A couple of my ancestors lost their entire family and were orphaned on the voyage to America from Germany in ~1740. The story told is that they became the property of the ship captain and were separated and sold as indentured servants. The orphans were siblings, an 8 year-old boy and a 5 year-old girl.
I'd like to know what life may have been like for them. What sort of services were young children able or required to perform? I know that times were different, but I struggle to imagine young children capable of doing much in the way of service. Were they likely educated? When people bought indentures, why would they buy contracts for children?
There were hundreds of indentured servants in Philadelphia in the mid 18th c. ( a very likely destination), so they would certainly not have been unusual. A long period of warfare in the Palatinate had also caused many farmers to flee to America, so it also was not unusual that they were German. And, it was not unusual for them to have become orphans en route. The transatlantic trip , typically lasting about six weeks, was often brutal, and especially brutal for the lowest class of passengers.
In an English parish new orphans would have come under the authority of the local officials, usually a priest and a judge, who would try hard to put them into service with another family. Note that being sent off was normal for any child close to adolescence: girls or boys would very typically be sent to another household or put into service at a local great house, or apprenticed to a craftsman. In either case, they would be moved into a family still, for most businesses were centered on a family- a girl apprenticed to be a hatmaker would be lodged in the house of the owner of the shop, and the wife of the owner would likely be seeing to her care. Parents and the hatmaker would sign a contract ( which is what an indenture was) stipulating various conditions- usually, the apprentice was to be obedient, hard-working, was not to enter into matrimony ( which also meant, have sex), the hatmaker would promise to feed and clothe them and get them to church, not abuse them, and give them something of an education- especially, teach them the "art and mystery" of the trade. If that contract was violated, it was possible for either party to appeal to a judge. And , the indentured child was not free- if an apprentice ran off before her time was done, the master of the shop could ( and often would) offer a reward for her return, and if found she could be jailed until reclaimed.
However, a very young orphan of 8 would not yet be capable of very much work, and I don't know how such indentures were handled- a typical indenture for a servant was four years, but a girl of 12 is likely only starting to be able to be a strong worker, so you'd suspect that her contract at 8 years was different. But unlike parents, a judge might not be trying to drive a hard bargain with the family that took her in, nor the ship's captain that sold her contract, and you suspect she'd get a pretty bad deal. Similarly, it has to be admitted that, compared to an orphan in an English village circa 1750, an indentured servant landing on the dock in Philadelphia would generally get bad treatment. The indentured could be bundled into a group and taken around to different towns and places for display and comparison, sometimes auctioned off like slaves ( and yes, chattel slavery was legal in Philadelphia).
England and most of western Europe was overpopulated, arable land for farming in short supply. There was a labor shortage in the colonies, especially of skilled labor, and some historians have made much of this shortage as creating much more opportunity for immigrants than they would have gotten in their home countries. But the actual records don't support this happening for the poorest. Though there was greater opportunity for getting farmland in the colonies for those who could scrape up some money for it, life there was very often a hard scrabble, and servants were expected to work quite hard, to be available to work whenever the master or mistress demanded it. One study found only about a third of the indentured arriving in Philadelphia mid- 18th c. could be located in the records after they were freed. It seems far more likely that for every Ben Franklin who cleverly advanced himself in Philadelphia and every German immigrant family who arrived able to buy some acreage in Lancaster county there were a hundred humble indentured Marys and Isaacs who completed their four years contract as servants and workers and then lived hand-to-mouth for the rest of their short lives.