The “Gendered Indenture" section of IIS details the story of Henry Clemer, a child bound as an apprentice twice over. Henry’s story brought to light several questions: how many other children are represented in the data set? What happened to them? Were their lives significantly different from the adults in the record? A further examination of the indenture data ultimately revealed that children are an important, but often forgotten, demographic of the indentured population.

As with Investigating Indentured Servitude, the data doesn’t always provide details necessary for analysis. Children aren’t easily identified in the data as the vast majority of people recorded do not have an age associated with them. It was therefore necessary to augment the dataset in a way that would allow us to see children when no age was recorded. For the purposes of this exhibit, children were identified based on whether or not they received consent from a guardian to become indentured or apprenticed.

An additional challenge was to divide children into meaningful categories to better reveal their experiences. Gender seemed a natural way to highlight how the indenture experience varied from case to case. Since the data does not associate gender, this exhibit relied on the augmented dataset created by digital humanities fellow Nicôle Meehan for Investigating Indentured Servitude who assigned gender based on name and job description.

The augmented data shows us quite a bit about the record of indenture. Out of 5,142 records in the indenture book, 856 were determined to be children, a striking 17% of the dataset. Of the 856 children, 196 were girls and 660 were boys. Broken down even further, of the 196 girls, 171 were apprentices and of the 660 boys 626 were apprentices. As is clear in the visualization, a child entering into an unfree labor contract was most likely bound as an apprentice, rather than a servant regardless of gender. This differs significantly from the total records where both males and females were significantly more likely to enter into an indentured servant contract. 

The data also revealed the gendered nature of the work completed by indentured children. As the graphs show, boys were most likely to be trained  as shoemakers (cordwainer), carpenters, and tailors. They also had a large number of occupations that they could be contracted to learn.  In direct comparison, girls were assigned to perform labor in housewifery exponentially more than any other kind of labor and had significantly fewer occupations available to them. The descriptions in each child’s contract reiterated the gendered divide, with boys more likely to learn a “business” and girls more likely to be taught to sew.

The data also allows users to examine the length of indenture for each child. The graph below shows the extremes of working as an indentured child, displaying the minimum and maximum number of years each gender and status were bound as. The girl and boy servants with the longest time bound were actually sister and brother, Anna Marie and Adam Schendiffer, at 18 and 19 years respectively. The Schendiffer siblings were bound as servants with the consent of their father, John (Hans) George, to Samuel Howe in Philadelphia Pennsylvania. In a rare instance, the book has recorded the ages of the children, Adam was only 2 years old and Anna Marie only 4 when they became indentured servants. Unfortunately the record does not describe the kind of labor Howe was planning to use Adam and Anna Marie for, however by using the data visualized in the word clouds, Anna Marie was most likely to be used for housewifery and Adam would most likely be used for unskilled labor.

Of course, the Schendiffer children are not the only siblings indentured together, as we have record of full families indentured together. And, sometimes, as is the case of Henry Clemer, we see children indentured to family members (even the founder of APS, Benjamin Franklin, was indentured to his brother). But one thing the data does tell us, as is that children were bound for a lengthier period of time in comparison to the records as a whole as shown in the Investigating Indentured Servitude project. 

The historical study of childhood experience is important. Studying children in historic materials such as this one matters as often the children’s experiences are dissolved into the general narrative. This results in silencing the voices of children who are a large part of the record in their own right. However, as this record displays, at least 856 people had a different experience during their contracts because of their age. Recognizing children as their own demographic in this way allows us to see the life a historic child likely lived, and begins to allow children today to see themselves in the record as present and meaningful historical actors, something that seldom occurs. 

This exhibit is just one example of the power of historic open data. For more about this project, or to download the dataset, check out the About this Data section of Investigating Indentured Servitude.