A Glossary of Obsolete Occupations

What the job titles in old census, directory, and draft records actually mean



An occupation column looks simple until the word inside it stops meaning what it used to. Census takers, city directory publishers, and clerks all wrote down the job title a person gave them, in the language of that decade, not ours. Some titles vanished with the trade; others just changed spelling, status, or meaning, and sometimes the same word meant 2 different jobs on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Here is what the terms you are most likely to meet in U.S. genealogy research actually mean, and why the wording shifted.


Records That May List Occupations


An occupation can turn up in far more than the census. These are the records that most often name one:


  • Federal census records: occupations were recorded by name beginning in 1850, for free males over 15, and for every person over 15 from 1870 on. Earlier censuses counted household members in broad categories only.
  • City directories: usually give a name, an address, and a trade, and they were published year after year.
  • Wills, deeds, and probate files: a man is often identified by his trade, and inventories list the tools of it.
  • Court records, tax lists, and apprenticeship or indenture bonds.
  • Death certificates and many marriage records.
  • Newspapers: obituaries, business advertisements, and local notices.
  • Passenger lists and naturalization papers.
  • Draft registration cards: World War I cards asked for occupation directly; World War II cards asked instead for an employer's name and place of business.
  • Military service and pension files.
  • Social Security applications, filed at post offices beginning in November 1936.
  • Church records, school records, and fraternal or union membership records.


Terms You Will Actually Meet


  • Blacksmith: worked iron at a forge, making and mending tools, hardware, wagon fittings, and horseshoes; nearly every settlement had one.
  • Cabinetmaker: built furniture, and in many towns also made the coffins.
  • Chandler: originally a candle maker; the word widened to any merchant supplying a trade, as in ship chandler.
  • Collier: mined coal in England; in early America the same word often meant someone who burned wood into charcoal.
  • Cooper: made and repaired wooden barrels, casks, and tubs bound with iron hoops.
  • Cordwainer: a shoemaker who built new shoes from fine leather, originally the cordovan leather of Cordoba, Spain; a cobbler only repaired old ones.
  • Currier: finished leather after the tanner had cured it, working oil and grease into the hide to make it supple.
  • Domestic or servant: worked in another family's household and was usually enumerated within that household rather than with their own family.
  • Drayman: drove a dray, a flatbed cart without fixed sides, hauling beer, coal, or other heavy goods.
  • Fuller: cleaned and thickened raw wool cloth by soaking, beating, and pressing it, the trade behind the surnames Fuller, Walker, and Tucker.
  • Hostler (or ostler): cared for horses at an inn or livery stable; American railroads later used the same word for the worker who serviced locomotives in the engine house.
  • Husbandman: a farmer of lesser means, generally working land he rented rather than owned.
  • Joiner: a woodworker who made doors, windows, stairs, and furniture, finer work than the framing a house carpenter did.
  • Keeping house: not a trade at all, but the standard census entry for a woman running her own household; "at home" generally meant a child or young adult living in someone else's.
  • Limner: a portrait painter in the American colonies, usually self-taught and traveling from town to town for commissions.
  • Mariner: worked aboard ships, a common entry in coastal and river-town records.
  • Mason: built in stone or brick, including chimneys, foundations, and walls.
  • Miller: ran a grist or flour mill, grinding the neighborhood's grain and usually keeping a share of it as his pay.
  • Milliner: originally an 18th-century merchant selling fine imported goods from Milan; by the 1800s the word had narrowed to a maker and seller of women's hats.
  • Peddler or hawker: traveled from place to place selling goods from a pack, a cart, or a wagon.
  • Planter: a farmer working on a larger scale, most often seen in Southern records.
  • Saddler or harness maker: made and repaired saddles, harness, and other leather gear for horses.
  • Scrivener: wrote and copied documents for people who could not write, and often drew up wills and deeds before the profession of lawyer was common.
  • Sexton: maintained the church building, rang the bells, and dug graves.
  • Tanner: turned raw hides into leather using bark tannin, a trade usually placed at the edge of town because of the smell.
  • Teamster: drove a team of horses or oxen pulling a wagon; the word did not mean a truck driver until well into the 20th century.
  • Tie maker: hewed and shaped wooden railroad ties by hand, a job easy to mistake, on a faded census page, for someone who made neckties.
  • Wainwright: built wagons and carts; a wheelwright made or repaired just the wheels.
  • Weaver: wove cloth on a hand loom, often at home, before textile mills took the work over.
  • Whitesmith: worked in tin and other light metals, or filed and polished iron rather than forging it.
  • Yeoman: a farmer who owned the land he worked, a common self-description in colonial deeds and wills.


Why the Same Job Wears More Than One Name


Immigrant households sometimes kept the occupational term from the old country rather than translating it, so a German farmer might appear in a family record as an Ackersmann or an Achtelbauer, a farmer working an eighth of a full-sized holding, terms no English glossary will have. Enumerators wrote down what they heard, not what was on file, so spelling drifted from one census to the next and occasionally produced real confusion, as when an Oklahoma father and son were recorded on the 1910 census as Tie Makers, cutters of wooden railroad ties, not neckwear manufacturers. Before 1850, occupation was recorded for the household as a whole rather than for each person, so a tally mark next to manufactures could belong to the head of household, an adult son, or a boarder.


Where the Term Falls Short


Some occupation words are less an obsolete term than a moving target. Laborer, farmer, and at home were used as catch-alls even in their own decade, and they can sometimes hide real skilled work, particularly for women, whose paid work often went unrecorded even when it supported the household. A city directory only covers people who had a fixed address and answered the publisher's canvasser, so boarders, day laborers, and transient workers are routinely missing from it or folded into someone else's entry.


Looking Up a Term You Don't Recognize


An internet search is often quicker than looking a term up in a glossary, particularly when the word is simply misspelled rather than obsolete. FamilySearch's United States Business and Occupations wiki page is another good resource.



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