Iron Heater

[bookworm1]

What exactly was the occupation "iron heater", It was probably to do with iron and steel making, or heavy engineering, and may now be obsolete. It came up as an occupation in family history research.

[Lil O'lady]

Just a sideways suggestion: have you transliterated this from handwriting on the original census page? Or has someone else? The reason I ask, is on one of the online censuses, an ancestor of mine was put down as 'hatter' but in looking at the original, it is actually 'slater' in slap-dash copper-plate.
So if yer man was really an iron-beater.....?

Plus, individual trades had lots of unique terms - like in textile mills you'd have a 'plaiter-down' - so you need to talk to someone with a detailed knowledge of the iron industry in the 1800s. Kelham Island Museum in Sheffield?

[bookworm1]

Thankyou, Lil O' Lady, for your most helpful, and interesting suggestions. I will try to contact the Museum for a definitive answer. However, I do not think it is a mis-reading of "iron beater", since a Google search for the term produced a number of sites referring to different people in censuses (mostly US ones) described as iron heaters, and also a "Survey of 230 Male Wage-earners In Ohio, 1879, Reported in the 3rd Annual Report of the Ohio Bureau of Statistics of Labor" recorded 1 iron heater, as well as 1 iron & steel temperer, 1 iron melter, 2 iron boilers, 2 iron workers, and 12 iron molders, but strangely, no iron beaters; though when I googled that, it did appear as an occupation in 2 sites referring to UK censuses.
Bookworm 1