ROOTS & BRANCHES

We’ve been talking about passenger arrival lists for several weeks here at “Roots & Branches,” specifically those that the Federal government mandated to be kept starting 1820 and therefore are an outstanding set of records for those researching immigrants who came to America in the 19^th and 20^th centuries.

But as I observed in the first column of the series, I have only a passing personal interest in these lists since all except one immigrant couple in my lineage came to America well before 1820 (the exception being the Heinrich Hiller and Maria Niethammer who were talked about last week.

People who have a personal genealogy the opposite of mine – that is, almost all their ancestors stepping onto American shores post-1820 – often feel somewhat adrift (pun unintended) when they realize that these type of passenger arrival lists, in general, do not exist for those arriving in Colonial times.

Now the key phrase in that previous sentence is “in general,” of course.

There some ship lists from the Colonial era, but most of them are “reconstructions” – that is, no complete list was originally made of all passengers that has survived to the present day, but a listing of passengers aboard the ship has been compiled from other sources.

The only exception to this are the voluminous lists of “foreigners” (almost all German-speaking people) who arrived at the port of Philadelphia beginning in 1727, a response by the Pennsylvania assembly’s paranoia about the increasing number of Germans arriving in its colony.

While some of the so-called “captain’s lists” (listing every passenger by name and often age) have survived, most of the records that have come down to the present day are “oaths lists,” in which men age 16 and older forswore their old allegiances and pledged new allegiances to the king of Great Britain.

These lists have been one of the prime resources for (and unique to) those studying this ethnicity, especially since the surviving lists have been published as the three-volume work Pennsylvania German Pioneers.

One of the truisms of these Colonial lists is that it was unusual for an individual to be completely “alone” on the ship – that is, even if they did not sail as part of a nuclear family or with other relatives, there was often at least one other individual or family aboard the ship from the same village or cluster of villages.

As a result, a whole methodology has grown up that advocates (when direct research has not yielded a village of origin for the immigrant being directly sought) researching the shipmates for their villages of origin.

With the greater “search-ability” of many of the German church records in the FamilySearch.org system, I decided to test this in a backwards way: Many years ago, I had proven that immigrant Johann Daub, who settled in Lebanon County in the 1760s, hailed from Eiserfeld in what is now the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, but I wondered: How many of Daub’s shipmates also came from the Eiserfeld area?

Of the 86 men who signed the oaths list of the ship Richmond on Oct. 6, 1763, fully 18 of those could be found near Daub’s origin.