“The gateway to Europe are the indentured servants,” observed Nathan Murphy MA, AG, of FamilySearch International. Murphy gave a talk titled, “My Ancestor Came to Colonial America as an Indentured Servant” during the Thursday morning session of the National Genealogical Society Conference held in Richmond, Virginia. “The point is, indentured servants are the immigrants that help trace family back to the old country and extend the pedigree,” explained Murphy. “Identifying immigrants is the first step to tracing origins.” Following are Murphy’s tips for finding and tracing an indentured servant in your own line, with a focus on English ancestry. Who Were They? An indentured servant is someone who agreed to serve as a servant for a given amount of time in America in exchange for free passage to the Americas. According to Murphy’s lecture, 3 out of 4 immigrants to colonial America were indentured servants. From England, the major ports of departure were London, Bristol and Liverpool, with most going to Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Barbados. According to Murphy, a study of London records concluded that the top 3 reasons for choosing indentured servitude were: 1) fatherless (no inheritance), 2) friendless (no social contacts to obtain work), and 3) released from prison. Murphy explained not all were voluntary servants. Some were “Redemptioners.” These were more common amongst German colonists. Redemptioners were people who agreed to pay passage upon arrival (perhaps family in America had already paid). If they couldn’t come up with money, they were sold as indentured servants. Others may have been convicts who were exiled from the home country for crimes. How Do I Find Genealogical Records About Them? The following table, based on the one presented by Murphy, explains potential sources of family history information.
First Steps in Indentured Servant Family Research Murphy suggests using the following sources when you learn you have an ancestor who was an indentured servant. Uncommon Name For uncommon names, try the Guild of One-Name Studies. Instead of researching a particular lineage, these researches focus on a particular surname and find all persons with that name and related sources listing that name. Other sources, such as marriage records or burial databases may be available at FamilySearch.org, at Ancestry.co.uk, or at Findmypast.co.uk. These sources may point to a geographic region with high concentrations of a specific name. You can then try narrowing your search to records from that location. Websites, such as FamilySearch.org may have collated potential immigrant arrival sources on one page. Surname distribution maps at Public Profiler may also point to geographic regions in which to narrow your search. Servant Contracts Some contract records still survive in England, with the largest having been published. Murphy recommended you try Filby’s Passengers and Immigration List Index. Other potential sources are the Immigrant Servants Database and Virtual Jamestown. Research the Master American planters originally from England may have returned home to find servants. Start with genealogy record sources in their home town in the mother country. Search Near Departure Ports According to Murphy, surveys show that the majority of indentured servants came from within 60 miles of their departure port. If you know the port your ancestor departed from, try a surname search in surrounding jurisdictions. What’s the Point? “Tracing these laborers’ lives and origins will contribute to identifying more ancestors and understanding the geographic and social origins of many American colonists,” noted Murphy in the Conference Syllabus. Proudly claim your indentured servant heritage! Do you have a story in your family about an indentured servant? Share your stories of your heritage on FamilySearch.org.
 This research guide provides lists of resources and search strategies to help you discover materials related to early American papers of indenture, apprenticeship agreements, and records of transported convicts in the Library of Congress and beyond. Indentured ServantsIndentures are agreements between two parties about long-term work. The length of servitude might be a specified number of years or until the servant reached a certain age. Some people indentured themselves in order to gain passage to America or to escape debt and poverty. Others, including convicts, were sold into indenture upon arrival. Indentures are a type of contract that was torn in two, so each party could have a portion. Fitting the parts together again at the fulfillment of the contract was proof of the authenticity of the papers. Indentures were used for apprenticeship agreements as well as for service agreements. You might look for indentures in the archives and courthouses of cities and counties where transported persons arrived. ApprenticesTraditionally, young people have been bound out to a master as an apprentice to learn a trade from him. The master would feed, clothe and instruct the apprentice in the trade, and the apprentice would provide labor and watch out for his master's interests. At the end of his apprenticeship, the young person received clothes, tools, and became a journeyman who could work for himself. Look for indentures of apprenticeship in city and county courthouses. Transported ConvictsThose who were convicted of felonies sometimes escaped a sentence of death when they were sentenced to transportation to the Americas. This solved two problems for the government: it provided a much-needed workforce for the colonies, and it got criminals out of the prisons and off the streets. England was not the only government that transported criminals to the Americas. Sweden sent political prisoners to New Sweden, now called Delaware; the Dutch sent vagrants and criminals to New York; and the French also transported criminals to New France. England sent vanquished political foes from Scotland and Ireland. The mayors of London and Liverpool regularly gathered up urchins from the streets of their cities to be sent to America and sold into indentured servitude. Convicts who had been sold into indentured servitude, and who were making good in their new lives, were sometimes politely referred to as "servants" to avoid stigma. Look for records of trials and sentencing in the court records and archives of the government that convicted and transported these individuals. