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England (Counties as in 1851-1901) => England => Devon => Topic started by: KiwiHugh on Tuesday 28 October 14 02:59 GMT (UK)
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I have come across a listing for William Heywood apprenticed to William Heywood 1755 Devon. Is anyone able to flesh out any details eg where in Devon, William Snr's occupation, William Jnrs age etc
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Apprenticeships were with local tradesmen usually but in many cases were other than in the person's neighbourhood e.g. apprenticed to a maritime trade; or with family members who were tradesmen etc or arranged by a parish as a means of relieving the need to support orphans etc from parish funds. Particulary from those workhouses females were often apprenticed as servants and the males in agricultural trades. There were between 400/500 parishes in Devon. A small representative sample of indenture records are held at the Devon Research Centre at Sowton, Exeter; you can go online to check the headings of collections. If unable to visit you can engage a researcher [the DRC do not undertake research]. Whilst the researcher will not need to search the 400 or so parishes it will still be a sizeable task to search all the apprenticeship records, in a few cases within a limited date range there are alphabetical indexes. There were many more apprenticeship records which have not survived and those held in the DRC must be but a small percentage of apprenticeships. The lack of information and generic term "Devon" will make your search very difficult and if for example your researcher found more than one example of that surname how would you chose the right person?