Today’s episode of Research Like a Pro is a discussion with Alice Childs, AG, about additional record types that can help with Pennsylvania German research, including tax records, military records, naturalization records, court records, German Newspapers, and family records. We go over Fraktur and Taufschein and where those can be found as well.
Transcript
Nicole (2s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode, 211 Pennsylvania Germans part five more records. Welcome to Research Like a Pro a Genealogy Podcast about taking your research to the next level, hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder accredited genealogy professional. Diana and Nicole are the mother-daughter team at FamilyLocket.com and the authors of Research Like a Pro A Genealogist Guide. With Robin Wirthlin they also co-authored the companion volume, Research Like a Pro with DNA. Join Diana and Nicole as they discuss how to stay organized, make progress in their research and solve difficult cases.
Nicole (42s):
Let’s go. Good morning. Good afternoon. Whenever you’re listening to this. Welcome to Research Like a Pro.
Diana (50s):
Hi, Nicole. How are you today?
Nicole (52s):
I’m doing well. How are you, mom?
Diana (54s):
Hi, I’m doing great.
Nicole (57s):
All right. Well, we hope you want to join us for our study group this fall you’ll register, and we’re looking forward to working together with you on a research project today. We’re going to be talking with Alice Childs again. Hi Alice.
Alice Childs (1m 11s):
Hi. How are you today?
Nicole (1m 13s):
Great. Thanks for coming. We have gone through so many wonderful records about Pennsylvania Germans, and today we get a fun one where we get to talk about different types of records that could help us beyond land probated church, which we talked about in previous episodes. So today we’ll talk about some tax records and different other types of things you might be able to find.
Diana (1m 36s):
Great. So let’s start off with tax records. One of our favorite types. So Alice, what kind of tax records are available in Pennsylvania?
Alice Childs (1m 44s):
Well, Pennsylvania tax lists are pretty complete for most counties in Pennsylvania. So accessing them will be a little different depending on what you find online or what you have to find elsewhere. But it’s just important to remember that tax records started being kept a long time before the first census was taken in 1790. And they’re such a great resource that will help you locate your ancestors in a particular place in time. Again, it will be helping you trace their migration or show that they did live in a certain place. And it’s another great resource where you can build the fan club as you look at them. So sometimes tax records have been alphabetized, and that’s a little less helpful for fan club research, but if they’re not alphabetized, the people whose names appear next to your ancestor will be their fan club and could have been family members or other close associates.
Alice Childs (2m 36s):
Like I said, you can trace their residents and migration. You can also with tax records, estimate their age and marital status. And I will talk about that. You can gain clues about property ownership and tax records are a great source for estimating when a person died, if they disappeared from the tax record. And they’re also helpful to separate same name to men. So as far as estimating the age of a person in Pennsylvania, the age of taxation was usually 21. And another clue that’s great on Pennsylvania tax records is that taxpayers were separated into three different categories. So the first category was landholder and that meant they owned real estate and an inmate or a tenant would indicate a married man who didn’t own real estate.
Alice Childs (3m 24s):
And then the third category is free men, and those were single men without real estate. So if you don’t know that terminology, you might be a little confused when you look at the tax record, but those are really great clues that help you learn more about your person’s age and marital status and different things about them.
Diana (3m 41s):
Thanks for giving us a little bit of Brent down on dat. And I think some of those terms are kind of fun inmate or free men. So it’s always interesting to think of that.
Alice Childs (3m 51s):
It may, you might think an inmate and someone in an institution or something, right.
Nicole (3m 57s):
Well, when you were defining the differences between landholder inmate and free men, I had to laugh that an inmate as a married man with what about real estate and the free man is a single man. But then again, you know, when I looked it up, the word origin of inmate goes along with tenant, like you said, it’s somebody who without real estate. So like they’re living on someone else’s land. And the origin of the word inmate comes from two words in like going to an end and like lodging there. Right. And mate, so somebody who was like a lodger or a subtenant at a shared house.
Alice Childs (4m 34s):
Wow.
