ROOTS & BRANCHES

I’m no Luddite.

But I am still, at least in part, a Gutenberg man.

Give me the choice of reading something on a screen or printing it out and—if I wasn’t dissuaded more and more by “consider the environment” rejoinders—my preference would be to print it out every time.

It’s just the way I roll (and just may be related to being the author of four books, though truth be known, all four are available as e-books, too).

I was recently thinking about something I was asked to do some 20 years ago while I was executive director of the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania: Create “core collections” of titles for both state and Pennsylvania German genealogy resources.

I’m going to revisit this idea—talking about what a “core collection” of Pennsylvania German record sets looks like—exploring in “Roots & Branches” some of these resources sporadically over the next few months.

And the first one is the three-volume compilation titled Pennsylvania German Pioneers: A Publication of the Original Lists of Arrivals in the Port of Philadelphia from 1727 to 1808.

These lists were mandated by the Pennsylvania colonial legislature to be kept for all “foreigners” entering Pennsylvania, which before the Revolution primarily meant Germans since everyone from the British Isles was already considered a subject of the English king.

While there are a few lists showing the names of all passengers, most of them include only males age 16 and older who were required to swear oaths of allegiance.

Originally published by the Pennsylvania German Society in the 1930s, then reprinted by Genealogical Publishing Company (without the volume of facsimiles of the oath signatures) and most recently by Picton Press. Copies are available in any library with a decent collection of Pennsylvania German genealogy resources and can be found used on the Internet.

A few notes about this resource and those related to it:

• There was an earlier attempt at collecting these lists compiled by historian I. Daniel Rupp and published in the late 19^th century as Thirty-Thousand Names. While there a few lists that must have been lost by the time of Pennsylvania German Pioneers, Rupp’s volume rearranges the order of names and wildly misreads many of them.
• The signature volume of Pennsylvania German Pioneers has what are called “facsimiles” because they are essentially traced and “doctored up” copies of the originals to enhance readability. The Pennsylvania State Archives has high-resolution images of the original signature lists onsite in Harrisburg.
• While Pennsylvania German Pioneers is indexed, to do the most thorough search, also use Ancestry.com’s database of the volumes to search by the given names of the individuals for which you’re looking as a way to find ancestors whose surnames may have been butchered or misread.
• Likewise, if you have a clue from other sources about a likely time period of immigration, it’s worth doing a manual, list-by-list search for that year or years in question, again seeking out names that might be mis-indexed.