Individual Details

John RICHARDS

(Abt 1766 - Jan 1780)

Events

Birth	Abt 1766	Middlesex, England, Great Britain
Birth	Abt 1768	West Bromwich, Staffordshire, England, United Kingdom
Birth	Abt 1769
Birth	Bef 26 Mar 1769
Baptism	26 Mar 1769	St. Bartholomew, Wednesbury, Staffordshire, England, Great Britain
Death	Jan 1780
Burial	31 Jan 1780	St. Bartholomew, Wednesbury, Staffordshire, England, Great Britain
Employment	7 Sep 1784	bricklayer to his father, Joseph Richards, - Middlesex, England, Great Britain
Marriage Bann	19 Feb 1792	and on two successive Sundays - St. Mary, Islington, Middlesex, England, Great Britain - Ann FULLER
Marriage	22 Apr 1792	St. Mary, Islington, Middlesex, England, Great Britain - Ann FULLER
Residence (family)	1841	Islington, Middlesex, England, United Kingdom - Ann FULLER
Residence	1851	Finsbury, Islington, Middlesex, England, United Kingdom
Occupation		bricklayer

Families

Spouse	Ann FULLER (1767 - )
Child	Harriett RICHARDS ( - )
Child	Esther RICHARDS (1797 - )
Child	George RICHARDS (1802 - 1848)
Child	Thomas RICHARDS (1806 - 1879)

Father	Joseph RICHARDS (1743 - )
Mother	Eleanor SANSOM (1740 - )
Sibling	Henry RICHARDS (1767 - )
Sibling	Sarah RICHARDS (1771 - )
Sibling	William RICHARDS (1775 - )
Sibling	Hannah RICHARDS (1777 - )

Notes

Employment

This document, nearly 250 years old, is the “indenture” of John Richards, the 3rd-great-grandfather of Barbara Moore and June Waters. It is on parchment, rather than paper (accounting for its preservation). Unfortunately, it has been tightly folded up for who-knows-how-long and some words are hidden inside creases that haven’t relaxed yet. As you can see, it’s a pre-printed form and is notarized at the bottom left by a clerk. At bottom right is a wax seal. At top left are two pasted-on pieces of embossed blue paper—probably tax stamps. There is another stamp on the back side. The tax stamps and the wax seal show signs of being cut and woven onto the document. Perhaps this was a method of preventing removal and reuse.
The word “indenture” means something different today, but historically, it means a contract that provides something of value in return for a person’s labor. For example, about half of the white immigrants to the American colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries were indentured. They were required to work for some period of time, often as servants, to repay the person who paid the price of their voyage to the New World. Slavery in North American originated as a perversion of indenture, as owners successfully ignored the end of the term of indenture.
Indentured servants were forbidden to marry without permission and were subject to corporal punishment as deemed appropriate by the owner of the indenture. Female servants had their terms lengthened if they became pregnant. An indenture (the contract, not the person) could be sold to another owner. The term of the indenture would be legally enforced by the court and could be lengthened as punishment if the servant attempted to run away.
In the case of John Richards, the indenture is an apprenticeship to his own father. In return for learning the crafts of tiling and bricklaying, John agrees to work for the owner for a term of seven years. He agrees not to fornicate, marry, gamble, sell his own works, “haunt Taverns and Play-houses”, nor run away. In addition to instruction, the master agrees to provide “Meat, Drink, Apparel, Lodging and Other Necessaries.”
The agreement is dated on the “Seventh Day of September in the Twenty Fourth Year of the Reign of our Sovereign Lord George the Third, King of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, etc., Anno Dom. 1784.”

Note that the two copies are slightly different. The instrument of the indenture would have been a pre-printed form on a large parchment. The agreement would have been pre-printed on two or more areas of the parchment. The parties would have filled in the blanks on each agreement. Then the parts would have been cut apart along a meandering line and each party would have kept one part. The meandering line of the cut was important; one could prove that the various parts belonged to the same agreement by matching them up on the meandering line.

The copy of the agreement that came from me would have been held originally by John or Joseph. The copy that came from [1] was probably the part kept by the local clerk.

It’s probably not surprising that you might make a mistake if you have to fill the same information into several parts of one big parchment. And a minor omission was made here:

- The copy that comes from me reads: “…doth put himself Apprentice to Joseph Richards…”
- The copy that comes from [1] reads: “…doth put himself Apprentice to Joseph Richards his father”

So, this clarifies that John, son of Joseph, was indentured to his own father rather than to some relative with the same name.

[1] "London, England, Freedom of the City Admission Papers, 1681-1930," database index with images, Ancestry.com (https://search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=2052: downloaded 13 October 2018), 1786-1800 > 1793 Feb - Aug, image 25, Apprenticeship of John Richards to his father, Joseph Richards; citing London Metropolitan Archive; Reference Number: COL/CHD/FR/02/1156-1162.

Individual Details

John RICHARDS

Events

Families

Notes

Birth

Birth

Birth

Employment

Residence (family)

Residence

Endnotes