Indentured Servants

Colonial Laws and the Indentured Servant (Part2)

Laws governing human bondage in the English colonies did not happen overnight. As needed, laws were enacted by the colonial assemblies. The Virginia and Maryland colonies were the two most powerful mainland colonies. They lead the way in defining exactly what human bondage really meant. Lawmakers didn’t think in terms of color, but in people as a commodity. For this reason, colonial laws would apply to all races.

Using Virginia colony as an example; in a December 1662 law, women servants who became pregnant by their masters were to finish out their term and then be bound over to the local church to be sold for an extra two years of servitude. An October 1670 law pronounced that all non-Christians brought by shipping (by sea) shall be a slave for life, but if brought by land (from another colony) as children they were to serve until they are 30 years old. If they were adults and brought by land, they were to serve for only 12 years. In April 1691, all whites, bond or free were forbidden from intermarrying with blacks, mulattos or Indians. This law also stated that free white women who had an illegitimate child by a black, mulatto or Indian would be bound out by the local parish church for five years and the child bound until the age of 30.

It was a series of Virginia laws passed in October 1705 which began to define in detail what a slave was. The main points were:

*Slaves brought into the colony by land or sea (except Turks and Moors) remained slaves regardless of converting to Christianity.

*Free people who were Christians in their own country were not to be sold as slaves.

*No black, mulatto, Indian, Jew, Muslim or other infidel could purchase Christian white servants.

*White men or women intermarrying with blacks and mulattoes were to go to prison for 6 months with no bail.

*If any slave resists their master during correction, it was legal to kill them as part of the correction. Escaped slaves could be killed.

*A Christian baptism does not exempt a person from bondage, and the status of all children was according to the condition of the mother.

This was the world of our colonial ancestors regardless of color!

The Important Irish Connection to Barbados

18 Jul By Dwight Leave a Comment

Barbados was settled by the English in 1627, and became a center for the sugar industry. The island had a combination of slaves and indentured servants; both African and European. The Irish were an important piece of this trade in human bondage. Much has been written about the “Barbadosed” Irish, who were sent to the island as slaves under Oliver Cromwell: www.yale.edu/glc/tangledroots/Barbadosed.htm The number sent will never be known, but estimates range from 60,000 to 12,000.

For colonial Catholics, remember, this was a Protestant colony, so your ancestors will be found in the Anglican records. There were also Irish Moravians and Quakers on Barbados. Quakers can be traced to counties Leix (Queens) and Wicklow.

A useful reference work is Geraldine Lane, Tracing Ancestors in Barbados: A Practical Guide (2007) as well as numerous published and online articles. One handy article is Dwight A. Radford and Arden C. White’s article, “The Irish in Barbados,” in The Irish At Home and Abroad 2 (3) )1994/5): 92-97.

Major resources include James C. Brandow’s Genealogies of Barbados Families (1983) and JoAnne McRee’s six volume series Barbados Records(1979-1984). Much has also been preserved in Vere Langford Oliver’s Caribbeana and The Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society. The core records can be found at the Barbados National Archives; the National Archives, Kew: www.nationalarchives.gov.uk with much on microfilm at the Family History Library: www.familysearch.org

For those of us with Irish colonial ancestry in the English colonies, whether white or black, Barbados is such as important link that we dare not ignore it.

India and the Colonial America Connection

15 Jul By Dwight Leave a Comment

Don’t be surprised if your Colonial American ancestors were actually from India. The colonial vocabulary used the term “East Indies” to describe the Indian subcontinent.

So how did these people get to the New World in the 1600s? The records themselves provide answers, and are extracted by Paul Heinegg as “Free African Americans of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland and Delaware”: www.freeafricanamericans.com/East_Indians.htm

Mr. Heinegg, notes that East Indians came in bondage as indentured servants and slaves

from England. He documents East Indians from the court records in Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina. He notes that although they tended to marry into the Free Black community, they also intermixed with the indentured white community, many of whom clearly had Irish surnames. The court records used often use the term “East India Indians.”

One very interesting case from the Spotsylvania County Order Books (1735-38) showed the distinction between the East Indians and African slaves (page 440):

“Zachary Lewis, Churchwarden of St. George Parish, presents Ann Jones, a servant belonging to John West, who declared that Pompey an East Indian (slave) belonging to William Woodford, Gent., was the father of sd child which was adjudged of by the Court that she was not under the law having a Mullato child, that only relates to Negroes and Mullatoes and being Silent as to Indians, carry sd. Ann Jones to the whipping post.”

In this case, Ann Jones, a presumed white indentured servant, had a child by Pompey, an East Indian slave. The laws were already in place restricting white indentured servants having children with African slaves. Yet, it had not caught up with the East Indian issue. In the end, Ann’s sentence was the whipping post!

