What happens when both parents die?

[Phoenix]

I'm looking at a will made in 1627 where a man mentions his seven children.

He dies some six years later, and his wife a couple of years after that.

The eldest daughter is twenty, the youngest child ten, so as an economic unit they could keep going. But what happens where the children are younger?

I know some orphans would plummet into poverty with the loss of their bread winner. But others survived to make decent lives. How? Has anyone been able to unravel the childhoods of orphans?