Introduction

Rural artisans constituted an important part of early nineteenth-century rural society in the Grand Duchy of Finland. Even though the rural population maintained self-sufficient households, the contributions of professional artisans were nonetheless needed.

The authorities regarded craftwork as an urban occupation, but in an agrarian society where the few existing towns were small and distant, rural crafts had to be tolerated and accepted as necessary. Thus, unlike many other European countries,1 rural artisans in Finland constituted an official institution under the so-called parish artisan system. In this system, artisans had to apply for a work licence from the governor and pay special craft taxes. Rural artisans did not belong to craft guilds, and their prestige and appreciation were not equal to the urban masters, but they were locally esteemed.2 Alongside the parish artisans, there were also unofficial artisans who were usually unaffected by legal restrictions.3

In the Finnish countryside, the most common craft occupation was that of the smith, usually a blacksmith, who did all the metalwork. Smiths became more common because people started to use more iron in their tools and household items, and the need for farrier work was on the increase. The second and third largest occupational groups in the countryside were usually tailors and shoemakers. The common people of the countryside could make ordinary clothes and shoes, but tailors made men’s clothes and fine attire for women. Likewise, shoemakers made finer quality shoes. Rising standards of living and expanding consumption increased the number of tailors and shoemakers (Ranta 1978, 206–211; Gadd 1991, 144; Laakso 1994, 76; Uotila 2014, 117–122).

In early modern society, it was natural that a son followed his father’s trade. This was a matter of societal stability and maintaining the right kind of social order. It was also practical to invest in the children’s future by transferring the family’s craft knowledge and skills to the offspring, thus providing for the future care of elders as well. However, not all the sons of artisans became artisans in turn, and practising a craft was not option for daughters since girls were not permitted to become artisans themselves.

This chapter studies the careers of artisans’ children in rural Finland and discusses the ways in which artisans’ training practices influenced knowledge transfer within their families. How often was the occupation handed down from father to son? What was the daughters’ position in an artisan household—did they play a role in knowledge transfer?

The chapter focuses particularly on artisan families in Hollola, an old, centrally located parish in Southern Finland. In the nineteenth century, Hollola was a purely agricultural area with no noteworthy industrial activity. The closest towns lay more than sixty kilometres away, which is why the economic life of the parish was not affected by the existence of urban artisans.5 The research group consists of over 200 artisans’ children born between 1780 and 1820. Their working lives started before 1850, which makes it possible to follow their future occupations and marriage choices.6

Methodologically, the study is a collective biography or—more precisely— a prosopography. This method entails studying a definable group that is based on a large population of individuals with the aim, if possible, of collecting the same data on everyone and treating each person in the same way for the sake of comparison.7 The prosopographical approach has proven useful especially when investigating the informal side of rural artisanship.

Parish registers, or communion records, are used as the main source. Although the records were originally lists of persons attending Holy Communion, they can be used as population records as well. Importantly, they registered the whole family.8 Minors, children who had not completed confirmation classes and been duly confirmed, were entered in this area into the children’s book.9 The clergy were also ordered to keep accurate records of births, deaths, and marriages, which were listed in so-called history books, where the status of an individual was often recorded alongside his/her name. Despite some shortcomings, by bringing together scarce or abundant information and forming a collection of short biographies, it is possible to follow the life-course of artisans and—here especially—their children’s careers.

Previous research in Finland has largely focused on urban guild artisans (e.g. Vainio-Korhonen 1994; Juutila 1997).10 Moreover, attention has usually been paid only to those who became artisans, eliminating the sons who did not make it in the profession. Likewise, the role of artisans’ daughters has not received much attention. This exclusion is partly the result of the challenges that research on large quantities of people and sources entail: it is time-consuming to trace the children’s career choices. The current growth in digital archives and databases, however, has made family searches easier to conduct, and it is now more straightforward to continue examining the fate and life stories of artisans’ children in neighbouring parishes and beyond.