Does it make you uncomfortable that your ancestors had servants?

[veraaloe]

I'm not sure why, but it makes me feel a bit odd to think they had 3-4+ people who lived in their house.

Likewise an ancestor was a slave owner, now that makes me shudder.

OP, servants and slaves are very different!
I have employed various domestic staff over the years (nannies, cleaners, gardeners...) and I treated them all well and had excellent relationships with all of them.
I am in no way embarrassed about that, nor the fact that precious generations of my family were also employers of domestic staff.
I would never even consider owning a slave! And I would be pretty shocked to learn any of my ancestors did too. The two really are in no way comparable!

From a long line of miners, in service girls, mill, foundry and pottery workers. And this stopped with my parents. I am very conscious of how lucky I am, how fagile it all is, and how in other parts of the world people still live in poverty like my recent ancestors (and in the UK). My parents don't know we have cleaner and I regularly lie to them about what we waste our money on. We are not rich, and yet we are.

Nothing but poverty in my family tree! Lots of children in and out of the workhouse on various sides; children dying in an east end slum from typhoid and an awful lot of agricultural labourers!

My ILs still have servants! (Driver, maid, cook, caretaker for the house). They're also very snobby so I love telling them about my granny and who was in domestic service in the 20s and 30s. It's just further evidence I'm not good enough for them! She had more class than the lot of them and was the most elegant woman I've ever known.

Not at all
One side of the family were the servants - paid staff - and the other had servants

But wasn't it quite a norm for servants to have servants in some cases? E,g, in the 20s, a secretary might have had a char lady and I read that the char lady would often hire one herself because that's a couple of hours a day and the char lady might have work at five places in one day etc etc

Not at all
One side of the family were the servants - paid staff - and the other had servants

But wasn't it quite a norm for servants to have servants in some cases? E,g, in the 20s, a secretary might have had a char lady and I read that the char lady would often hire one herself because that's a couple of hours a day and the char lady might have work at five places in one day etc etc

SpringMay funny you should say that because although my dgm said it was a hard life, she learned so much and got to see some interesting stuff. It got her out of a tiny village in Scotland and opened her mind. We always said she should have written a book.

We were peasant farmers from Cornwall.

My gran did learn things but I got the impression that there was some humiliation for very little pay; she then moved into commercial kitchens which suited her better and had quite a varied and satisfying work life.

My dgm entered domestic service to escape a wicked stepmother so that may have influenced how she felt about the experience.

My Dads mum always reckoned we were related to Lady Jane Grey and to Sir Josiah Wedgewood. No idea if it's true - but I bet there were servants ! I don't have servants now, just a cleaner 😂😂

Ginis, start digging!

If you do have better off forebears you have so much more chance of finding stuff out! My research petered out into itinerant miners and an Irish side that was untraceable due to the destroyed records.

I recently did my family tree found many lords ladies and knights. It was very easy to find information about them.

Sobs quietly..

My great-great-grandmother came from a very wealthy family. She fell in love with one of the servants, they married and lived happily ever after. And they 11 children.

So part of my family had servants; the other half were the servants. My mother still has a housekeeper (cleaning/laundry etc) and we had a nanny when I grew up. I have neither.

From what I can work out some of my ancestors were part of the circus & the rest were dirt poor so I doubt if I have any ancestral guilt to stress about

My lot on both sides were agricultural labourers mostly. A few made good and ended up with their own sizeable farms and my great, great, great grandmother Phebe was left a young widow in the 1860s and farmed 62 acres in Wales helped by three labourers and domestic servants.

Do I feel uncomfortable about any of my ancestors having servants or being servants? Do I buggery. Different times and nothing to do with me. That was how society operated then. I can't apply my modern day values to their lives.

My mum's ancestors probably had servants. My dad's ancestors were servants.

Does that make me truly middle class?

One of DH's relatives had his head chopped off by Henry VIII, I don't hold it against the current Royal Family :D

Wow, that's a claim to fame Duckbilled

My granddad was a Jewish refugee who escaped from Hitler. The rest of his family weren't so lucky.

No, it provided employment. Also no second hand shame here either.

Not at all. They are probably spinning in the grave that I am a servant, though...

Doesn't make me feel odd as things were very different in those days. No labour saving washing machines, central heating etc. Keeping a household was hard labour. Even very modest families would at least keep a skivvy. Domestic service was a hard but respectable job for women when very few other wage opportunities were available.
My family didn't have servants, Dh's did. One of them - a lady housekeeper - is buried in the family vault!

Not really no. I would assume they had quite a lot of servants as they were very wealthy landowners, but they were also famously philanthropic and civic minded (which is probably why my generation of the family all have very bog standard semis ) .