Nicole (4m 36s):
Apparently that was kind of a 16th century term in English and mate. And so knowing that helps to understand, okay, this is just a person who’s probably renting doesn’t own land.
Alice Childs (4m 48s):
So good.
Nicole (4m 50s):
Well, let’s talk now about how to find the tax records and what repositories and websites can we look in.
Alice Childs (4m 56s):
Okay. So if you’re wanting to find online records, which a lot of time always, we want to be able to find them online, right? Family search and ancestry, both have records. Family search has microfilm and digitized a lot of tax records. And so the process for finding these is the same that we usually use. Just go to the catalog and search by county, and then scroll down to Texas to see what’s available. Ancestry has a collection. That’s interesting. It’s called Pennsylvania tax and exonerations 1768 to 1801. So this is a time period where our Pennsylvania, German ancestors would have, you know, been living there and just getting started in some cases.
Alice Childs (5m 38s):
And these records are really easy to search, but they’re incomplete. So you can read the collection just description, and it will tell you whether your county is included and a word of caution. The years assigned to the tax lists by ancestry are not always accurate. As I’ve researched these, I’ve gotten confused about a few things cause sometimes will give a man’s name and it will have him listed several times in the same town in the same year, but you go to the list and it’s obviously different lists. And there are not that many men of the same name in the same town. And so the years assigned are not always accurate. So sometimes you can find the year, maybe at the beginning of that section, there will be the year, you know, often they’re alphabetized.
Alice Childs (6m 21s):
And so you can go back to the A’s and then see if the year is listed at the beginning of that section. And if you can’t find the year, I have had success reaching out to the Pennsylvania state archives. That’s where the originals are held and they are able to tell me what the years are for. If I give them the link to the particular record, they’ve been able to tell me the year. So just be aware of that when you’re looking at that ancestry collection. And if you don’t find your ancestor in this database, go ahead and expand your search because it’s like I said, incomplete. Another place for tax lists from this period is the published Pennsylvania archives that we talked about. In a previous episode, they have tax lists from 1765 to 1791.
Alice Childs (7m 6s):
And that’s in the third series volumes 11 through 22. And there’s an index of those in volumes 27 through 29. So remember I told you, sometimes it’s hard to know what’s in these different volumes and series in the Pennsylvania archives, and you can go to Wikipedia and search Pennsylvania archives, and it will give you a list of that or a search by name at fold three. In addition to the tax list that you typically think of, and that we’ve been talking about created by each county, there are other tax lists that have been created in Pennsylvania. So there were quit rents. And that was an early form of taxes that land owners in Pennsylvania owed to the pens.
Alice Childs (7m 46s):
And often settlers would evade these taxes and the records are incomplete, but there are records and you would want to check them out if you have, if they’re available for your county and they are in the form of rent rolls. So family search has a collection that’s titled rent rolls 1703 to 1744. So that can pick up some of the earlier ancestors that you might have. And there’s another tax that Pennsylvania has a really complete set of records for. And that’s a 1798 direct tax and ancestry has digitized and indexed those records. And that’s in a collection called Pennsylvania, us direct tax lists, 1798.
Alice Childs (8m 26s):
And that’s a great resource for that one year. And then another thing that Pennsylvania did, they took a September census every seven years from 1779 to 1863. And there’s a collection at ancestry titled Pennsylvania, us S Tenielle census. And again, that’s incomplete, but that was taken for the purpose of taxation. And so it’s considered a tax list also. So there are a lot of different resources for tax lists in Pennsylvania. Yeah. That’s quite a
Nicole (8m 55s):
List there and I’m glad you pointed out the Centennial census because it doesn’t sound like a tax list, but when you look at it and I’m sure it looks like one and was used for the purpose of that to figure out who they’re going to tax. Yep.
Diana (9m 9s):
I think it’s so interesting. They did this September census every seven years. It seems kind of random does it?
