Existence of training ship/merchant seaman records 1902-3 Bristol area

[ValJJJ]

I am following up the possibility of an ancestor being sent to sea - either via a training ship or given a place on a merchant ship.

Can anyone tell me what was the usual or minimum age that a boy would be at sea?  I lost track of this person in late 1902/early 1903 but he was only 5-6 years old at this time (born Oct 1897).  I think he may have been in Bristol with relatives for a while before possibly becoming part of a crew.

I know this is very vague, with not knowing the year or the name of the ship, and it is only a guess in any case, so I'll have to plough through a lot of records.  Hopefully they are online somewhere.

Thanks.

Val

[majm]

Hi there,

Do you know where he was on 31 March 1901?  I am assuming you have not yet found your elusive John CAMPBELL.  He is well hidden. 

JM

[ValJJJ]

Hi

Yes, this is the elusive John Campbell - perhaps I should cross-reference to other lookups of mine but this is a new angle entirely!  So not sure if the other threads help or hinder.

I have been told about CLIP - Crew List Index Project - but he's not there, although they haven't indexed all info yet, and haven't done Bristol. 

I looked again at FreeBMD and the GRO to see if I could spot JC's death, but nope, not in England/Wales, in the window I looked at 1902-12 (no reason for 1912, but you have to stop somewhere! I'll widen the search next time).  He's not in the 1939 register but could have died before eg in WW1. He's not in the 1911 census online records, but could have been missed/mistranscribed.

To answer your question, yes I know where he was in the 1901 census, with his family, and I know where he was in Dec 1901 from workhouse records, and I know where he wasn't (!) in late 1902 as the workhouse lost track of him.  I am working through census records of all other relatives to see if he pops up in their household in 1911, perhaps given their surname in error by the enumerator, but have problems with quite a few females as I haven't found the married names of quite a few of them yet.

Thanks for the interest.

Val 

[majm]

Oct 1897 plus six years .... Oct 1903.  When you were looking at those Crew Lists,  were there entries for children of that age ... I had understood England's compulsory education of young  children  was well underway and land based by that decade.  I may well be wrong, but perhaps he was sent to boarding school.

As an aside, I am on e reader, and it has its own ways of spelling.     may I share ... one finger typing ...  I have been smiling at sending John to :- browsing school ... 
boating school, ...
bloating school ...

 finally it allowed boarding school. 

JM

[ValJJJ]

You're probably right about ages of crew members - I think for Cam*  and *bell the earliest dob were 1910, but I didn't look into the details.

The compulsory education didn't stop quite young children being packed off abroad though did it?   :   . Perhaps there were exceptions or exemptions?  Maybe a 'training ship' was considered education?  I don't know the practicalities of having very young ones aboard though.  I did wonder if he stayed in Bristol for a few years and then went to sea, thus missing the 1911 census.

Predictive texting is endlessly fascinating but at the same time annoying.  It is similar to spellchecks on Word as where ever to they get those suggestions from?  I'm sure many of them cannot be real words.  I know some will be variants such as Amercan English or Australian English, but one day I'm going to start looking up the suggestions in dictionaries.  Perhaps the suggestions are compiled from usages by other people? Typos?

[ValJJJ]

Oh, meant to say that I am exploring the boarding school angle but that is difficult to narrow down.