By David A. Fryxell
These Colonial practices produced the earliest occupational records of American ancestors. Learn how to find them.
Among the oldest occupational records you're likely to find
are those for two kinds of employment almost unheard of today:
apprenticeships, in which a young person was bound to a master to learn
a trade, and indentured servitude, in which a person was committed to
working off a debt, such as payment for passage to America. The two
often overlap, and in Colonial America the agreement apprenticing a
youth was called an indenture. These documents are valuable for
genealogy because they had to be signed by the apprentice's parent or
guardian. Most apprentices were teenage boys, and they were obligated
to work at their trade until age 21. The term of an apprenticeship can
be used to estimate an apprenticed ancestor's age, by subtracting the
term from 21.
Typically, apprentice ship records were made at the
local level, but many of these documents have since migrated into state
archives and historical societies. If you have English ancestors, you
might be able to use apprenticeship records to trace your kin back to
the old country; the UK Public Records Office has a helpful guide to
these resources at <catalogue.pro.gov.uk/ExternalRequest. asp?RequestReference=ri2187>.
For early American ancestors, the FHL has collections of apprenticeship
documents from Pennsylvania and Virginia. Ancestry.com 
offers a
database of more than 8,000 Virginia apprentices from 1623 to 1800.
Indenture
records also can overlap with passenger records, as the most common
type of indenture was payment for passage to America. State and local
archives may hold indenture records, although these can take a bit of
digging to find. The Pennsylvania State Archives, for instance, has two
boxes labeled “Records of the Proprietary Government, Provincial
Council, 1682 1776 — Miscellaneous Papers, 1664-1775,” among which a
dedicated researcher could uncover the Oct. 31, 1765, agreement binding
one Charles Carroll of Maryland to Richard McCallister.
From the April 2005 Family Tree Magazine