Presentations on farming ancestors tend to focus on those who owned real estate. It can be a challenge to research those farmers who rented their ground or those who worked in agriculture as farm laborers. In this presentation we focus on those two types of individuals. Farm renters and farm laborers tend to leave fewer records–we’ll focus on research strategies directed towards them. They can be challenging to research in a way that landowners are not.
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2 Responses
There were sharecroppers too, my in-laws were sharecroppers. They were somewhere between being employees and renters.
They lived on the land and raised crops. They got to keep a share of the sale of the crops and the landowner kept the rest.
Good reminder. We’ll be covering that as well–since as you say it’s in that range between employees and renters.