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Messages - Fiat Lux

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Yorkshire (West Riding) / Re: john gerard hudson
« on: Wednesday 02 March 16 00:24 GMT (UK)  »
John Gerard Hudson was born in Leeds about 1816 In 1838 he married Ann Green at St. Peter's Leeds. Some time during the next 10 years he moved to London where he died in 1875.

John's father was Richard Hudson. All I know of him is that his occupation was 'Painter'. I do not know who John's mother was. John's occupation was a "Paper Stainer"

Can any one help me at all?
Foulsham

Merry Christmas to you all!

I have found several references to Samuel Hudson, paper stainer, in Leeds between 1817 and 1848 (on which occasion Charles Kenworth stabbed him with a chisel, not fatally). Perhaps this is how your John Hudson became a paper stainer, which was a hand printer of wallpapers.  Paper stainers also hung the wallpaper in people's homes and worked closely with painters, i.e. house painters, so there could well be a family connection - nephew & uncle, perhaps?.  (The painters ground the pigments and mixed the raw materials to make their own paint in those days - there was no B&Q or Homebase to pop into.  Some of the pigments the paperstainers and painters worked with - especially but by no means exclusively the greens - were highly toxic, and there were serious concerns about the health risk even in the 1850s and 60s.)

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Occupation Interests / Re: Lath Render Maker?
« on: Thursday 18 July 13 00:03 BST (UK)  »
:) Hi,
         I am curious to know what this occupation was, I worked all my life in the timber/building trade and seem to sense that it may be something to do with preparing laths on ceilings and walls ready for the plasterer to plaster onto, I may be totally wrong, any ideas?
melm ???
There is much confusion between two entirely different verbs, 'to rend' and 'to render'.  What these guys did was rend, not render.  They split wood, they didn't plaster walls.  The guys who plastered (or rendered) walls would have used the lath render's product, which is an unfortunate coincidence that simply adds to the confusion, and it doesn't help that the verb 'to rend' is rarely used these days, other than in expressions like "let no man rend asunder".  Renders would rend wood asunder.  Gardeners were also customers, using laths to make trellis work.

A pale render would also have split wood, typically chestnut I believe, to make fences, the palings joined by twisted wire.  As a child in the 1950s in Lancashire our gardens were separated by such fences, and everyone referred to them as chestnut palings.

To call a lath render a lath renderer is as mistaken as calling a gardener a gardenerer or a footballer a footballerer, and the idea that he plastered walls arises from that error.  Sadly, it's almost commonplace to see the mistake on family history websites, but the Victorian census enumerators understood well enough they were lath renders.

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Occupation Interests / Re: Paper Stainer
« on: Monday 19 September 11 18:27 BST (UK)  »
There's nothing mysterious about paper stainers - they simply printed wall paper.  They were found in most of the larger towns - there were several in competion with each other in Leeds by the 1820s, for example. 

It seems to have emerged as a distinct trade in the mid 1700s.  Prior to that only the very wealthy had wall paper, from China, France or perhaps London.  The paper stainer block-printed the paper by hand on relatively short lengths of paper.  There was a register pin set in each corner of the wooden block (which they carved themselves) to help locate the second and subsequent strikes accurately, and in this way a repeat pattern was achieved.  The paper might then be overprinted in a second or third colour in just the same way.  They typically hung the paper for customers as well.  A good provincial paper stainer would offer London and even French papers as well as his own.

Until 1836 each sheet was taxed, and paper stainers also had to purchase a licence.  Sadly, The National Archive assures me none of these taxation records have survived.

By the mid 1800s the paper stainers were being driven out of business by rotary-printed paper in long rolls, printed from engraved metal plates, as we know it today.  My Hargrave ancestors printed wall paper in Leeds in the traditional mannner for 65 years but called it a day in 1847. Two other paper stainers went bankrupt in Leeds in the late 1840s - a sign of the times, perhaps - though some struggled on.   A handful of people around the world have revived the craft and are producing wall papers in the manner of the old paper stainers.

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Occupation Interests / Re: Occupation: Lath Renderer
« on: Tuesday 16 August 11 01:32 BST (UK)  »
The occupation is lath render, not lath renderer. 

To render means to offer.  To rend means to split.  Both words have largely fallen out of use, but they linger on in phrases like "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's" and "What God has joined together let no man rend assunder." 

A plasterer certainly renders plaster, but a lath render certainly doesn't render wood, he rends it - he splits it into laths.  The laths would be used for trellis work or to make plaster & lath walls, and I suspect that this partly explains the confusion between render & rend.  To call a lath render a renderer is like calling a plasterer a plastererer.  It's a common mistake today, but I think you'll find the Victorian census enumerators usually got it right.

As if to prove my point, the spell-checker on this site has just (correctly) challenged renderer as well as plastererer.

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