Asa

I think that was probably my biggest surprise overall, when I first started doing family history - how OLD most of my ancestors were when they died. Many of my rural ones died in their 70s, 80s and 90s. My Scottish 4 x GGM was still "keeper of Torrey Lighthouse" at the age 0f 94!!!!

OC

Wow I am impressed to be a lighthouse keeper .. but at that age wow wow

I have lots of ag labs, but my most interesting, are the Jaffrey lot in 1841 in Roxburgh - John 80 Pauper Helen 30 ag lab Elizabeth 12 ag lab .. No sign of John or Helen in 1851, but Betsey now 22 is a house servant ... So what did a 12 yr old female ag lab do in Roxburgh in 1841 .. milk cows ? Julie

The 12-year-old Ag Labs in Scotland would have helped look after animals in the fields, bring cows in for milking, cleaning the yards and byres, collect water, etc. They would also do jobs like hand-thinning young turnips. Later on in the year, it was tattie picking. I've got some wonderful reports from school teachers in the 19th century complaining that children wouldn't turn up when it was turnip and potato time. Even in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Scottish schools closed down when it was time to lift the potatoes - my mum remembers going into the fields to do this.

Erm growing up on a dairy, I know all about cleaning the feed troughs and washing down the bails .. but that was after school lol and I seem to remember that I often escaped .. the lovely man who worked for Dad often covered for me !!
I don't think I would have considered myself an ag lab but I suppose I was .. I know I wasn't very good at driving a tractor at hay baling time .. lots of rather colourful language when I managed to hit lots of bumps .. accidentally ofcourse ..

I suspect that one of the problems with ag labs is that at different seasons they would be doing different jobs. The team man cannot having been ploughing through the whole year, though I suspect the shepherd simply wasn't recognised till later in life.

Interestingly re child-labour, I went to a talk on the subject where they pointed out that the census question was something like "what is your regular occupation?" so that most children would be down as scholars when much of their time would be spent on bird scaring, running errands, holding horses etc etc, depending on where they lived.

I know in Cornwall some of my family's children were put down as scholars when they were down the mines ..

I remember from one or two of Thomas Hardy's books how labourers did different things according to the seasons.

My great x 3 grandmother Elizabeth Smith was a 'domestic labourer' at the age of 85 - I'm assuming she retired before she died at 93 but I don't know :)

I'm sure all the fresh air and exercise helped keep them young..

Presumably infant mortality also took care of many of those who might not have made old bones in any case.

My senior school in Washington, Co. Durham always had a week off when it was time to lift the potatoes. We would go earn a few back breaking pennies by working on the picking. Yes it was in the 50's.