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From: "Nathan Murphy" <>
Subject: Re: [US-SHIPS-PRE1820] 10,000 Indentured Servants on New Website
Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2007 12:11:05 -0700
References: <000001c7544d$cbfbcbc0$fe01a8c0@price.local><B1652235D53B10499B28752981C2E8910E631C@server.price.local><000001c75521$661e6c20$fe01a8c0@price.local>


Hi Helen,

First, let me say, I'd be very interested in hearing about the indentured servants you have studied.

There is a general consensus among historians that 75% of the immigrants came over as "immigrant servants" (i.e., indentured servants, transported convicts, or redemptioners), see Wesley Frank Craven. White, Red and Black: The Seventeenth Century Virginian. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1971.

England only has a few years of what approach "complete" passenger departure lists during the Colonial Era: 1637, and 1773 to 1775. These lists have been thoroughly analyzed by Harvard professor Bernard Bailyn and one of his students Alison Games. Each study came up with similar statistics on the servant-free immigrant ratio.

See:

Bernard Bailyn. Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986.

Alison Games. Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999.



Nathan W. Murphy, MA, AG®
Researcher and Marketing Director
Price & Associates, Inc.
http://www.pricegen.com



-----Original Message-----
From: on behalf of Helen Dearing
Sent: Tue 2/20/2007 12:00 PM
To:
Subject: Re: [US-SHIPS-PRE1820] 10,000 Indentured Servants on New Website

Dear Nathan Murphy:

Do you mean that 75% are shown on ships passenger lists as "servants"? Or did they become servants in the New World by selling themselves or being sold into indentured servitude. I am really interested in the indentured servants in the colonies, because it looks as though all but one of my immigrants went into indentured servitude.

Helen Dearing

----- Original Message -----
From: Nathan Murphy
To:
Sent: Tuesday, February 20, 2007 12:38 AM
Subject: Re: [US-SHIPS-PRE1820] 10,000 Indentured Servants on New Website


Something interesting that I've learned is that approximately 75% of Colonial America's immigrants (South of New England) came to the colonies as servants. That being the case, most of us with ancestors in America before 1800 should have ancestors who were imported servants.

Nathan W. Murphy, MA, AG®
Researcher and Marketing Director
Price & Associates, Inc.
http://www.pricegen.com

________________________________

From: on behalf of Nathan Murphy
Sent: Mon 2/19/2007 10:45 AM
To:
Subject: Re: [US-SHIPS-PRE1820] 10,000 Indentured Servants on New Website



ANNOUNCEMENT: Free Online Database of Indentured Servants, Redemptioners, and Transported Convicts

PROJECT TITLE: Immigrant Servants Database

PROJECT URL: www.immigrantservants.com <http://www.immigrantservants.com/>;

IF YOUR ANCESTOR WAS AN INDENTURED SERVANT, MR. MURPHY WOULD LOVE TO HEAR FROM YOU. THE NAMES OF MANY SHIPS THAT BROUGHT INDENTURED SERVANTS TO COLONIAL AMERICA ARE INCLUDED.

DESCRIPTION: Nathan W. Murphy, Ph.D. candidate at the University of Utah, is using skills he developed as a social historian and professional genealogist to reconstruct a passenger arrival list of indentured servants coming to Colonial America. For more about Mr. Murphy, see http://www.pricegen.com/staff2.htm


The project will continue for several years. It follows in the spirit of Peter Wilson Coldham's efforts to publish passenger departure lists from sources in the United Kingdom and Ireland for indentured servants and transported convicts, but focuses on tapping American sources of immigrant servant arrivals to complement the UK data.

Murphy, an Accredited Genealogist who resides in Salt Lake City, Utah, has quick access to Colonial American and European sources through the Family History Library. He has received permission from the major publishers of Colonial Virginia's court orders to extract evidences of imported servants from their books and make them available for free on the Internet. He hopes to complete his search of seventeenth-century court orders by Spring 2007.

NOTE: The approximately 10,000 immigrant servants currently in the database do not derive from the same sources as those in the Virtual Jamestown project. The numbers of immigrants in this new database will continue to grow in the future.

PROJECT HIGHLIGHTS:
- Three search engines: SIMPLE SEARCH (queries all text in database),
ADVANCED SEARCH (search by any of more than 50 fields in database), and LETTER SEARCH (browse through lists of servants arranged by the first letter of their surname). The search engines are equipped with SOUNDEX, which retrieves servants with surnames that sound alike, i.e. Murphy, Morphew, Murfee, Murfew, Murfey, Murphew, and Murphey all come back as possible matches with the surname "Murphy."
- LEARNING CENTER, includes a copy of Murphy's ARTICLE "Origins of Colonial Chesapeake Indentured Servants: American and English Sources," published in the March 2005 edition of National Genealogical Society Quarterly, which provides tips for tracing the immigrant origins of English indentured servants; GLOSSARY of terms associated with the practice of indentured servitude; extensive list of LAWS from Colonial Virginia pertaining to indentured servants; lengthy BIBLIOGRAPHY identifying sources Murphy has used and hopes to use to build this database (includes references to 12 personal accounts of immigrant servants); and a list of LINKS that will interest researchers of immigrant servants.

Comments and suggestions are welcome.

Nathan W. Murphy



*************
Also see USA Ships Passenger Lists & Resources at http://olivetreegenealogy.com/ships/


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*************
Also see USA Ships Passenger Lists & Resources at http://olivetreegenealogy.com/ships/


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To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message

*************
Also see USA Ships Passenger Lists & Resources at http://olivetreegenealogy.com/ships/


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