The New York Times - NOV. 10, 2014
Two months ago, I discovered that my grandmother, Ida, had been a verdingkind, or “contract child,” in Switzerland in the 1890s.
A
transcript from the archives in Teuffenthal, a small village south of
Bern, the capital, confirmed that Ida, an orphan, had been contracted as
an unpaid domestic servant to a woman in a neighboring village. The
Swiss authorities used the nine-year-old’s meager inheritance to pay the
woman 120 Swiss francs a year; Ida’s seven-year-old brother, Fritz, was
made to pay 70 Swiss francs to fund his hardscrabble life as a
farmhand. They both “had the appearance of being very hungry,” the
document chillingly noted. They were kept under contract for about eight
years.
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