ROOTS & BRANCHES

I enjoy getting genealogy questions.

As you might think is natural, I enjoy them more when I know the answer … and a lot of times knowing the answer is dependent on having a fairly specific question being asked.

One such question came from Katherine Schober, my colleague who is the expert German transcriber/translator and owner of SK Translations, on behalf of a client: “Would a 1717 Palatine immigrant to Pennsylvania have emigration records?”

I started by taking the question literally—that the person was asking about emigration records on the German side and not immigration records on the Pennsylvania side.

If a person left the Palatinate legally at this time, there  should be an emigration record of them paying an exit tax (as part of manumission from serfdom). Virtually all of these records—as well as some other oddball evidence of emigration such as estate records mentioning an heir in America—from the Palatinate have been abstracted and published by the late Werner Hacker.

Hacker compiled 10 German-language books with records from archives of various areas; Closson Press published an abstract of the entries in these works applying to emigrants to America as Eighteenth Century Register of Emigrants from Southwest Germany.

In addition to what’s in Hacker’s works, there are just a few notarial records in Rotterdam, which was the primary embarkation point in this time period. These are basically contracts recorded by notaries between the ship captains and the people being transported.

On the immigration side, unfortunately. there’s virtually nothing for that time period. The Oath of Allegiance records and surviving Pennsylvania-mandated ship manifests only start in 1727.

 As far as further evidence of immigration, there are naturalizations, which until 1740 required an act of the Pennsylvania legislature, so typically you find that a bunch of immigrants applying together after having finished a 7-year waiting period. These can be found in Crocker Candy Livengood’s Genealogical Abstracts of the Laws of Pennsylvania and Statutes at Large (Family Line Publications). These likely include some who arrived in the 1710s.

 From 1740 onward, the immigrants seeking naturalization went before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and exist in two versions:

• Origination copies that stayed in Pennsylvania are found in the published Pennsylvania Archives, Second Series, Vol. II. (Also reprinted as Persons Naturalized in the Province of Pennsylvania, 1740–1773, by Genealogical Publishing Company)
• Destination copies sent to Britain are found in M.S. Giuseppi’s Naturalizations of Foreign Protestants in the American and West Indian Colonies (Genealogical Publishing Company).

 Something I didn’t choose to deal with as part of this: That “Palatine” in the 1700s was loosely used to refer to German-speaking immigrants in general rather than just from the Palatinate itself. But that’s a topic for a future column!