Dusting & Digging: The Revelations of a Wages Ledger, 1796 – 1829. ONLINE.

Dusting & Digging: The Revelations of a Wages Ledger, 1796 – 1829. ONLINE.

Join Valerie Brenton for an online talk looking at a Wages Ledger from Dorset History Centre’s Bankes Family Archive.

An un-indexed wages ledger for the Kingston Lacy Bankes Estate in East Dorset presents a snapshot of the employment of a rural workforce. Day rates and hours allow trends before and after the Napoleonic Wars to be clearly identified for named and unnamed workers. The payment of board wages helps identify not just the role, but the name of trusted domestic staff. Fascinating case studies are used to show young women changing occupation from an outdoor day labourer to domestic staff and widowed women continuing to ply their husband’s trade.

Valerie Brenton is a professional genealogist, volunteer researcher at Dorset History Centre and co-ordinates the Brenton One-Name Study. She is a MSc alumnus of the University of Strathclyde’s Genealogical, Palaeographic and Heraldic Studies course and has a keen interest in unearthing snippets to bring to life the invisible women of the past.

Tickets are £5 for Dorset Archives Trust (DAT) members or £6 for non-members. Please book via ticketsource. The link to this online talk will be sent to all ticket holders one week prior to the event.

This talk is given in support of Dorset Archives Trust, a charity that works to preserve and promote Dorset’s rich archival heritage. Its strapline is ‘Saving Dorset’s disappearing history’ and it undertakes this work by fundraising, holding events, supporting projects and promoting the value of archives. DAT works closely with the Dorset History Centre in Dorchester which holds archive collections dating back over 1000 years from across Bournemouth, Poole and wider Dorset.