Forced Apprenticeships

Recommended Reading: Labor Of Innocents: Forced Apprenticeship In North Carolina, 1715-1919 by Dr. Karin Zipf, PhD

By Sara Whitford
©2007 All Rights Reserved.

When researching one’s genealogy, an often neglected resource is a county’s apprenticeship bonds. At times, children apprenticed out were poor orphans. Many other times, the children being bound out simply had the misfortune of being born to non-white parents, or of having a father who died without specifying in a will that the children’s mother should be their guardian. (Zipf’s book details the phenomenon of children being removed from their mother’s care after their father’s death for just that reason -- in depth. It really is devastating to think such a travesty happened with such regularity.)

According to Zipf’s book, “... the law implicitly defined an orphan as a child with no father. Courts were to select guardians for those orphans who had inherited estates. Orphans for whom ‘such Estate shall be of so small value that no person will educate and maintain him or her for the Profits thereof’ were to be bound out as apprentices. The court bound out all ‘free base born children,’ as well as ‘every such Female child being a Mulatto or Mustee, until she shall attain the age of Twenty One years.’ The law required all children to be bound until they reached the age of twenty-one, except white females, whose indentures terminated at age eighteen.”

Poor white children who were bound out were given the added advantage of being taught to read and write, however non-white children were not guaranteed the same privilege. It’s likely that some “masters” were generous enough to instruct even their non-white apprentices to read and write, but it was not something the state of North Carolina required for most of the period during which apprenticeships were taking place.

Victor Jones, Jr. at the Craven Regional Library in New Bern has gone to the trouble of transcribing and posting to the library website most all of the apprenticeship bonds for Craven County from the mid-1700s all the way through 1910. Those records can be found by going to:
http://newbern.cpclib.org/research/apprentice/

If you'd like to do a quick search of those documents, enter a name here:

At present, we’re not aware of any other eastern North Carolina counties with apprenticeship bonds posted online, but if anyone is familiar with any such information, please let us know so we can pass the information along.

To begin researching apprenticeship records for your own ancestors in eastern North Carolina, you can start by looking for microfilms of the apprenticeship bonds for the counties in which your ancestors lived, and additionally, you should check out the minutes of the Court of Pleas and Quarter Sessions for the relevant counties.

Click here to order Labor Of Innocents: Forced Apprenticeship In North Carolina, 1715-1919

©2007 EastCarolinaRoots.com. All Rights Reserved.