Alice Childs (9m 18s):
Yeah,
Diana (9m 19s):
So we love tax records and they are so very valuable, especially when figuring out ages of people and people at the same name. So great. So it’s wonderful that Pennsylvania has such a great collection. Well, let’s jump now to military records. And what can you tell us about military records for our Pennsylvania German ancestors?
Alice Childs (9m 40s):
There were a number of conflicts in some that you ha you know, that I hadn’t really heard of before. There were several that took place during the peak years of German immigration. So some of these that you might think about include king George’s war that was from 1744 to 1748. Lord Dunmore is war in 1774 Pontiac’s war in 1763, the French and Indian war from 1756 to 1763. And then of course the American revolution from 1775 to 1783. So some of the best resources for Pennsylvania military records for these early conflicts are in, again, the published Pennsylvania archives.
Alice Childs (10m 22s):
The fifth series has military records from the colonial and revolutionary era, Aras, and you’ll find muster rolls and abstracts a pension application and enlistment papers in those. And then in the sixth series, you will find military records from the revolutionary war through the Mexican war. And again, you can find those at fold three and search by name also for the revolutionary war. You have your compiled military service records and revolutionary war pensions and bounty land records. And you had Michael Strauss on your podcast. I think it was episodes 82 and 94, and he gives some great in depth information about those records.
Alice Childs (11m 3s):
So I would invite your listeners to go back if they want to learn more about how to find those records and what would be contained in those. But you can find these military service records are indexed at family search and images are available at full three and revolutionary war pensions and bounty land applications are also indexed at family search with images at fold three. So there are a lot of great resources and places to look for military records.
Diana (11m 29s):
That’s great. We have such a wonderful collection there at full three, and I love it that the published Pennsylvania archives are for free. That is just so fabulous.
Alice Childs (11m 39s):
Yes, that’s right. You can access it without a subscription. So it’s such a great resource. You can watch four times, you know, sometimes around Memorial day or different times, they also will offer free access for a week or something. So watch for those those times too.
Nicole (11m 57s):
Yeah. When you were talking about full three, having the Pennsylvania archives database for free, I was remembering that the war of 18, 12 pension files are also part of the free collection at fold three. And then I looked it up and they actually have 214 free collections at fold three. So they’ve made a lot of things available for free. So that’s kind of a, a good thing to know when you’re looking at military records that you don’t necessarily need to get a subscription because you can just look up a lot of things for free. And then if you find something that you need, you can go to like a family history center and they will often have both three access.
Alice Childs (12m 35s):
Yeah. That is a great point.
Nicole (12m 37s):
Okay. Well, let’s talk now about naturalization records. How can we find those?
Alice Childs (12m 41s):
Okay, well first talk about how important naturalization was to our Pennsylvania Germans. So in order to get the permanent title to their land, immigrants were required to gain citizenship. If they didn’t have citizenship, then when they died, their land would revert back to the pens. And that was a policy that was upheld for a lot of years. So anyone who wasn’t naturalized would lose their land when they died in their family, wouldn’t get it. And so that was a really important reason for Pennsylvania Germans to become naturalized. And also they got the right to vote when they became naturalized. And that was really important to them too, because they wanted to make sure that they were not being oppressed, you know, like they were back in Germany.
Alice Childs (13m 22s):
So naturalization was really important. So the early immigrants were considered citizens when they gave their oath of allegiance. When they arrived in the U S and went to the courthouse and signed the oath of allegiance that automatically made them become citizens in 1740, there was the naturalization act, or sometimes it’s called the plantation act. And that formalize the naturalization process. And that kind of began the process of having to be a resident for a certain number of years. It stated that they had to be a resident of the colonies for seven years without being absent greater than two months. And then they could just declare their allegiance to the king of England, profess their Christian faith and pay two shillings.
