Daily AncestorLandlord
A landlord owned property rented to others; in older records the word can also mean the keeper of an inn, tavern or hotel.
The usual sense is the owner of a house, farm, land or rooms leased to a tenant; a woman in the role was a landlady. In Britain the word also long meant the person who ran a pub.
Census instructions for 1870 and 1880 used landlord in the second way: in a hotel, the landlord was written first as head of the hotel family, just as a jailer headed a jail. A landlord in a town census can therefore be an innkeeper rather than an owner of rental houses.
As seen in a recordOccupation column of the 1850 to 1880 census
Jacob Mertz, 51, Landlord, Hotel
How to cite this page
Daily Ancestor. "Landlord." Dictionary of Old Record Words. https://dailyancestor.com/dictionary/occupations/landlord. Last checked 2026-10-10.