While we are on the subject of "forced" emigration, does anyone have a list
of the women sent to Virginia in 1619 to marry the planters?  I am told that
most of them came out of prisons or orphanages. 


MWF

-----Original Message-----
From: Discussion of research and writing about Virginia history
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Nathan W. Murphy
Sent: Friday, February 02, 2007 12:11 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: New Online Database of Indentured Servants

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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