One other item. Based on Cook's research, it appears that many of the women listed as wives on the early Virginia Muster roll had actually arrived as servant women (based on which ships they arrived on), though they're not listed as servants on the muster, because their terms were up and they had already gotten hitched.
Nathan W. Murphy, MA, AGŪ
Researcher and Marketing Director
Price & Associates, Inc.
http://www.pricegen.com
________________________________
From: Discussion of research and writing about Virginia history on behalf of Douglas Deal
Sent: Fri 2/2/2007 12:01 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [VA-HIST] New Online Database of Indentured Servants
Sunshine49 wrote:
> You may be confusing this with later indentured servants in the
> colonial period, who were petty crooks and troublemakers [male and
> female], who were sent to Virginia. From the runaway ads in the
> Virginia Gazette, they seemed to have been quite a troublesome lot. A
> good many seem to have been Irish, or Welsh, a few Scots or English; a
> few could not speak English, evidently they were Gaelic-speaking.
>
>>
Many of the 18th-century servants were convicts who chose transportation
to the colonies in lieu of some harsher punishment at home. Others were
not criminals at all, and we should hesitate to "type" them or the
actual "criminals" as a "troublesome" bunch in Virginia just because
they ran away from their employers. Would we call slave runaways
"troublesome" or would we use a word like "bold"? The ads are sometimes
the only, or nearly the only, sources we have about them (unless there
are also court records about their "crimes"), and in using them we
should keep in mind that they portray the runaways from the masters'
perspective. To servants trying to escape cruel treatment or other
indignities and hardships, thing probably looked rather different.... A
good many masters probably ought to be characterized as "troublesome" too!
Doug Deal
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