Daily AncestorArmorer
An armorer made weapons or kept them in repair; in American records it usually means a man who maintained small arms for the army, a militia or an armory.
The word first meant a maker of body armor. As guns replaced armor it came to mean a maker of weapons, especially guns, and a military specialist in charge of the upkeep of small arms.
An armorer's duties resemble a civilian gunsmith's, but a gunsmith usually does the bigger jobs, such as building, rebuilding and altering firearms, while an armorer mostly replaces worn parts in standard weapons.
As seen in a recordOccupation column of the 1850 to 1880 census
Jno. Fuller, 36, Armorer, U.S. Armory
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Daily Ancestor. "Armorer." Dictionary of Old Record Words. https://dailyancestor.com/dictionary/occupations/armorer. Last checked 2026-10-10.