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.

My ancestors weren't even good enough to be servants. That was probably for the best. They weren't exactly compliant.

My ancestors were the servants and agricultural labourers too.

It's not just cleaners and gardeners that are the modern-day equivalent of servants long time ago. We buy so much ready-made food, have fridges and so on - I reckon a lot of well off people now would employ cooks again if absolutely everything had to be bought and cooked fresh from scratch and couldn't be stored as easily as it is now.

You could argue lots of us have servants now in the sense that we pay (often very little) for other people's labour to do chores we don't want to do - it's just that the jobs are in food factories rather than all our own kitchens.

Exactly pointy

One of my ancestors was a sheep rustler, so unless he was extremely good at it, I doubt he had servants. 😂

Why would it make you uncomfortable to know previous generations had paid someone to cook or clean or mind their children or whatever?

I agree, no different to employing a gardener or taxi driver, hair dresser or anyone other trade that spicalises in a service.

Some not very rich people at all had domestic help 100 odd years ago. Including live in domestic help.

why should it make me feel bad, i had a nanny when i was a child.
my relative had a servant it was a good Thing to have a servant abroad , he paid for their son to go to school.
my grandparents had a housekeeper.

it makes me uncomfortable that i am so hard up in comparison

1 side had servants the other side were servants. I also have a slave owner in my tree.

I have spoken with some of the descendants of the people my ancestor kept as slaves and they tell me they believe he had a reputation as a good man and provided a lot of things many didn't such as beds with blankets, a school for the young children and 1 whole day off a week.

Some of the descendants also share that line of my tree, I'm not sure what I think about that. I dont know if the women were forced into sex or they were consenting.

I'm of the opinion such a 'good man' shouldn't have had slaves. I can't see him as anything but cruel and offensive. There must have been other trades he could have worked in

I don’t think anyone should feel guilt for what their ancestors did, but domestic service was usually exhausting, extremely low paid and you were effectively ‘owned’ for 16 or so hours a day, with perhaps an afternoon off per week if you were lucky and lived in very poor conditions. Obviously conditions in wider society could be bad too, but there is a reason why domestic servants became much harder to find as other employment options opened up to young women. They left in droves to work long hours in munitions factories where they could at least have their own life outside work.
www.thehistorypress.co.uk/articles/women-and-domestic-service-in-victorian-society/

genocidal religious extremist bigots

Kind of odd - if they were really early that's what they were trying to get away from.

On my mum's side, my (white) grandmother's family history is as mill owners and cotton traders in Lancashire. My (black) grandad's family were slaves picking cotton for plantation owners. When my Grandma moved to the Caribbean to be with my grandad, she was terribly abused by his family for "her part" in colonial history. It makes me so sad for them both that their family histories added to the breakdown of their marriage.

We lived abroad and I grew up with servants although my parents didn't allowed us to call them that and it makes me uncomfortable to admit to it. We just didn't think of them as servants, they were just people who did chores around the house, cooked us meals and looked after us children. two of them lived in the house, one lived in a sort of one bed bungalow next to our house and the rest lived elsewhere.

Anybody who had what would now be a white-collar job would have servants.

A doctor for example might well have a cook/housekeeper, a maid, and a groom/coachman and stable-boy.

MY family history was we were always pisspoor, so we had no servants just a bunch of hardworking ancestors
though half the town is named after a rich family with the same surname as my family it kinda irks me that we were skint and they weren’t lol