What a fascinating piece of history with records to back it up.

Irish, African, Slave, Muslim, Christian and Hoodoo Practitioner

29 Jun By Dwight Leave a Comment

The intermixing of Europeans with African slaves produced new religious ideas. This happened openly in the 1600s as Irish indentured servants intermixed with Africans. It also happened through the master-slaver relationship. What it gave birth to was little known piece of American religious history.

Many of the kidnapped Africans were Muslim, and a hybrid form of the faith continued on the plantations, combining Islam, Protestant Christianity, and Hoodoo. Hybrid Islam survived on the isolated Georgia islands into the 1870s. In regard to Hoodoo, it means to “conjure.” It is a folk practice, mixing the Germanic-Swiss hexmeister from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, with indigenous African, Islam, Native American and European folk magic.

If you study the “Slave Narratives” recorded in 1936-38; the former slaves describe the mixed practices. These are on www.ancestry.com under the database: “U.S., Interviews with Former Slaves, 1936-1938,” and elsewhere on the Internet. Georgia Presbyterian minister Rev. Charles Colcock, wrote a guide for missionaries going on the plantation. His The Religious Instruction of Negros in the United States (1842): http://docsouth.unc.edu/church/jones/jones.html provides amazing details as to what he observed. He noted the slaves took the stories of the Quran and transferred them over to the Bible seeing both religions as the same religious idea (see page 125), and this was 1842! It’s an otherworldly and bizarre read by our standards!

Concerning Christianity, Catholic slaves often would mix their faith with Louisiana Voodoo. In the Protestant South, the Baptist and Methodist denominations would dominate African American life. There they mixed Hoodoo into their faith. Voodoo and Hoodoo are very different.

Just be careful not limit what it means to be Irish to white and Christian. Irish identity may have become submerged into the African American experience, but the Irish contributed to the mixture of ideas and faith (Catholic, Protestant and folk religion).

The Irish in Antigua

28 Jun By Dwight Leave a Comment

The English colonized the Caribbean Island of Antigua in 1632. By 1674 the first large sugar plantation was established. The island became important because of its natural harbors. The 1678 Census showed there were 610 Irish out of the population of 4480. This means 13.6% of the population was born in Ireland.

The Irish came to Antigua as indentured servants or as merchants. As more African slaves were imported, there were fewer reasons for the Irish to stay. They would leave for the larger islands or for the mainland American colonies.

There was a direct connection between the merchant families of County Galway and Antigua, and they were often Roman Catholic. When dealing with colonial Catholics, it’s important to keep in mind, Antigua was an English Protestant colony. For this reason, all family baptisms, marriages and burials were recorded in the Anglican Church registers.

Irish Catholics on Antigua also had connections with the Irish Catholic colony on Montserrat.

For the genealogist, Vere Lanford Oliver’s three volume work The History of the Island of Antigua (1894) provides extracts of church records, tombstones, censuses, genealogies and civil records. It is on microfilm at the Family History Library (FHL #1149539): www.familysearch.org Oliver traces many in the planter class of Irish back to Ireland. Primary records at the Antigua & Barbuda National Archives have also been microfilmed at the FHL. The periodical Caribbeana (FHL #38848) is another resource for extracted records. Other records can be found at the National Archives, Kew, England: www.nationalarchives.gov.uk

Antigua is especially important for researching both Catholic and Protestant Irish families in the colonial period. This island may be the link between Ireland and Colonial America.

African American Surnames

29 May By Dwight Leave a Comment

How African American families got their surnames is often misunderstood, affecting your ability to connect into your Irish ancestor. The popular notion is that the slaves took the surname of the last master.

You may find your family did not have a “slave name” at all. Often surnames were used for several generations within a family. It may also be your ancestors were not slaves. You might be descended from those bi-racial and tri-racial families from the 1600s; descendants of African men and Irish woman. This free segment of the population was more common than you might think.

The 1870 Census is the first federal schedule which lists the former slaves by their full names. This is a pivotal record. If you find your ancestors in the census schedules prior to 1870, then start asking some serious questions about what “free color” means.

In some families surnames came into use just like they did with the free population, from the father or mother. In slave families, surnames were often used, but not publically. The slave owner had little reason to know, use or care about slave surnames.

The surnames of slaves might signify a major event or person such as a favorite or first master. Often surnames were chosen for various other reasons; a political figure (Washington, Lincoln), a first name (David, John, George), a principle (Freeman, Love, Pride), an occupation (Carpenter, Mason), or a place. These were sentimental ways of forging an identity as a family unit apart from the brutality of slavery.

