Author Topic: Son living with another family - why?  (Read 1679 times)

Offline chempat

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Re: Son living with another family - why?
« Reply #9 on: Saturday 06 December 14 19:10 GMT (UK) »
Children lived and live with grandparents throughout history, for very many different reasons:

'Of the 7.5 million children in the USA who lived with a grandparent in 2011, more than a fifth did not have a parent present in the household, the report said. '

Suggest you do some background reading on social conditions in Lancashire at the time.

Offline snuttall

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Re: Son living with another family - why?
« Reply #10 on: Saturday 06 December 14 19:16 GMT (UK) »
Children lived and live with grandparents throughout history, for very many different reasons:

'Of the 7.5 million children in the USA who lived with a grandparent in 2011, more than a fifth did not have a parent present in the household, the report said. '

Suggest you do some background reading on social conditions in Lancashire at the time.

Thanks, yes I can well imagine it would have been usual for members of households to move to other households at different times according to financial situations and which family members were living, earning, incapacitated, etc., and there are many instances of this in my tree (widowed families moving in with other families, orphaned children being divided up between numerous relations, newly married couples living with parents, illegitimate children quietly appearing as children in the grandparents' household, etc.). It is just the permanence of this situation which strikes me as strange. Admittedly I only have three snapshots in time (1891,1901,1904) but that one child - and one child alone, out of eight children born - went to live with his grandparents, and never once returned - strikes me as not simply having been for financial reasons. But thank you all for your suggestions - as you say we can never know for certain but to get some conjecture from others is always useful.