Genealogy Chat

I had always assumed 'at home' to be either the above reason of staying at home to help mother out, or a polite way of saying unemployed.

Girls often went into service and moved out of home and into their employer's home, although some girls worked in service locally and still lived with parents, but these still usually gave servant domestic as their occupation. That's what made me think that purely at home meant they had no job at all and their own family were supporting them.

Dianne xx

In most cases, the only medical care would have been at the local workhouse ........ the doctor or midwife would have had to be paid if they came to the house, and hospitals were expensive.


so, to send someone to the workhouse infirmary if they were sick or about to give birth was just practical. It doesn't mean they were actual inmates in the workhouse itself.




sylvia

Do you think she could have gone to the workhouse just to give birth? I think a lot of very poor women did that if they couldn't afford a midwife (in the pre-NHS days I imagine midwives - formally trained and untrained - would have made at least a little money through their work) because the infirmaries attached to the workhouses were sometimes the only place they could get free health care.

So they might have delivered the baby there but not actually been a permanent inmate.

I have seen "At Home" against daughters above the age of 14 or 15 ....... and have assumed that it means either they are helping Momma with the younger children, or the family was wealthy enough that daughters didn't have to work and were just waiting to get married.


Two possible alternatives for you!!


Usually, if there is a disability, it will say in the very right hand column, after the birthplace information.



sylvia

That is curious - most of the "at home" notes I've seen against people have been written against what we'd probably call nursery school aged children now (the sort of 2-5 years range). ie. they were at home because they were too little to be at school or working.

If they are adults it may be that it means they were employed within the home, or that they thought that even though they didn't have an actual paid job (like a cotton weaver or domestic servant, say) they still had to describe what they did with their day.

I have also seen "employed at home" and "employed on the farm" referring to young adults and teenagers who literally did work for their parents because their parents were farmers, and those terms could have been the best way to describe what the children did. (I am sure those "employed on the farm" probably weren't paid but were seen as necessary help for their parents.)

ON SEVERAL OF MY CENSAS RECORDS I HAVE FAMILY MEMBERS WITH AT HOME LISTED IN THE OCCUPATION SECTION CAN ANY ONE TELL ME WERE THEY PREGNANT OR DID THEY HAVE A HANDYCAP THEY ARE ALL FEMALE BETWEEN 18 AND 24