ROOTS & BRANCHES

Last week’s “Roots & Branches” talked about the research I’ve done on my own Pennsylvania German ancestry thought the lens of how many were enslavers.

I found three direct-line ancestors to be enslavers who were among the largest real estate owners in my pedigree and talked about the details in a presentation for Historic Trappe in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, last month.

This lined up with the anecdotal evidence from research that while enslavement among the Pennsylvania Germans in general was rather low, it was related to class and that those who had “made it,” so to say, were more likely to be enslavers.

It still appears that a large majority of enslaved persons in Pennsylvania were held for industrial work—those who owned forges and furnaces, in particular—but that a few are found in domestic servant roles in urban households and just a few in agriculture among the more prosperous farmers.

One caveat that I put on this research is that enslaved persons might have been “loaned out” to collateral family members. For example, in the prominent Hiester family of early Berks County, my direct-line Hiesters, immigrant brother Johann Jost “Yost” and his son Johannes, were not enslavers. But younger immigrant brother Daniel was, as well as Daniel’s sons and also Gov. Joseph, the son of the oldest immigrant Hiester brother.

Indeed, Joseph not only registered enslaved people already held under Pennsylvania’s 1780 gradual abolition act, he continued to register newly born children of enslaved mothers as indentured servants for terms of 28 years (as allowed by the act).

Interestingly, these children Joseph registered are listed as “mulatto” (mixed race), which leaves some room to argue that Joseph himself might have been the father of them, which sounds like a case for DNA analysis if descendants of these children can be found to compare to the Hiesters.

 In addition to those potential nuggets my other takeaways are these:

• While I looked at a narrow segment of years (1776–1781), to determine whether someone was an enslaver at any time in their life would require researching all records through the ancestor’s full life cycle.
• Related to that is the fact that since the taxation in the colonial and early republic years in Pennsylvania was based on use of property, old men often fall off tax lists even if land is still in their names, and they might have still had use of enslaved people, but not of enough value to make the lists.
• Finally it appears the occupation of “cordwainer” (maker of new shoes) was a popular one among my ancestors … I find three of them with that tag in the 1780 tax lists!

 There’s still much more to learn about Pennsylvania German enslavers!