if you lived then

[burntcopper]

AFP lot may remember me pointing out something when camping (can't remember if it was before or after our plans for the apocalypse), where I'd come across some bugger bemoaning that no-one these days had any idea about the land, and how would we do in our ancestors' place as peasants when confronted by the situation. Which led me to go 'excuse me, but my ancestors wouldn't know one end of the horse from the other when it came to ploughing either. We were the ones who made the plough or fixed the damn thing when it broke.'

My ancestors having been skilled craftsmen for the most part (aside from a few mill owners and smugglers). One of the main surnames is Cooper, which tells you a lot right there. And considering your position in society is normally derived from what your family does, and how social mobility isn't all that great in this country, I do love it when people sigh about how they'd have loved to live in past times with servants or been servants. Somehow this type of person seems to forget that there was a whole big section in between.

Hi, I'm from the skilled working class that provided glass, smiths, barrel makers, foremen of mines and toolmakers. How about you?

Comments

[artela.livejournal.com]

Farmers on mother's side (as in actual farmers, not farm-labourers). On Father's side skilled craftsmen (Copperwork, Pottery, that sort of thing).

[akadougal.livejournal.com]

Farm labourers and fishers and iron workers.

[taraljc.livejournal.com]

Miners, butter merchants, loan sharks and horse thieves.

[jovieve.livejournal.com]

On the side I know about? Sailors (men) and domestic workers (women). Many, many generations of sailors and domestic workers.

[sheldrake.livejournal.com]

On one side, the name would suggest cart-makers/menders. On the other - farmers and market gardeners who suddenly decided one day in the 17th century to all become schoolteachers.

[aderyn.livejournal.com]

From what I know of the family tree we were farmers, with one pirate in our midst. Though I can only assume the surname 'Cutter' implies some kind of tailor or barber perhaps.

[st-lemur.livejournal.com]

Dunno, they might have been history's first emos?

[aderyn.livejournal.com]

That would be a brilliant excuse for when I'm having an off-day: "You don't understand, I come from a long line of emos, it is my birthright to be a moaner!"

[fahrenheit-f430.livejournal.com]

Iron workers, munitions, steel workers etc.

Have the Cooper name prominent in my family history too, but not a whiff in the 350 years my uncle's gone back to of ONE barrel maker. May be the case that 351 years ago the last barrel maker in the family said 'Fuckit, let's make some GUNS!'

I do love it when people sigh about how they'd have loved to live in past times with servants or been servants. Somehow this type of person seems to forget that there was a whole big section in between.

Yep. It's amusing. The only obvious thing about my family history is we were ALWAYS minted. Never enough to own property or keep servants, but enough to put meat on the table every night, rent 2 houses and have a pot of tea going all day - which is more than the aristocracy could manage at the time.

[el-staplador.livejournal.com]

Wool merchants and potters.

[bedlamsbard.livejournal.com]

My (100% Japanese) mother's side of the family is a straight line of samurai, no kidding, so, uh. My father's side...came from Norway and Sweden? At some point, but I know no more. And my surname is Knight, so...

Not that this is one of the things that's generally spoken of in the U.S. *shrugs* I mean, my folk only came over in the last hundred years or so, and my mother in the past thirty years.

[derryderrydown.livejournal.com]

Dad's side is oiks - labourers, dock porters, mariners, monoglot Welsh miners...

Mum's side is skilled craftsmen - mostly chefs, for some reason. And my mum's mum's family owned the same three farms in Omagh for the past three hundred years. (Rented out two, worked and lived on the third.)

[random-c.livejournal.com]

Servants. I think that heritage comes out in my love of Jeeves and Wooster - I'm identifying with Jeeves. I *need* to be useful. I like nothing better than sorting shit out for people who're hopeless at it and *need* me - unless it's my family because, I assume, I expect that they should be doing the same thing themselves. I kick if I'm not appreciated, but I'll take any amount of crap directed at me and be professional in the face of it - within hearing of anyone who matters - but attack anyone I consider to be under my care, a friend or a subordinate or coworker, or one of my hopeless little customers, I will kick and kick HARD. I can't talk about it, but there's someone who might just be finding out about that soon, and will be bloody surprised by it because I've taken their crap and calmly given back facts.

[silly-swordsman.livejournal.com]

Small-scale farmers, lumberjacks and hunters, the lot of them. This means they were also carpenters, wood turners, cabinet makers, cobblers, saddlers, weavers, and so on on the side, since in the sparsely populated north of Sweden (all my genaology has lived (well, been born/died) north of 61th latitude) you had to be a jack of all trades, since there often wasn't a comunity around you.

