Genealogy Chat

I think! - has anybody run into this ever?

I was doing a search for somebody in a TTF thread and ran across

Name: George Driver
Age: 23
Estimated birth year: abt 1858
Relation: Boarder
Gender: Male
Where born: Fulham, Middlesex, England
Civil parish: St George Martyr
>> Occupation: Assistant To Nunn & Sons (No Occ)


Had a look at the image (which is bad). The first person in the household list is shown as what does indeed look like "Assistant To Nunn & Sons", the ones below are dittos. A census worker has written diagonally across them "No Occ".

Now, was "Assistant to Nunn & Sons" a figure of speech meaning "None"?

Along the lines of "How are you getting there? - by Shank's mare", i.e. walking, I thought maybe. What do you do? I'm an assistant to Nunn & Sons, I'm between assignments.

Now I did google it of course, and there was a Nunn & Sons wine spirits dealers, but I wouldn't have thought their assistants would all be sharing digs. ;)

More to the point,who is keeping them?

"Keeping"? Ha, now you've put me in mind of someone else I looked at way back when as being, just possibly, the mother of that Ernest Monck (not-Monck) of mine. Upon viewing the image (another bad one), we see, written alongside a long list of names of women identified as "lodger":

"Refused to give the woman in charge of the Lodging House their various occupations
Let beds by the night no chance of getting information next day"

I think there's another word for the woman in charge of that lodging house.

Interestingly, they all seem to have given their ages and places of birth. They were in the area where Ernest's putative father had hanging out at one time, and I had visions of him having had a companion and her having a child and the child being sent home to wife to rear, and then the companion ending up, 30 years later, 50ish and cast off, in this list of unfortunate women, she was poor but she was honest ...

I just have to say this somewhere.

There's a thread just adjacent ... I would dearly love to join the hunt ... but I'm afraid I'm not managing to get past the second paragraph, and everyone being so sober about it. The subject's name is ...

Lettuce??

My sister gave her first daughter a flower name and wanted to continue the theme with her second. She really wanted another girl, but had to prepare for the other possibility. We came up with Basil and Narcissus, and that was about it. Maybe we should have offered up Eggplant and Sprout. Or just good down to earth Carrot. Anyhow, fortunately, she had another girl, and that was an end of it.

So I asked FreeBMD and there are indeed gazillions of records of people named Lettuce. They couldn't all have misspelled Letitia or such. Who names their kid Lettuce?? Must be one of those funny Brit tricks that didn't cross the pond. ;)

A lot of them must surely be Lettice?
I'm still grinning over Lettice Spittle Saint who marries a Tandy and ends up on Ancestry as Lettuce Spittle Landy.

Maureen

For some reason I know that Lettuce was a common name given by the Victorians. I may have read it but I may have seen it on a documentary on television.

I remember this name going back yonks (but then, I am older than you JC!) It was usually shortened to 'Letty'.

I googled for clarity:

Lettice.
Joy, gladness. It appeared in the form Lettice in medieval England. It is a rarely used today, and if chosen, would be in the latinized form "Letitia" rather than "Lettice" (perhaps also due to its similarity to the name of a vegetable).

I hasten to add that I do not recall medieval times! lol


Cx.

Back in 2005 there was a thread on beaver blower as an occupation.
The original thread has since gone.

Have a look at LETTICE KNOLLYS - Countess of Essex and Leicester

b. c1539.

I have a Lettice ? somewhere in my tree from the West Country.

I also have a Sage Job and have never seen the name Sage on another

tree. Has anyone else?

Reece

Beaver blower..........ha ha...........that'll keep me going all day!!

Lettice, yes! (I should have said that rather than Letitia at first.)

But Lettuce, that's a veg of another colour. ;)

I think when I retire and people ask me what I do (because hey, I look so young for my age, nobody will suspect I'm retired!), I'm going to start saying I'm an assistant to Nunn & Sons.


And now stop all this mocking of Canada's proud and honourable national symbol, eh?

Umm....since when was the lettuce a national symbol - proud or otherwise - of Canada??? lol



~~~~ moves hastily out of the way ~~~~


Cx.

Reece - Sage! I was trying to remember, I knew there was another herb we'd come up with for my sister besides Basil. Knew it wasn't Oregano ... ;)

I think we also suggested that if it was a boy she could just call him Herb.

FreeBMD actually does return a few dozen Sages -- on a general search, so some would be the same persn, b, m and d.

The middle names, where there are, all seem to make them girls.

Hi PP - yes indeed, that's all true. What I'm still wondering is why the census official wrote in big bold letters "No Occ" across the four people who claimed to be "Assistant to Nunn & Sons"!

I'm thinking it's a Victorian expression that has been lost - much as "Shank's mare" pretty much has today. ;)

I'm sure it was a tv documentary I saw but can't remember the other things they mentioned. I remembered Lettuce because it was so unusual and it was definitely not a misspelling but the vegetable.

I wonder:
Do you greet someone with the name Lettuce/Lettice as "Hello Old Vegetable" rather than "Hello Old Fruit" ?

Just a thought regarding Nunn and Sons.. The No Occ was probably written by the statistician afterwards. I'm thinking he wrote that because-well-there's no real occupation given,so he couldn't tally it up with any of the usual ones.
I imagine they were porters or something.

Although I do like your explanation better,Janey!!!!

Maureen

Nah, I don't like yours, Maureen. ;) It's entered as a genuine occupation, and as PigletsPal said, an assistant was a shop clerk basically. There are loads of assistants to drapers and whatnot in the censuses.

Search 1881 for
given name John
occupation Assistant (or Assistant to)

John Abbott is "Assistant in Ironmongery business", no annotation.
John F Atherton is "Assistant to Estate agent", no annotation.

Now granted, those describe the employer rather than naming it. Hmm. But there are some like John T Bailey, "Assistant to Head" where the head is an Earthenware Dealer, with no annotation. John Baker, "Assistant to his father" where the father is Post Master & Grocer is annotated Grocer ...

"No Occ" just seems a tad high-handed!


Brian! Hello, old fruit! Never heard that one myself, but happy to greet you. I'll bet you know what Shank's mare is. ;)


Maybe my explanation just occurs to me because of our movement to sabotage the 2006 Cdn census. The vile Conservative govt contracted the processing out to Diebold -- not just a US corporation getting access to all our personal info outside Canada, but Lockheed Martin, a particularly unpleasant US corporation! So we spilled coffee on our forms, wrote our names upside down, and like that, so the forms would have to be processed manually at much greater cost and Lockheed Martin might decide it wasn't worth the bother next time. ;)

http://www.vivelecanada.ca/content/page/7-census-boycott-action-timeline

Brian,

How about "Hello me Old Salad"??

Janey - my ancestor, Sage Job, was born in 1744 m. 1760!

Lettice Job b. 1806! All in Carms.

So what was wrong with Basil?

Reece

Janet is it because he lied about his occupation and they've just corrected it later? I've heard of that before.