Poor Farm, orphanage important parts of early social safety net

If you’ve traced an ancestor to the Colonial era you may have run across the phrase “warning out.” If your ancestor received one you may be puzzled what he or she did to deserve a “get out of Dodge” notice. If your ancestor continued to reside in that town and didn’t leave after the warning it may be even more puzzling. So what was going on? What was a “warning out”?
A warning out wasn’t a moral judgment indicating unacceptable behavior. It was a caution. When a person moved into a village, the officers of the town would automatically issue a warning out which simply meant should the newcomer be injured or unable to provide for himself and his family he wouldn’t receive financial assistance from his new village. He would have to return to his former home for help. Once the newcomer established residency or proved he had means the warning out was rescinded.
Later warnings out were replaced with institutions such as orphanages and town farms where the poor were sent. The latter were usually located at the extreme limits of a town as far out of sight of most citizens as possible. Anyone who became indigent, a widow and her children for example, or an elderly childless person or the disabled, were sent to the Poor Farm.
If a town didn’t have a Poor Farm those in need of help, such as orphaned children, were “bid” for at town meetings. A resident could bid to provide care and food to someone and the town would reimburse the bidder. The same bidding practice was done to provide board for teachers at the town schools. Imagine how you would feel knowing your room and food were being provided by the lowest bidder!
People who needed help weren’t usually forcibly removed from their new communities as they had been in Elizabethan England. Newcomers would receive what help was absolutely necessary. The Overseers of the Poor, elected at town meetings, were then obligated to retrieve the money spent from the aid recipient’s former town. This effort often resulted in a great deal of correspondence between the two communities.
Sometimes that reimbursement was easily collected once an itemized list of costs was sent. In other cases the Overseers would spend weeks or months trying to pry the money out of the other town’s tightfisted grasp and I suspect sometimes they were unable to collect anything.
Poor Farm records show up in town meetings (and later in annual town reports) as do bids for the care of those unable to work anymore. Overseer of the Poor records were kept at the town level though many are now at historical societies. For example, Brunswick’s Poor Farm records are in their historical society and the Dover-Foxcroft Historical Society has a smattering of correspondence from the Foxcroft Overseers of the Poor. In an age before a social safety net injured workers often had to ask for help to survive. Your ancestor may have been one of them and hopefully you can find records if that were the case.
Nancy Battick is a Dover-Foxcroft native who has researched genealogy for over 30 years. She is past president of the Maine Genealogical Society, author of several genealogical articles and co-transcribed the Vital Records of Dover-Foxcroft. Nancy holds a MA in History from UM and lives in DF with her husband, Jack, another avid genealogist. You can contact Nancy at nbattick@roadrunner.com.