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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