Lawyer Hurdle Maker????

[ThrelfallYorky]

Someone had one of my ancestors don as a Lawyer, when we knew he was a Sawyer .... contacted them to correct it, to get the reply ( nose in the air, we assumed) "He must have been a lawyer, we had mainly professionals in our line, not labourers"!!!!
Anyone know many amateur sawyers?
TY

[iluleah]

Someone had one of my ancestors don as a Lawyer, when we knew he was a Sawyer .... contacted them to correct it, to get the reply ( nose in the air, we assumed) "He must have been a lawyer, we had mainly professionals in our line, not labourers"!!!!
Anyone know many amateur sawyers?
TY

  None of us know very much about our ancestors and even if we research correctly and find all and any records produced about them during their lifetime, we still use human logic to 'build their life story' ( sometimes wrongly) but I can't understand anyone who assumes some personal superiority because of what job/status our ancestors  once were as 'we' are not them.

I am proud of my ancestry, all hard working whatever job they did, whatever faced them in life, makimg good and bad decisions as all humans do and but for them I wouldn't be here.

I have 'liked' an ancestor and also 'disliked' them and switched between like/dislike as I have researched them. As far as I can see having an ancestor who had a trade/profession it just opens up an opportunity to find more records about them.

Take Frederick Henry Royce ( of Rolls Royce fame) when he was 9yrs old his father died(a Miller & Baker but he died in the poor house in London aged 42yrs) Fred was working from the age of 4yrs old to get money for the family he went out  bird scaring for farmers crops, at 10yrs old selling newspapers at Clapham Junction and at 14yrs old delivering telegrams in Mayfair before getting his apprentiship 1yr later with the GNR. His grandfather a Miller and Farmer was declared bankrupt the year Fred was born, he married 3 times and migrated to Canada when Fred was very young. All ordinary, hard working people who did what they needed to do to feed their family, provide a home and they made bad/good decisions as all humans do and life/death/illness in families can change a life. But this is a typical person who many claim as an ancestor and purely because of his fame, yet not one of them are as he had no children.

[Kiltpin]

In my wife's tree there were a great many Sewells. In our village there were two families (cousins) who lived side by side. A third family moved in and almost immediately were known as the Jewells. I have seen the handwritten invoice from one Sewell (a carter) to the incoming Sewell (a harness maker). I can't tell the difference - they both look like Jewell and Sewell at the same time.

Regards

Chas

[SwissGill]

On the 1911 Census Mary Ann Pennington, Bolton, Lancs aged 12, has Occupation:

School Part Time Guilt Knotter. I suspect Quilt Knitter 

[IgorStrav]

Someone had one of my ancestors don as a Lawyer, when we knew he was a Sawyer .... contacted them to correct it, to get the reply ( nose in the air, we assumed) "He must have been a lawyer, we had mainly professionals in our line, not labourers"!!!!
Anyone know many amateur sawyers?
TY

I do wonder whether some people realise that the reason many ancestors (well, of mine anyway) are 'only' ag labs and gen labs, is not because they were not intelligent enough to do anything else - it was because they had limited opportunities of raising themselves into a 'middle class' occupation, and if they did, were looked down on by those who considered themselves 'better'.

One ancestor of mine moved to New Zealand from Kent with her family in the late 19th Century - the situation for agricultural labourers then was pretty terrible - and said that what was most striking for her was the way that people in NZ spoke respectfully to her, rather than dismissing her as not of any importance, as she'd found back in England.

Of course why there were so many Working Mens Institutes (hopefully some of the women got there too) - no opportunity for more education after 14 (or younger) when you had to leave school and go to work.