As well as geography and climate, one of the chief factors determining the character of an area can be said to be the type of work carried out there. The Burial Records do not give a total representation of the activities in the area since ‘occupation’ tends to take second place to ‘relationship’ in the ‘Description of Person Buried’ column of the Registers. In addition, this column is often left blank. However, a very good picture can still be obtained from the information shown in the Occupations listing (180KB). The occupations are sorted by their frequency of occurrence in the burial records.

The first two rows indicate that there was a lot of unspecified manual work taking place. However, the next 7 or 8 rows home in on the mining and ironworking activities of the area. These are expanded if you look down the table where other activities related to mining (mainly coal, though lead mining is occasionaly mentioned) and ironmaking keep popping up. Swordmaking had long since gone and papermaking and flour milling were on the way out by the early part of the twentieth century. Farming is represented and this, together with the coal and ironmaking activities, may account for a lot of the laborer/labourers.

There is also a very representative range of other trades and occupations which may be said to form a good service infrastructure, even running to the services of a Town Crier. Most of the occupations are self explanatory but I still have not been able to get to the bottom of what a ‘Squeezer’did for a living.

The occupations are as written in the Registers with the exception of ‘Soldier’ from the 1914-1918 War to which I have appended (1).

There are several archaisms in the listing including the spelling of Laborer/Labourer mentioned above. What we would now regard as the American spelling was actually the early form and was slowly replaced by the present usage. Note the occasional occurrence of ‘ ƒs’ in words such as Dre ƒsmaker.

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