UK, Register of Duties Paid for Apprentices' Indentures 1747

[peakoverload]

Can anyone tell me what this says (top line). I think it's for my 7x GG

The line starts:

6 Stephen Leach of Whitechapel Middlesex

But I can't read anything after that. All I know is that by 3 generations later they were all Silk Weavers but it doesn't look like anything to do with weaving here.

[rosie99]

Drugist & ..  Nehemiah Spire 

[cati]

Drugist & ..  Nehemiah Spire 

That's how I read it, too

[peakoverload]

Hmm, that's what I thought it said but thought Drugist far too modern a word for the mid 1700's.

Anyone know what a drugist would have done back then?

[rosie99]

http://www.familytreeassociation.org/d-f1.html

Druggist: A pharmacist or retailer of medicinal drugs.

[peakoverload]

Just found a page on the Royal Pharmaceutical Society that says that this term was in use from the 1700's and means exactly what we think it means.

Hmm, that makes me think I have the wrong person. I would presume someone who was effectively a pharmacist would be quite skilled, therefore be relatively comfortable so unlikely (although possible) for his family a couple of generations later to be on the poverty line working as silk weavers.

[suey]

Just found a page on the Royal Pharmaceutical Society that says that this term was in use from the 1700's and means exactly what we think it means.

Hmm, that makes me think I have the wrong person. I would presume someone who was effectively a pharmacist would be quite skilled, therefore be relatively comfortable so unlikely (although possible) for his family a couple of generations later to be on the poverty line working as silk weavers.

Plenty of time I would say, two generations is somewhere around 50 years if you take 25 years as the average for one generation.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong but that's how I was advised when I first started out in family history.

[rosie99]

Who / Where were your silk weavers 

[peakoverload]

Well it started with Samuel Leach b 27/09/1792 in Shoreditch, parents I think were Thomas & Sarah who worked with his family as Silk Weavers in Shoreditch and Bethnal Green. But Samuel had other brothers who I'm pretty sure also worked in Bethnal Green as Silk Weavers.

Samuel's sons started off carrying on the family trade but after the Napoleonic Wars England was flooded with French Silk and the bottom fell out of the market and so they diversified into furniture makers, leather makers and harness makers.