Ancestry Magazine

There’s an assumption that significant contributions only happen once we become adults, yet many of our historical figures were children or teens when they became famous. And, whether your ancestors were well-known children or just ordinary kids, exploring the early years of your ancestors’ lives adds a new dimension to your family history.

Sound familiar? Regardless of whether they were rich or poor, immigrant or native born, rural or urban, male or female, there exist common threads—experiences—that connect most children, no matter when, where, or how they lived.

The stereotypic view that men spent time away from their families conducting business while the wives stayed at home was a nineteenth-century invention. In Ye Heart of a Man (Yale University Press, 1999), Lisa Wilson noted that colonial fathers were actively involved in the daily lives of their children—not just for schooling or discipline but as nurturing parents.
Take colonial immigrant Thomas Minor as an example. In his diaries, available through the Thomas Minor Society, Minor details his life in Stonington, Connecticut, particularly his role as a father. Written from 1653 to 1684, Minor frequently expresses his concern about the well-being of his children and grandchildren, mentioning fevers, bouts of the measles, and specific incidents like when “Little Ephraim” scalded himself.

In 1832, the New England Association of Farmers, Mechanics, and Other Workingmen resolved to reduce the amount of time children spent each day at work, noting that working from dawn to dusk endangered a child’s health and well-being. In 1836, legislators in Massachusetts passed a law that required children under the age of fifteen who worked in a factory attend school for at least three months of the year. Six years later, Massachusetts passed legislation that limited a child’s work day to ten hours. Similar laws were adopted by other states; the laws, however, were rarely enforced.

The twentieth century saw the advent of more products that specifically targetted children. In 1900, for example, Kodak issued a camera just for kids, the Brownie, that allowed children to document their own childhoods (a boon for today’s genealogist). Over the years, as leisure time grew for children and a greater importance was placed on the nurturing and development of children, other manufacturers followed suit. (Read “Snapshots from Childhood,” Ancestry Magazine, September/October 2004, for a history of kids and photography.)

Even in colonial America there were customs and methods devoted specifically to child development. Puritan New Englanders believed children were naturally evil and their wills needed breaking. All discipline efforts were directed towards molding children into model religious citizens. Quakers, on the other hand, felt that children were innocent and harmless. In the southern Unit ed States, where one-third of all children died during the first two years of life, people raised their offspring to be willful and self-reliant so that they could eventually manage the family’s estate. On the western frontier, survival depended on children being independent and courageous with pride in their accomplishments.

Moving Forward
Times have changed. Living, rearing, educating, and working condtions once considered acceptable for a child may not be so readily adopted by society today. An ancestor’s toys and games might seem pointlessly boring when compared to modern, high-tech offerings. Even the not-so-distant childhood of your grandparents might be utterly unrecognizable to your own child or grandchild today.

But common threads of childhood still remain to tie us together. Whether your own ancestors’ childhoods were filled with exceptional experiences or they were plain vanilla, just like everyone else’s, they’re worth researching. By developing a better understanding of your ancestors’ childhoods, you will learn more about how these ancestors developed into the adults you know or have familiarized yourself with. And you may even gain some insight into how your ancestors, in their own ways, had an effect on everyone’s history. Especially your own.

For the factory, hiring children was a financial boon—factory owners paid children low wages and got workers who could be easily managed and who could more easily manipulate tiny tools and other detailed items. Children might work twelve hours a day, six days a week. By 1910, over 2 million children were in the U.S. workforce.

Hine’s goal was to photograph what was often deemed “child slavery” and open the eyes of the American public, motivating people to act to implement child labor laws. Hine quit his teaching job and became an investigative photographer for the National Child Labor Committee, often sneaking his way into workplaces to take pictures of children. He carefully documented each image.

Hines died in poverty in 1940, but his efforts and the efforts of other reformists led to the 1916 Keating-Owens Act establishing more humane standards for child labor. While the Keating-Owens Act was subsequently ruled unconstitutional, several states passed laws that cut the child workforce in half by 1920. Years later, New Deal reforms changed child labor practices nationwide.

Today, Hine is recognized as a great American photographer, and his work instrumental in creating child labor laws. A selection of Hine’s photos can be viewed online at www.historyplace.com/unitedstates/childlabor/about.htm and www.archives.gov/education/lessons/hine-photos/.

Boys and girls dressed alike from infancy through the toddler years, after which time their clothing resembled that worn by their parents. It wasn’t until the late nineteenth century that fashions specifically for kids were marketed. To learn more about how your ancestors dressed as children, look at JoAnne Olian’s Children’s Fashions 1860–1912 (Dover, 1994). Study all the stuff of their youth using antique guides like Joe L. Rosson and Helaine Fendelman’s Treasures in Your Attic (HarperCollins, 2001).

Don’t have any clues in family attics about an ancestor’s childhood? Try flea markets, antique shows, and thrift stores in the area in which your ancestor lived. While you may not find artifacts that directly belonged to your ancestor, you’ll get a better understanding of how area children spent their youths. You’ll find popular toys, clothes, and maybe even find photographs that can help paint a clearer picture of an ancestor’s past.

Learning more about past generations of children also means examining documents as well as studying the history of the time period in which an ancestor was a child. Outside influences that affected the course of a child’s life can range from the loss of a family member (or members) to wars, disease, and immigration.

For example, even if you think your ancestor was too young to have participated in a military conflict, it’s worth checking pension files and service records just in case. While soldiers weren’t supposed to be younger than sixteen during the Civil War, the lack of birth certificates and other forms of identification meant that recruiter s often signed up boys who looked old enough. It was often a matter of height and appearance. In the Revolution, some children like ten-year-old Israel Trask joined along with their fathers. Drummer boys and powder monkeys (who delivered gunpowder to gunners) were usually as young as eleven.

Whether you choose to focus your research on the specifics of your ancestors’ childhoods, on the society in which they lived, or a combination of the two, remember that everything you learn can help you paint a fuller picture of the lives of the people who grew up to directly or indirectly influence you.