RootsChat.Com
General => The Common Room => Topic started by: hilarykellis on Tuesday 13 March 18 17:53 GMT (UK)
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I've noticed a really interesting trend in my tree. I'll have an ancestor born in the mid-1800s who is fairly poor, maybe an agricultural labourer or works in a cotton mill. Usually illiterate based on his marriage cert.
I trace back to his father, and he is a small farmer, slightly better off, still probably illiterate or signs with an initial. I trace back a couple more generations and my ancestor's great-grandfather ends up being an educated yeoman who leaves several hundred or even 1000+ pounds in a will and dies in the late-1700s.
If I've been able to, when I trace the line even further back, it often ends up that this person has noble lineage (now we're talking 1600s or 1500s).
I've managed to get back to at least the mid-1700s on almost all of my lines and this is a pretty typical trend. For those who were already middle class, they seem to stay middle class as far back as I can go. And of course, there are a few who were poor and stay poor as far back as I can trace, or some who were self-made after starting life poor, but they seem to be the minority.
Any idea why this would be the trend? Maybe the industrial revolution changed fortunes? Or maybe I'm just overthinking things?
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Have you found Wills for the "better off" members of the family?
Often, if there were numerous children, and the Will is worded that the estate is divided in some way between them, then by definition each person only gets a fraction, and often that does result in subsequent generations moving progressively down the social scale.
The practice of leaving the estate to the first born son more or less in its entirity, with subsequent children having only small legacies and having to fend more for themselves, does seem in many ways unfair, but it does often mean that at least one line of descendants maintains the lifestyle and social status of the family.
It is something I too have observed in some of my lines - a "wealthy" family becomes more "ordinary" when the wealth has been divided several ways, several times! But a "wealthy" family may continue to have "wealthy" descendents if the estate, or bulk of it, is not divided, although you may then come across "poor relations".
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I've got a totally different pattern. There are two brothers in the late 1700s, both masons of the stoneworker sort. The descendants of the elder one became solicitors, clergy, and medical men. The ones on my branch became tradesmen such as upholsterer, lamplighter, boat builders, foundry workers and dock labourers, until my late father broke the trend on my side.
Martin
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I have the same thing, and as Lizdb explained, people can slide down the social scale if they got a fraction of the inheritance of their well off parent if that parent had lost of children or grandchildren. Ancestors who owned halls, manor could have grandchildren who ended up as ordinary farmers. You can have normal ag labs who had a great grandfather who was a lord of the manor at one time.
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The practice of leaving the estate to the first born son more or less in its entirity, with subsequent children having only small legacies and having to fend more for themselves, does seem in many ways unfair, but it does often mean that at least one line of descendants maintains the lifestyle and social status of the family."
From my research that really only happened with those very high up in society and not yeoman families etc. Granted that the land tended to go to the sons but often split across all and not just to the eldest, the daughters often inherited monetary bequests.
I've a number of lines that are the same as the OPs. By the early to mid 1800s they were predominantly of labouring classes living in poor parts of London but for those lines that can be traced back out of London (some we just don't know where they originated) even back just a further 100 years there was more money about with land ownership, as shown by the Wills they left. The further we've gone back on some lines, the more affluent they were but unlike with the aristocratic way of leaving property only to the eldest son, I've found they tended to split property amongst, but not always exclusively, the sons and the daughters often just inherited money along with the sons (some daughters did inherit some property too where a lot was owned). Consequently down the generations this continued but the amount available became less as a result of the number of children each had and a reducing amount of land and/or money. I've seen it time and time again, albeit that not all lines were affluent early on but a good number were. Its a misnomer I've seen with some researchers that if they had ag labs in the 1800s they were that all they way back (and that isn't pointing a finger at anyone on here).
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I’m really enjoying reading these responses so far. Glad I asked!
Interestingly, now that you say it, nearly every ancestor I can think of who left a will left money to all of the children, neatly divided. A few did leave additional land or money to the eldest.
So it does follow that the children would a bit less well-off.
The most stark example I have of class falling quickly is a woman who was born to a gentleman of the Gentry class in the 1720s. She married a relatively humble country curate of yeoman stock. They had 8 children. The oldest son did go into the church and maintained respectable status but the daughters each married local farmers. Several of this woman’s grandchildren ended up laborers, even though their great-grandfather was an “Esq” with noble roots.
