London Freedom of the City Admission Papers

[olliecat]

There is a new collection on Ancestry that may be of interest to anyone with ancestors who applied for or attained Freeman status. Many of the documents in the collection are indentures or apprenticeship agreements. Here is part of the collection description...

London, England, Freedom of the City Admission Papers, 1681-1925
This database contains papers associated with application for "Freemen" status. Historically, Freedom papers go back to royal charters granted for the privilege to market, trade, or conduct business. Livery Companies (which originated in guilds) are associations of craftsmen whose members can earn Freemen status and who regulated their trade by controlling wages, labor conditions, and admission by apprenticeship. When an individual is granted Freedom papers they are made "Free of the City of London."

Many of the documents in this collection are "indentures" or sealed agreements for things like apprenticeship agreements.

Information in this database:

Surname
Date of indenture
Parent or guardian’s name
County of residence
Master’s name

Original data: Freedom admissions papers, 1681 – 1925. London, England: London Metropolitan Archives. COL/CHD/FR/02.

On a personal note I am quite pleased since I found some of my own ancestors in this database which was an unexpected find for this morning. So far have found five indentures, one 'Freedom of the Company' and one admittance to the "Freedom of the City" by patrimony.

[t@nya]

I found a man who may be an ancestor of my Henry Randall I still haven't figured out which baptism is his yet.

[lesleys]

Ah but.... In true Ancestry style they seem to be restricting access to Ancestry.com members - my uk membership allows me to search but not see details

[arthurk]

Ah but.... In true Ancestry style they seem to be restricting access to Ancestry.com members - my uk membership allows me to search but not see details

You can see them with a UK membership, but earlier today the link from Ancestry's UK homepage was taking you to the US (.com) site instead - and logging you out into the bargain. You can get round this by following the link provided and then in the address bar change .com to .co.uk and press Go or Enter or whatever your browser prefers. If you're not logged in when you get to the UK version of the page, then copy the URL, get yourself logged back in by whatever means you usually use, then paste it in the address bar and Go.

Arthur

[Sue Mackay]

Ah but.... In true Ancestry style they seem to be restricting access to Ancestry.com members - my uk membership allows me to search but not see details

I got there by going to Recent Website Additions at the foot of Browse Records (under Search), then added it to Quick Links

Have just found John Jefferys Corsan and know that he at least wrote his middle name that way

[Sue Mackay]

Just a word of warning in case you miss something. I found my great uncle in the index and opened the View Image to discover that he had applied for Freedom by Redemption in 1916. His father's rather distinctive name had been on the index, but was nowhere to be seen on the page I opened. I clicked the forward arrow (to move from something like page 1236 to 1237) and found five further pages of information. I then went back to the Corsan entries I had found earlier and discovered that they too ran to several pages.

[arthurk]

And a further warning to add to Sue's: with the indentures, sometimes the image of the reverse of the document appears before the front, and sometimes after it, and when clicking to View Image, if the reverse appears first you may still be taken to the front, ie you're being taken to the second of the two relevant images rather than the first. Sometimes the only way of being sure you have the right reverse of the indenture is to compare its shape with those before and after it.

The reverse of an indenture can contain important information such as the turning over of an apprentice to a new master, who may be in a different company, and it also includes the reference number which as far as I can see from the information provided at Ancestry is the best clue you get as to the exact month and year of the admission to freedom; the date at the top of the image page is generally only a range of months. Also, the date given in the Ancestry index under "Admission" seems to be completely random - sometimes the year of apprenticeship, sometimes not: I found some suggesting that the person was admitted before they were born!

Arthur

[lesleys]

Some of the dates in the index are the date that the father was made a Freeman.
I found a lovely piece for my family jigsaw which puts my 5x gt grandfather in the village where I knew my 4x gt grandfather had his family. The Indenture was for his brother - who moved from Wiltshire to London for his apprenticeship in 1752.

[Coromandel]

There are some fascinating documents here. Unfortunately some of the indexing is quite dire. The transcription of one 1712 apprenticeship (filed among 1722 admission papers) really made me laugh. The original begins

'This Indenture Witnesseth that without any
sume of money or other value paid or
contracted for as the Consid[eration] hereof Thomas
Stevenson Son of Timothy Stevenson of
Davetry(?) in Com. Northampton Pewterer
doth put himself Apprentice to Edward Hall Citizen and
HABERDASHER of London.....'

The transcriber has assumed that the first two words after 'This indenture witnesseth that' must be the apprentice's name, which is accordingly indexed as Wilhout Any.

Then they have misread 'sume of' as 'sunne of' and so assumed that the next word (money) is the father's name. So now the already fictitious apprentice, Wilhout, has a father called Money Any. Poor old Thomas & Timothy Stevenson have been replaced by this bogus pair.

It's a shame it isn't possible to search by place name or by livery company. I tried putting 'Grocer', 'Grocers' etc. in the keyword box but this only finds entries where the company name has, in error, been used for apprentice's, father's or master's name. There are a surprising number of these. To compound the error they've sometimes been garbled too, so we find 'Barberricqcons Hall' (Barbers & Surgeons Hall) as a master's name, along with 'Wossers Company' (Drapers Company!). The corresponding indentures clearly show a master's name which just hasn't been transcribed.

Despite these problems this is a super collection. How I wish I had some London ancestors!

[RobinC]

Coromandel,

I think Timothy Stevenson was from Daventry, Northamptonshire which is what your post seems to hint at.