Alice Childs (14m 6s):
So the naturalization process was fairly simple, as long as they had been a resident for a number of years, then in 1790, the naturalization process became even more formalized and turned into the process that we’re more familiar with, which is where they would file a declaration of intention after they’d been in the country for two years, and then they could file a petition for naturalization three years later. So it kind of evolved over time. So keep those changes in mind, as you’re seeking naturalization records, a few things to remember about naturalization records is that the later in time you get the more information the records will have, that’s Jenny illogically significant earlier records don’t really provide a lot of information beyond the name and perhaps where the immigrant came from and how long they’d been in the country or something, you know, just very minimal information.
Alice Childs (14m 59s):
The other important thing to remember is that before 1906 and immigrant could file for naturalization in any court anywhere they didn’t have to go to their county quarter, their state quarter, you know, there was no court that was designated to handle naturalizations and they could file their declaration in one court and then their final petition in another court. So a good practices to look for the court records in the court, that’s closest to where your ancestor was living, because that’s probably where they would have gone to file their papers. You can start looking for naturalization records for your Pennsylvania, German ancestors in several different places. The earlier records, there’s a collection called names of foreigners who took the oath of allegiance to the province and state of Pennsylvania, 1727 to 1775.
Alice Childs (15m 44s):
And that’s available at ancestry that will catch those earlier ancestors and naturalization lists from 1740 to 1773 are available at family search and ancestry also available in series two volume, two of the published Pennsylvania archives. So that’s one collection available in three different places. And just note that the collection of family search is locked. And so you would have to access that in a family history center. Another record set is at ancestry and it’s Pennsylvania, us naturalization records from the Supreme and district courts from 1794 to 1908. And finally, ancestry has another just general Pennsylvania, U S federal naturalization records from 1795 to 1931.
Alice Childs (16m 31s):
So that, that covers different levels of courts at ancestry and a couple of different collections.
Nicole (16m 38s):
Yeah. Looking at all the different court levels can be one of the most challenging parts of looking for these naturalization records, but it looks like there’s a lot of good resources to help aid that search.
Alice Childs (16m 48s):
Yeah, there are great resources.
Diana (16m 51s):
Well going right along with naturalization, his court records, naturalization records are a form of court records, but there are other kinds of records that are in the courts. And it’s really great to just have a little bit of knowledge about what kinds of things can be in court records and especially how to find them. So with that in mind, what kind of court records are available in Pennsylvania?
Alice Childs (17m 16s):
Okay, so court records can be really helpful and they are available the Pennsylvania Supreme court and the court of courts of common pleas were established by an act called the judiciary act of 1772. Before that time central courts didn’t exist. And so you won’t find court records very well before 1722, but the court system has evolved over the years. So you need to familiarize yourself with what courts were available in which time, period. There’s a really good history of the courts of Pennsylvania. And I kind of did a brief overview of that in my blog post, but court records for state level courts are held at the physical Pennsylvania state archives, not the published ones that we’ve been talking about there at the Pennsylvania state archives.
Alice Childs (18m 4s):
And a lot of them have been microfilmed and they’re available at family search. So again, go to the catalog and do a place search and scroll down to court records to find those and records created by other courts are usually held by the court itself, the Pennsylvania historical and museum commission, which is the online repository for the Pennsylvania state archives has a really good description of the offices that you can find in the county courthouse and what their responsibilities are. So when you’re looking for certain things about your ancestor, you can go to their website and just look at the different offices to determine what courthouse you might want to contact, to find records for your ancestry.
Alice Childs (18m 44s):
There’s one term in Pennsylvania, that’s kind of unique and you’ll want to be aware of, and that’s the,
Diana (19m 5s):
Wow. That’s really interesting. I’ve never heard of that word before. I love how Pennsylvania has some unique terms and some new unique records, all such good information to know.
Nicole (19m 16s):
Thank you for sharing all that. Now let’s talk about German newspapers and we’ve heard in the past from Heidi, when we talked with her that they have a lot of different kinds of German newspapers, and sometimes they’re even in German. So can you tell us about that?
