Daily AncestorRagpicker
A ragpicker collected rags and other scrap from streets and rubbish to sell, a poor city livelihood before modern recycling.
Old cloth, bones, bottles, paper and metal all had resale value. Ragpickers gathered them on foot or with a handcart and sold them to dealers, who passed rags on to be made into paper or board.
The work was among the poorest paid, and whole immigrant families sometimes did it together. In a city directory the dealer may be listed as a junk or rag dealer, a step up from the picker.
As seen in a recordOccupation column of the 1900 to 1940 census
Giuseppe Esposito, 50, Rag picker, Italy
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Daily Ancestor. "Ragpicker." Dictionary of Old Record Words. https://dailyancestor.com/dictionary/occupations/ragpicker. Last checked 2026-10-01.