How do you find out what social class your ancestors were?

[dollee]

I'm having trouble picturing my ancestors. Obviously social class was a big thing. But some jobs have gone down in social standing whilst some have gone up.

For example, I have an ancestor who was a clerk. Lived in a 12 room house with two servants. I would probably say middle class. But today, I guess that role would be more secretarial and so perhaps working class?

Other hard to figure out cases are an ancestor who was a tenant farmer in the 1880s but had a cook and two house maids. Would that be working class or lower middle class?

Why do you feel the need to classify them in such a way? The modern day classifications are vastly different to what they once were, so you won't be able to conveniently slot them into categories.

There was some work done in London, with maps of all the different streets and areas, with the people therein defined in some way, but I can't remember what it was called.

@dollee Found it! It's called Charles Booth's Poverty Map. The categories are:

Wealthy
Well-to-do
Comfortable
Poor
Very poor
Semi criminal

Oh dear, the poor semi criminals!

I don’t think you can figure it out. people select which bits suit Their agenda

see: Keir “toolmaker dad” Starmer worth millions being working class.

This is the Genealogy board, and the thread isn't about the present day attitudes towards class, but how people were viewed in centuries past.

@MavisPennies I know!! People weren't all that happy about that category even in those days. It was the writer's own view.

"...an ancestor who was a tenant farmer in the 1880s"

Things were very different indeed 150 years ago, and even more recently as well.

Unmarried women and girls being in service was very common indeed. Also, agriculture was a lot more labour intensive than it is nowadays.

For example, one ancestor of mine worked as a domestic servant for a farmer and his family who was described as a "Farmer of 40 Acres employing 1 man and 1 boy".

Nowadays, 40 acres wouldn't generally support one family never mind also two employees and a servant.

Farmers with larger farms would employ proportionately more labour and also more servants.

"I have an ancestor who was a clerk. Lived in a 12 room house with two servants."

Again, this was not unusual, but I would suggest that he was likely a bit more than just a clerk. Most middle class families employed domestic servants. An ancestor who worked for HM Inland Revenue employed a domestic servant in the 1890s and 1900s. At the time of the 1901 census they were living at 111 Hopton Road, Streatham, London which you can see on eg Google Maps to see the actual home they were living in.

One of their sons became a doctor, living on Ealing Road, Wembley and this son and his wife also employed a domestic servant right up until the 1930s.

I wonder this too. Mine were teachers and clearly quite progressive in terms of educating their many daughters. I would love to meet them and see their home (which I now own several items from).

Work on the classifications of the time.
They were much more simple anyway.

Clerks who lived in a 12 room house with 2 servants were doing VERY well for themselves. This is an upper-middle class household.

Few points - agree that looking at them in terms of "class" and trying to compare to the present day is fairly pointless. Society is so different that you just can't.

But it is useful to understand where they were in society based on the what it was like at the time. This site: https://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/ is really useful. If you click on "census reports" then the year you can read the analysis which was done AT THE TIME to discuss the structure of society. You are looking for general report, then something about occupation. Clerks are categorised mainly on the sort of business they were working for, legal clerks in with the solicitors, business clerks in with the merchants.

Depending on the census you are looking at, the vast majority of men in the 1841/51 census are agricultural or manual labourers. This changes through the decades but still, clerk is a level above which indicates education, good levels of literacy.

I know a 'clerk' in more recent times was a junior-level admin ('clerical') worker, but depending on how long ago, a 'clerk' could mean 'scholar' and they could definitely be middle class and/or wealthy. During the Middle Ages, when scholarship and writing were limited to the clergy, clerk came to mean a scholar, especially one who could read and write, and thus serve as notary, secretary, accountant and recorder. Even nowadays the office of Town Clerk is an important part of the machinery of local government.

Clerk = clerk in holy orders, ie a Church of England clergyman. Chances are the 12 bed house is a vicarage.

And a cook and two housemaids is very middle class. Tenant farmers could be very prosperous people of high social status - most land was not owned by the people who farmed it.

@HomeCountyHome

A clerk ther was of Oxenford also, That unto logyk hadde longe ygo

Ah, happy days!

Not always. Legal clerks and mercantile clerks were definitely a "thing".

I’m not sure this is clear in today’s terms though. Comfortable is pretty wide. Some of my ancestors lived in Bermondsey at the turn of the C20. There were lots of them living in a few addresses, so quite crowded, but they all had local jobs as far as I know and I don’t think they’d be poor. Likewise my grandfather worked as a printer on magazines. They didn’t have any servants and they weren’t poor, but I’d have thought that comfortable people would have had a daily maid at least