ANNOUNCEMENT: Free Online Database of Indentured Servants,
Redemptioners, and Transported Convicts
PROJECT TITLE: Immigrant Servants Database
PROJECT URL: www.immigrantservants.com
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. 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
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