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I'm not suggesting that anyone here would do this, but once you get back before civil registration and censuses it can be very easy to attach the wrong parents to an individual. For instance someone with the right name died and left a Will naming a son or sons who fit with known family history. But parents weren't always that imaginative regarding children's names and there could be more than one family in the same locality fitting the criteria. A parallel family of ag labs may have left very little trace of their existence beyond cmb records and certainly no Will. Is your William son of William and Mary the one who inherited several acres and a cow, or the one who could hope for nothing more than to survive infancy and have children of his own who might possibly support him if he made old bones?
For the most part in my own tree I've found that my mainly tradesmen and ag lab ancestors were the sons and daughters of other tradesmen and ag labs. The latter part of the 19th century saw a couple of family members (not direct ancestors) "make good" but nothing to suggest it was due to anything other than their own hard graft. Sadly nobody was seriously moneyed - not then, not now!
Jane :-)
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I had the same thought as familydar. Records for ordinary working people are very poor before the 19th century and get worse with every decade you go back. It also becomes harder to triangulate the evidence you do find.
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Sadly - my lot were Agricultural Labourers/Laundresses in 1700/1800 and the most of it followed thru to my father who was a dairyfarmer in the 1950's. Its only my generation with my siblings to become a Director of Nursing, 2 x teachers and a Bank Manager. Good jobs now but not a lot of assets gained over 300 years.
Jack Gee
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One of my families were French refugees who came over and did well in the silk weaving industry - then when the laws changed and cheap imports of silk were allowed in, various families fell on very hard times indeed and were practically destitute in East London - 1750s onward
- so there could be various reasons why the family lost their 'wealth'. One of mine stole to try to keep bread on the table . . . . and ended up with a free trip to Australia for his pains. :( :(
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I had the same thought as familydar. Records for ordinary working people are very poor before the 19th century and get worse with every decade you go back. It also becomes harder to triangulate the evidence you do find.
Fair enough but based on DNA and loads of other evidence over many years of research, I very much doubt I’ve just attached the wrong people with the right-ish names.
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There's one line of my daughter's family that are pretty well off in the 18th cent. Then one of them (her direct ancestor) tries to move into another business venture due to changing patterns of business. His venture didn't go well and he lost a large proportion of his wealth. This reduced the options for his children, some of whom went bankrupt in attempting business ventures as they didn't have the capital to back them. There is even a book on the family that refers to our branch as the "embarrassing poor branch" of the family.
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There's one line of my daughter's family that are pretty well off in the 18th cent. Then one of them (her direct ancestor) tries to move into another business venture due to changing patterns of business. His venture didn't go well and he lost a large proportion of his wealth. This reduced the options for his children, some of whom went bankrupt in attempting business ventures as they didn't have the capital to back them. There is even a book on the family that refers to our branch as the "embarrassing poor branch" of the family.
Haha! That’s pretty funny (I’m sure it wasn’t to them at the time, though) about the book. I’d love to read it.
On my Dad’s side he has an aunt who just died at 102. She was a “keeping up with the Joneses” type and insisted we were descended from royalty. Her grandmother was a Somerville and she claimed was related to the noble branch of that family. She went on a trip to Scotland with her husband and apparently looked one of them up in the phone book to pay a call on her long lost kin at their grand house. Apparently the “cousin” slammed the door right in her face! We always thought that was hilarious. (And our earliest Somerville ancestor that I’ve managed to trace was a cotton mill worker, so I’m doubting her story).
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There's one line of my daughter's family that are pretty well off in the 18th cent. Then one of them (her direct ancestor) tries to move into another business venture due to changing patterns of business. His venture didn't go well and he lost a large proportion of his wealth. This reduced the options for his children, some of whom went bankrupt in attempting business ventures as they didn't have the capital to back them. There is even a book on the family that refers to our branch as the "embarrassing poor branch" of the family.
Haha! That’s pretty funny (I’m sure it wasn’t to them at the time, though) about the book. I’d love to read it.
On my Dad’s side he has an aunt who just died at 102. She was a “keeping up with the Joneses” type and insisted we were descended from royalty. Her grandmother was a Somerville and she claimed was related to the noble branch of that family. She went on a trip to Scotland with her husband and apparently looked one of them up in the phone book to pay a call on her long lost kin at their grand house. Apparently the “cousin” slammed the door right in her face! We always thought that was hilarious. (And our earliest Somerville ancestor that I’ve managed to trace was a cotton mill worker, so I’m doubting her story).
