What Would Become of Young Joseph Akley?

When Timothy Winship died at the end of 1767, the apprentice he’d taken in for Boston’s Overseers of the Poor, Joseph Akley, was fifteen years old.

Though Joseph had been living with and working for the peruke maker for five years, he was still five years short of his majority.

He didn’t have the legal standing, and he probably didn’t have all the skills, to set up his own shop.

Joseph did have parents nearby in Boston. However, that family had its own troubles. In the spring of 1768, three younger Akley children were admitted into the alsmhouse, to be bound out to masters outside Boston by the fall.

So what happened to Joseph? I haven’t found many clues from the next few years, and that’s a good thing. Because Joseph did not reappear on the Overseers of the Poor records, unlike his parents and his brother Thomas.

It seems likely that Joseph was a bright lad. Winship chose him as an apprentice ahead of his older brother, and for a profession that required social graces.

Furthermore, the Winship shop was still a going concern when the peruke-maker died in 1767. Timothy Winship still had his shop and his tools. His estate owed wages to George Bellamy, presumably a journeyman.

As executrix, the widow Elizabeth Winship collected on debts; paid off creditors like Bellamy, landlord Hugh Hall, Dr. Nathaniel Perkins, and Dr. Joseph Warren; and came out ahead. She still had her husband’s goods and a pew at King’s Chapel. She continued to sponsor friends’ baptisms there.

I suspect that Elizabeth Winship or other wigmakers in her husband’s circle saw potential in Joseph, already partly trained, as well as an obligation. Someone kept him on as an apprentice, but because that was a private arrangement we don’t know who.

The biggest clues about how Joseph Akley weathered the death of his master is how he appeared in Boston records after the Revolutionary War. As of 1796, he was established as a hairdresser on “Hanover street, corner Wing’s Lane.” He owned a little real estate.

Furthermore, in adult life Akley was an Anglican/Episcopalian. His parents were Congregationalists, like most Bostonians, but he joined the denomination of the Winship family. That suggests how much influence his apprenticeship had on him.

No doubt Joseph Akley faced some challenges after Winship’s death. Being sued for tarring and feathering a royal official was one. Joseph may have had to grow up quickly. He married in May 1771, a few weeks short of his nineteenth birthday, and was a father before he turned twenty-one. But he was able to support that family with the skills he learned.

COMING UP: What about that lawsuit?