Share More Than A Turkey Dinner With Your Family

There's No Place Like Home for the Holidays!

That statement is true in so many ways, and one of those ways is when it comes to researching your family history! Spending time in your old home town for the holidays will do more than bring back happy memories. It will be a great chance for you do a little digging for treasure about your own family's past.

The holidays are a wonderful time for listening to the memories of older members of the family, hearing about how the generations that proceeded you spent their holidays. Many grandparents or great-aunts and uncles will also be able to share the memories their parents told them. Take good notes - or better still, tape these visits so that you can refer back to them for information and for the fun of listening to some of the more colorful stories again and again. And don't forget to preserve them for your own posterity!

Open the old family Bible or photo albums and get everyone involved in remembering events like births, christenings, baptisms, and funerals. Often, just reminiscing about these events will bring up long forgotten facts that can help put the puzzle of your family history together.

Spend a quiet afternoon at your hometown library, newspaper, courthouse or even take a stroll through a local cemetery and see if you can locate any names, dates or documents that might fill in some of the gaps in your family's records. It's surprising how much of a paper trail is there for the asking if you just go looking.

The holidays have always been about family. Be sure to spend time with the loved ones who are gathered around you during this wonderful season. But don't forget those who have come before and marked the way for you. Find out who your ancestors were, where and how they lived. When you get home and start the fresh New Year, you can enter all these wonderful new facts into the OneGreatFamily database and perhaps begin another branch on our great global family tree!

HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

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Town Meeting Records

My third great-grandfather had a tough childhood. His parents separated when he was very young. Because his mother was so poor, she had him bound out to two elderly women. When he was about eleven he ran away from them and then his whereabouts was not known until he was twenty-one years. At that time he returned to live with and help take care of his mother. Where was he during those ten years? Fortunately a census record was able to provide the answer. He was listed in another county, living with a family and working as an apprentice saddle maker. This opened the possibility of additional records.

An apprenticeship was an agreement between a master craftsman and a parent, guardian or court appointed supervisor of a child. The master would teach the child his trade in exchange for the child’s labor. A girl was often taught housekeeping, spinning or weaving skills. The legal age to begin an apprenticeship was fourteen for boys and twelve for girls. The apprentice would work with the craftsman, learning that trade until twenty-one years old for males and eighteen years old or until marriage for females. Knowing this can help you establish an approximate age for the apprentice. Children did become apprentices before the legal age, but when this was the case, they were only obligated to work for the master until the ages fourteen for a boy and twelve for a girl.

In addition to teaching the apprentice his/her trade, the master was expected to provide room, board, clothing, and in most cases to see that the apprentice had some formal education. After a boy finished his apprenticeship, he usually became a journeyman and would travel from employer to employer until he had earned enough to set up his own business and become a master himself.

A deed would be made that showed the apprentice’s consent. If the apprentice were an orphan , no consent was needed. You will often find apprenticeships records for orphans. These records can be found in court order books and other court records. If the courts do not have the records you will want to check local libraries and archives to see if they have been deposited there. When the apprenticeship was done privately, you usually will not find any records.

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