Apprenticeship records are valuable tools for family historians, often filling in the bare bones of research.

Before 1710 no centralised record of apprentices existed in England and Wales and the only evidence of apprenticeship is found in surviving papers of guilds, charities or parish collections. Since that time, there is a wealth of information available.

Parish apprentices were often paupers, aged 7-14 years, placed with masters for at least seven years, the cost of indenture borne by the parish. Details about parish apprentices may be recorded in parish registers, Vestry minutes and overseers’ account books at County Record Officess – including transcribed lists by local family history societies.

Information available
The detail in apprenticeship indentures varies, but generally includes:

• the parish
• name and age of apprentice
• name, occupation and parish of residence of the master/mistress
• sometimes detailed arrangements relevant to the apprenticeship
• names and signatures of parish officials
• sometimes parents’ names.

Private apprenticeship
Parents or relatives made their own arrangements with craftsmen or tradesmen and paid premiums. These generated several resources:

• after 1710, parents had to pay Stamp Duty for private indentures, records found in overseers’ records, along with lists of parish apprentices allocated to named masters. These duty records, covering the 1711-1811 period, are available online at www.TheGenealogist.co.uk – to search the records and for more information, see here. This collection includes scans of the original documents in addition to the searchable transcripts.
• wills may contain details of money set aside for children’s apprenticeship. Again, TheGenealogist has many wills – see our feature on pages 12 and 13 of this issue.
• offline, the indentures themselves may sometimes be found in family/estate papers at CROs.
• if the family had settled from another parish, apprenticeship may be mentioned in Settlement Examinations.
• frequent disputes between masters and apprentices were entered into Quarter Sessions records, some sessions transcribed online by county.
• proceedings may be reported in local newspapers.
• after 1801, detailed apprenticeship registers were kept – these are usually in Poor Law records at local/county record offices, although rarely indexed.

Remember too that marriage was forbidden during apprenticeship.

For more information on apprenticeship, see here and My Ancestor Was An Apprentice by Stuart Raymond (Society of Genealogists, 2010).