Remember, a family could have used an unofficial surname for generations, but the first recorded evidence might have been in the 1870 Census. This is your pivotal record in exploring the origins on your surname.

Don’t Forget to Look in the Caribbean

8 May By Dwight Leave a Comment

Whenever someone comes to me with a tough 1600s and early 1700s research problem (both Catholic and Protestant), they always want to know about records in Ireland. Well, there aren’t that many, but people are usually shocked when I ask if they have looked at the Caribbean. The early colonial migrations were so often from Ireland to the Caribbean and then up the coast.

Irish went to the English Caribbean colonies as indentured servants, slaves, plantation workers, prisoners, exiles, merchants, and soldiers. Much of this was just prior to the full scale importation of African slaves. In fact, the island of Montserrat was an Irish Roman Catholic colony! Another little known fact is the original parishes of South Carolina were named after the Barbados parishes. This was because settlers from Barbados immigrated north to help develop South Carolina.
Main English islands where Irish immigrated or were brought include Bermuda (1609), Barbados (1627), Jamaica (1655), and the Leeward Islands: Antigua (1632), St. Kitts (St. Christopher) (1623), Nevis (1628) and Montserrat (1632).

It’s amazing that between hurricanes, volcanoes, rain, fungus, earthquakes, insects and humidity that anything survived. Much is available either in the Caribbean or from copies filed in England. Key records have been inventoried in Christiana K. Schaefer’s Genealogical Encyclopedia of the Colonial Americans (Baltimore, Maryland: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1998).

Many records have been published or are on microfilm at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City. Others are at the National Archives in Kew, outside of London, and still others are at the archives on the islands. Regardless, access to these valuable and essential records is now easier than ever.

What is an Indentured Servant?

3 May By Dwight Leave a Comment

A nasty piece of North American history has come to light concerning white indentured servants. The program “Who Do You Think You Are?” http://www.nbc.com/who-do-you-think-you-are/ has dealt with several cases. Books such as Don Jordan and Michael Walsh’s White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slavery in America (2008), document the practice. The Irish were a big piece of this ugly history.

For the genealogist it’s almost impossible to not come across servants in the colonial land, court, wills and tax records. Their lives were linked to their masters. It is believed between 1620 and 1775 some 300,000 or two out of every three immigrants to the English colonies arrived in bondage.

Servants were of little value, bought cheap and disposable. They were worth less than an African slave. Whites sold themselves into slavery in hopes of a better life. Early slavery was economic not racial. That came later.

The indentured servant had a contract usually for 4 to 5 years of work, in exchange for an agreed upon amount of acres. The land was held in trust by the owner who bought the right to the indenture at the auction block. If the servant died before the contract was fulfilled the land went to the owner. If a servant violated the contract, by having children (even by the master), marrying or escaping, extra years were added, and the owner received the land. This system benefited few servants, and provided no reason for the master to keep the slave alive.

Typically an indentured servant was escaping poverty, was 15-24 years old, rarely had family and friends indentured with them, lower class, could not select their master and could not marry for their 4-5 year contract. An online database “Immigrants Servants Database”: http://pricegen.com/immigrantservant/search/simple.php is trying to document up to 100,000 servants. The database currently has 22,441 servants documented. Another source is P. William Filby and Mary K. Meyer’s “Passenger and Immigration List Index” which is now a database on www.ancestry.com Even with databases, do not neglect the county records as a primary source.

The Irish and the African American Connection

7 Apr By Dwight Leave a Comment

Probably all African Americans descended from slaves have a line from Ireland. Some would naturally come through an Irish slave owner on the plantation. However, it’s much more complicated than that.

There has been “free color” in America since the 1600s. It was the intermarriage and intermingling of African slave men and white indentured servants that forced laws to be enacted. Many of these women were Irish.

In Colonial America, there were questions with no legal answers. Who was a slave? How long can one retain someone in slavery? Can a Christian be a slave? What about Muslims and Jews? Can a European Christian be a slave? Is slavery color based? Were the children of an African man and a white indentured servant a slave? The answers to these questions affected the entire colonial economy in the 1600s. Over the decades into the early 1700s, these questions were answered one by one, starting in Virginia.

For those mixed-race families who were considered “free color” from the 1600s, they blended into the white, black or Indian communities. Some remained in-between as “tri-racial isolates.” Be aware that race cannot necessarily defined by skin color. Many tri-racial isolates have researched their Native American side, reorganized into a tribe, and successfully applied for state and federal acknowledgment.

American history is much more fascinating, and at times bizarre, than we were ever taught in school. All of us, regardless of skin tone can claim our Irish heritage.

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