It's not really funny, I keep wanting to throttle the author who goes on about our branch being shameful etc because we're not rich or titled.
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Although as I have found, if you do find a esquire and gentleman in your family or even a knight, they can be just as elusive as ordinary ag labs, tradesmen.
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There's also a bit of a self-fulfilling prophesy going on. In addition to the effects of splitting estates into ever smaller chunks, it's true that the percentage of people who made wills is progressively smaller the further back you go, and it's those that had wealth to bequest that made a will.
So the very existence of a will means that that ancestor was more wealthy.
As someone else has said, it's very easy to think that because an ancestor matches an expected name in an expected place that it's the "correct" ancestor. I'm preventing myself getting too excited about the wills I have identified as predecessors of my GGGG-grandfather until I can corroborate with other evidence. You could also find that corroborating evidence in the will itself if you're lucky.
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I do have a copy of the will of my ancestor, John Pearle, who made his will in 1653 and died in 1658. I am descended from John's eldest son, Thomas, who died in 1649 leaving a widow and five young children.
Now John Pearle appears to have been quite a wealthy fellow, and in his Will he gives specific instructions for bequests to his wife: if I remember correctly, she was bequeathed both a pony and a pightle [field] to put it in!. However, unfortunately John left the rest of his estate to his two surviving sons in equal shares, without making any provision for the widow of Thomas or her five children.
Which sort of explains why one side of the family remained wealthy, whereas my side of the family spent several generations as Ag Labs, gradually lowering themselves gently down towards the workhouse. Until the coming of the railways, when things started looking up a bit.
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I do have a copy of the will of my ancestor, John Pearle, who made his will in 1653 and died in 1658. I am descended from John's eldest son, Thomas, who died in 1649 leaving a widow and five young children.
Now John Pearle appears to have been quite a wealthy fellow, and in his Will he gives specific instructions for bequests to his wife: if I remember correctly, she was bequeathed both a pony and a pightle [field] to put it in!. However, unfortunately John left the rest of his estate to his two surviving sons in equal shares, without making any provision for the widow of Thomas or her five children.
Which sort of explains why one side of the family remained wealthy, whereas my side of the family spent several generations as Ag Labs, gradually lowering themselves gently down towards the workhouse. Until the coming of the railways, when things started looking up a bit.
That's very interesting. I have a more recent example of that. My ancestor John Eckins was a well-off yeoman. His oldest son, also John, died a year before him in 1840, leaving a widow and children. I haven't found a will for John Sr, but I can see from census records that John Eckins's 3 other sons all were farmers of up to 600 or 700 acres, whereas his deceased oldest son's family was pretty destitute. That son's widow ended up a housekeeper and the children sent out to work as labourers and domestics. I'm descended from John Sr's youngest son George Eggins, a yeoman who did alright but not quite as well as his older siblings. Not sure without a will how the division of property was decided on, but it certainly favored the two older (surviving) sons.
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I must say, Hilary, that it surprises me that the orphaned grand-children in both our families were left to fend for themselves, and had not received bequests from their grandfathers. I could understand why the widows were not provided for if they remarried, but in the case of my family, the widow did not remarry and the children were all below the age of 12 on her husband's death. It does seem a very harsh way of going about things, particularly when my ancestor, too, was a wealthy Yeoman and there would appear to have been land and assets enough to keep everyone fairly comfortable.
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My family most definitely gets wealthier as time went on.
A few examples of doing rather well in trade in the 1800's but the real steps upward began in the 20thC.
After WW1 much, much smaller numbers of children ensured that even working class families were a bit more prosperous.
The greatest leaps forward came post WW2 when access to grammar schools became truly open. ( before the mid 1940's you had to pay to go to even state grammars, so most working class children could not go)
Fuelled by better nutrition in the form of free milk, orange juice proper school dinners and, most significantly, cod liver oil, all my generation of the family burst through the barriers to well-paid jobs previously so carefully guarded by the better-off classes.
There is a lot of talk about trying to increase social mobility today. Actually very easy to achieve if the state took back responsilbily for childhood nutrition and health, and provided an education system which rewarded ability and hard work.