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a variety of labor market institutions developed to facilitate the movement of labor in response to the opportunities created by American factor proportions. While some immigrants migrated on their own, the majority of immigrants were either indentured servants or African slaves. Because of the cost of passage—which exceeded half a year’s income for a typical British immigrant and a full year’s income for a typical German immigrant—only a small portion of European migrants could afford to pay for their passage to the Americas (Grubb 1985a). They did so by signing contracts, or “indentures,” committing themselves to work for a fixed number of years in the future—their labor being their only viable asset—with British merchants, who then sold these contracts to colonists after their ship reached America. Indentured servitude was introduced by the Virginia Company in 1619 and appears to have arisen from a combination of the terms of two other types of labor contract widely used in England at the time: service in husbandry and apprenticeship (Galenson 1981). In other cases, migrants borrowed money for their passage and committed to repay merchants by pledging to sell themselves as servants in America, a practice known as “redemptioner servitude (Grubb 1986). Redemptioners bore increased risk because they could not predict in advance what terms they might be able to negotiate for their labor, but presumably they did so because of other benefits, such as the opportunity to choose their own master, and to select where they would be employed. Although data on immigration for the colonial period are scattered and incomplete a number of scholars have estimated that between half and three quarters of European immigrants arriving in the colonies came as indentured or redemptioner servants. Using data for the end of the colonial period Grubb (1985b) found that close to three-quarters of English immigrants to Pennsylvania and nearly 60 percent of German immigrants arrived as servants. A number of scholars have examined the terms of indenture and redemptioner contracts in some detail (see, e.g., Galenson 1981; Grubb 1985a). They find that consistent with the existence of a well-functioning market, the terms of service varied in response to differences in individual productivity, employment conditions, and the balance of supply and demand in different locations. The other major source of labor for the colonies was the forced migration of African slaves. Slavery had been introduced in the West Indies at an early date, but it was not until the late seventeenth century that significant numbers of slaves began to be imported into the mainland colonies. From 1700 to 1780 the proportion of blacks in the Chesapeake region grew from 13 percent to around 40 percent. In South Carolina and Georgia, the black share of the population climbed from 18 percent to 41 percent in the same period (McCusker and Menard, 1985, p. 222). Galenson (1984) explains the transition from indentured European to enslaved African labor as the result of shifts in supply and demand conditions in England and the trans-Atlantic slave market. Conditions in Europe improved after 1650, reducing the supply of indentured servants, while at the same time increased competition in the slave trade was lowering the price of slaves (Dunn 1984). In some sense the colonies’ early experience with indentured servants paved the way for the transition to slavery. Like slaves, indentured servants were unfree, and ownership of their labor could be freely transferred from one owner to another. Unlike slaves, however, they could look forward to eventually becoming free (Morgan 1971). Over time a marked regional division in labor market institutions emerged in colonial America. The use of slaves was concentrated in the Chesapeake and Lower South, where the presence of staple export crops (rice, indigo and tobacco) provided economic rewards for expanding the scale of cultivation beyond the size achievable with family labor. European immigrants (primarily indentured servants) tended to concentrate in the Chesapeake and Middle Colonies, where servants could expect to find the greatest opportunities to enter agriculture once they had completed their term of service. While New England was able to support self-sufficient farmers, its climate and soil were not conducive to the expansion of commercial agriculture, with the result that it attracted relatively few slaves, indentured servants, or free immigrants. These patterns are illustrated in Table 1, which summarizes the composition and destinations of English emigrants in the years 1773 to 1776. Table 1 English Emigration to the American Colonies, by Destination and Type, 1773-76
Source: Grubb (1985b, p. 334). ReferencesDunn, Richard S. “Servants and Slaves: The Recruitment and Employment of Labor.” In Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era, edited by Jack P. Greene and J.R. Pole. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984. Galenson, David W. White Servitude in Colonial America. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Galenson, David W. “The Rise and Fall of Indentured Servitude in the Americas: An Economic Analysis.” Journal of Economic History 44, no. 1 (1984): 1-26. Grubb, Farley. “The Market for Indentured Immigrants: Evidence on the Efficiency of Forward Labor Contracting in Philadelphia, 1745-1773.” Journal of Economic History 45, no. 4 (1985a): 855-68. Grubb, Farley. “The Incidence of Servitude in Trans-Atlantic Migration, 1771-1804.” Explorations in Economic History 22 (1985b): 316-39. Grubb, Farley. “Redemptioner Immigration to Pennsylvania: Evidence on Contract Choice and Profitability.” Journal of Economic History 46, no. 2 (1986): 407-18. McCusker, John J. and Russell R. Menard. The Economy of British America: 1607-1789. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985. Morgan, Edmund S. “The Labor Problem at Jamestown, 1607-18.” American Historical Review 76 (1971): 595-611. Citation: Rosenbloom, Joshua. “Indentured Servitude in the Colonial U.S.”. EH.Net Encyclopedia, edited by Robert Whaples. March 16, 2008. URL http://eh.net/encyclopedia/indentured-servitude-in-the-colonial-u-s/ |
Many of those who came to colonial America as indentured servants were
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