Professions
Old family cards or death certificates often contain interesting things that are not always included in a family tree. For example, the exact time of death, an address or whether someone was transferred to the ‘infirmary’. Or the profession of the person reporting a deceased person to the municipality.
There were a lot of professions that we don’t know anymore or are not called that anymore. At the beginning of the last century, for example, a funeral director was called a ‘court attendant’.
Below is a list of such professions found in our sources:
| Profession | Description |
|---|---|
| Retainer | After a ‘douwer’ had pushed a red-hot rivet into a hole in a ship’s hull, the retainer stopped the rivet with a heavy hammer. On the other side of the plate, a ‘clinker’ struck the nail. After cooling, the nail had shrunk and the plates were stuck together. |
| bookbinder | craft and art of holding together sheets of written paper. |
| butter deliverer | someone who brought butter to the door. |
| cafe owner | someone who served drinks to groups of people, mainly before 2020 (after that, a reigning coronavirus made this impossible). |
| Classifier | someone who cleans ships (after 1950 mainly oil). |
| maid | someone who does domestic work as an employee. |
| Grainweger | someone who weighed sacks of grain, their work was made redundant by the rise of grain elevators. |
| IJzerdraaier | Someone who uses a lathe to make objects from iron bars, for example a screw. |
| wood turner | Someone who cuts objects out of wood with a lathe and a chisel, for example a spinning top or a chair leg. The profession still exists. |
| boiler maker | Someone who welds parts of (steam) boilers together. |
| Coal worker | someone who loads and unloads coal in a factory. |
| coppersmith | someone who processes soft metals such as copper, brass or zinc. |
| Grocer | trader in dry foods, replaced by supermarket. |
| Letterzetter | someone who arranged lead blocks with a letter on them into words and sentences. An entire page full could then be printed on paper. |
| Milk dealer | milkman, he brought fresh milk to the door. |
| state constable | law enforcement officer in small rural communities. |
| ship sheller | carpenter, who provides the inside of ships with eg windows, stairs and doors. |
| Ship vowel | someone who connected steel plates with clinkers for the walls of a ship. |
| coal worker | coal man, someone who brought coal, used for heating. |
| Bars | someone who, on a steamer, takes the coal from a bunker and takes it to the furnace (the Dutch word ‘Tremmer’ comes from the English ’to trim’). |
| Carter | someone who drives a vehicle pulled by animals. |
| sand former | someone who made molds from sand into which copper was poured to make engine parts. |
| Without a job | housewife or stopped working. |
Many sources contain occupations related to dock labour, which makes sense when you consider that many Sparrebomen lived in or around the port city of Rotterdam.