[bunnyk.livejournal.com]

Farmers and farm labourers on both sides of my family.

[st-lemur.livejournal.com]

Farmers, silver workers, bankers, pirates, vikings.

[celievamp.livejournal.com]

My dad always maintained that he came from good mining stock. He was quite put out when I did the family history and told him that his own father was the first (and last) to go down the mines, and the previous three generations were gas fitters and plumbers.

My mum's side was even better. She always thought that one side of the family came from money. I found where her great grandfather was in the 1871 and 1881 census - and told her that if they did have money it probably wasn't theirs - he was in a local jail in the Black Country in 1871 and in Parkhurst in 1881 as an incorrigible thief!

[ineptshieldmaid.livejournal.com]

Urban working class in England, as far as I know, with poultry farmers back in the ancestry somewhere (Fowler); the obligatory convict ancestor (I believe he stole a loaf of bread, but that could be family legend standing in for 'we have no idea because records are shonky') leading to urban working-class / subsistence farming in the outer west of Sydney; cane farm hands in Queensland, until for reasons unknown that branch of the family moved down to live on the breadline as urban working class (I believe my grandfather drove a milk truck) in the outer west of Sydney.

Oh HAI, as far as I know, I'm only the second person on either side of my family to get a university degree, and the other one is my uncle who graduated in his forties.

[clanwilliam.livejournal.com]

Farmers one side - they pass the golden rule, which is if there's continuous records for the past 300+ years (the Petty survey in our case), you've probably been on that land for more than 3000 years. Even in certain bits of Ireland (aka the bits of land no-one else wants. gmh will confirm it has a lovely view, though).

The other side? Well,in the past century and a half, we show classic Irish social mobility[1] in assorted generations: labourer, train driver, schoolmaster, priest (non-reproducing), bank manager, academic, diplomat, etc, etc. Before that we appear to have been a combination of tinkers and hedge schoolmasters and everything in between - education seems to have been a big feature - and before that, apparently we owned a decent chunk of land until Lizzie I or Cromwell kicked us off it.

Mind you, go back far enough, and the name may derive from pre-Norman monks - and we are the only "De" name in Ireland not to be French. (The name has a different origin, which is still used in the Irish version.)

[1] We got independence, a huge chunk of the middle classes left or were pushed out. Where do you think we found the replacements?

[clanwilliam.livejournal.com]

Oh, and the farming side were prosperous enough that they provided schoolteachers, so even at their poorest, there was still enough leeway to educate children.

Also, names aren't much cop on professions in Ireland, since most surnames come from clan groupings, not from what your ancestor did for a living.

[gmh.livejournal.com]

My dad's side I've little idea on, but my mother's side we've got a fairly clear picture, as they've been Quakers since around 1650 (and I've an elderly cousin who is one of the stalwarts of the Quaker Family History Society).

It's pretty much solidly middle-class clerical/business or artisan all the way back to a child born of ecclesistical fooling around (the family surname is Abbatt).

The Lancashire arm of the family ran mills (until one of them failed to realise that crinolines would ever go out of fashion and thereby ruined the firm), whereas the Bristol side were craftsmen in stone; a number of features in mid- and late-Victorian churches in Bristol are done by them, including St. Mary Redcliffe - the apostles around the 1856 pulpit are my great-great-great-great-grandfather and various other family members.

Another of them was a foreman of works on the Clifton Suspension Bridge - my mother has a cylindrical stone-and-marble 6" ruler at home which was carved out of the block that provided the foundation stone for it.

Typical Quaker makeup, really - business of a comparatively 'clean' nature, skilled workers and clerks.

[sbp.livejournal.com]

Lots on my mum's side worked on the railways in York. My dad's side they owned a mill or something like that.

[mrslant]

Coopers and whitesmiths on my father's side, tanners and pargeters on my mother's side.

[cidercupcakes.livejournal.com]

No idea further back than a couple of great-grandparents. Surname is specific to a one period in French history, suggesting someone from the middle or lower classes during the Revolution, likely caught up in Revolutionary fervor, maybe someone in Napoleon's military. Might be a fur trader or two in the French-Canadian line. Quite a few farmers in the last couple of centuries, but further back from that it's pretty well lost. A couple of English miners on my mother's side.

One great-grandmother raced horses, though, which is pretty nifty, and a cousin of hers ran off to California to be a cowboy and wrote her this hilarious letter about how he'd heard "the call of the wild" and she was "the only real sport in the family" and telling her in loving detail about his Winchester (shush). That made for good reading.