking aspect of the site would bring them other people's research for no effort on their part, sad to say.  Which is why I think there are a lot of people willing to give subscription databases a spin, without being willing to put the time and effort in, and terribly ignorant that you still often have to use the OLD FASHIONED methods like books, microfiche, films, and writing away to governmental archives.

But strange - someone did post about a year or so ago on one of these many posts I made and it was a story about someone whose surname was similar to the person I posted about.  This poster said that the person I posted about was said to have brought with them (on a steamship) enough GOLD to last THREE GENERATIONS. 

I had to laugh.

My research on this line is now EXTENSIVE and HARD WON, as well as EXPENSIVE, but I have never found ANY evidence that there was even enough GOLD to live well in the first, immigrant, generation.  There isn't one person in the entire family who hasn't worked until they were sick or dead.

THAT MEANS IF THERE WAS GOLD it was buried or lost.

The tale might even have some PIRATES in it!