Parish Documents: Apprenticeships, Examinations, Removal Orders etc

This is the collection of largely indentured documents stored in the Widecombe Parish Chest. The documents here are largely Parish Apprenticeships, which are the binding of poor children of the parish to an employer usually until aged 21. They normally received no pay, just board and lodging etc., but did hopefully learn a trade that would be useful later on. Examinations are records of examinations of people; this was often done because it was thought that the person did not belong in the parish, hence the third type of document, the Removal Order, that was an official order for the person to remove themselves from the parish.

This set of documents was originally published on CD as the Parish Documents Database. We have now added the images to the database and brought the search inline with the other archives. This means that some of the relationships are lost but can still be obtained through more indirect means.

You can use the button on the right of an entry to go directly to a more detailed list of your chosen catalogue item's contents, from which you can utilise the search facilities.

Please click here if you would rather go straight to the full search facility.

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Widecombe Digital Archive by Widecombe History Group is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported Licence.