It’s 1763 and if you’ll allow me some artistic license, and it’s going to be a sunny morning. Sarah Cribb, a girl who would be around fourteen years old, probably has not slept. She’s been indentured into a husbandry apprenticeship in Tyneham, from her home in Stoborough approximately six miles away. Whilst this was a common practice, I cannot imagine that the commonality made it any more appealing for Sarah.
She was to spend a year of her life away from home and family, likely without her consent. This arrangement was made through Overseers of the Poor between her father, Thomas, and Joseph Symonds, owner of (at least part of) Eggleston farm. Joseph would house Sarah and pay her father.
Sarah was the second child of Thomas and Ann Cribb, with a younger brother James, and an older sister, also called Ann (to give you a little insight into this kind of research; if you happen to do some family history, it is very wise to start mapping a family tree as the same names will crop up and confuse you, especially when cousins get involved).
What would Sarah have been doing? As has been mentioned in a previous blog post, looking after animals on the farm would have been a daily task that would have gone on for the year.
Again, encountering the difficulties of researching a person as far back as this, when I went looking for the indenture of Sarah Cribb (see our other blog posts on this topic) I found that the writing had faded to the point of being unreadable!
There’s no record of what happens to Sarah up until 1770, it appears that at some point she returns and gets married in Holy Trinity church to a Roger Courtney, and they later have two children, Angel and John. From here the ‘trail’ goes colder, there is a burial record for a Sarah Courtney, but it is in Buckingham, quite the trek away from Wareham, and while it is certainly possible it is the same Sarah, we cannot be sure.
Perhaps this is the biggest challenge one will face in tracing family history before the modern censuses in the 19th century, the amount of data is extremely limited. This means I found records in transcripts for births, marriages and burials, but with only a name, date and location to go on it is difficult to prove it is not someone else with the same name. Fortunately, Stoborough and Tyneham were small enough to be confident of much of this information, however some remains only conjecture.
Both myself, and my work experience colleague Molly hope the recent blogs on apprenticeships have been interesting to DHC readers. We found them very interesting to research and put together, and it taught us a lot about a period of history about which we only knew a little before starting this project!