Alice Childs (19m 29s):
Yeah, that’s right, because they retained their German culture and identity. The Pennsylvania Germans did create local newspapers and print them in German. And just to get a feel for the number of German newspapers that were around and available, you can go to chronicling America and then search the U S newspaper directory, just search for Pennsylvania and German language. And that’ll just give you a list of the German newspapers and where they were published. And this is a great resource. They don’t always have all those papers online and digitized, but it does give you a comprehensive list of newspapers that were available. And then it will also tell you where those papers are held and where you can find copies of them. So I like that resource at chronically in America, but you will see when you go there, that there were a number of newspapers printed in German, in Pennsylvania.
Alice Childs (20m 16s):
And obviously they’re a valuable source of really Gen-Y ecologically significant information. You can find information about birth marriage and deaths through notices and obituaries there’ll be notices of property sales and other events that can lead to additional records. So to aid in your research, you can look for abstracts of newspaper notices as well. There are a man named Edward w Hawker compiled genealogical data relating to the German settlers of Pennsylvania and adjacent territory from advertisements in published in Philadelphia and Germantown. So that’s a great resource that would give you abstracts of different things that were published over a period from 1743 to 1800, and that’s digitized and available at family search.
Alice Childs (21m 0s):
So, you know, think beyond just the newspapers themselves and look for abstracts that have been compiled to gain information from these newspapers.
Nicole (21m 9s):
It’s always good to look in that chronically in America, newspaper directory, I have even ordered some newspapers to my local library on microfilm, through interlibrary loan. So it’s really a good idea to check and see if there’s a newspaper out there somewhere that could be helpful.
Alice Childs (21m 24s):
Yeah, that’s a great tip.
Diana (21m 26s):
Well, let’s talk about another type of record and that is family records and Pennsylvania Germans have some unique family records. So can you tell us about that?
Alice Childs (21m 35s):
Yeah. It is always fun when you can find these are sometimes a little more difficult to find, but they’re so fun to look at when you do find them. One of the first ones I would think about is Bible records. A lot of families recorded vital information in a family Bible. So the bride would maybe be presented a family Bible by relatives as a wedding gift. And then they would start recording the marriage date and the birth dates of their children and any deaths that occurred in the family. And so those are really great resources and they might still be in possession of the family. So you can reach out to extended family members to fight. If you think a family Bible might be out there somewhere, you can start reaching out that way.
Alice Childs (22m 15s):
Sometimes they’ve been donated to a local historical or genealogical society and the family search research Wiki has a great list of places to look for family Bibles from Pennsylvania. So that’s a good place to go and see where collections of family Bibles are held a really unique record for the Pennsylvania. Germans are Fruchter and Tufts shine. And so fracture is a type of folk art, and it’s a decorated manuscript. And these played a big role in the culture of Pennsylvania Germans. They were really popular in the period from 1750 to 1840, and you will recognize them there’s central text, and it’s usually surrounded by embellishments around the edge.
Alice Childs (22m 57s):
You know, they’ve drawn different things around the edges. They’re really beautiful. The most common type of fracture were birth and baptismal certificates. And those were called Tufts shine and they were very common so much so that by the middle of the 19th century, they started mass producing designs. You know, they would get them printed and just so people could get them and fill them in. So you might find those in home sources again, maybe a relative has had one handed down to them. They also could have been tucked into the family Bible or saved with the family’s important documents. Manuscript collections might have these published family history books could be a good source.
Alice Childs (23m 37s):
I have a top shine for my husband’s ancestor. He was born in 1775 in Westmoreland county, Pennsylvania. And it was in possession of the woman who authored a family history book. And she included a color image in the front of her book, Mathias milestones. So that was really fun to see that in their libraries and historical societies also have collections of frog tour. There’s just for example, the free library of Philadelphia or the Franklin and Marshall college library, the Berks history center, the library of Congress also has a small collection. So there are a lot of different places that you can look. And there’s a website called Fruchter web, and that has a history of the Fruchter and Tofe Schein practice and a bibliography of there’s over a thousand books on the topic.
Alice Childs (24m 26s):
And so there’s a bibliography there. So that’s a really fun source that you might be able to discover for one of your ancestors that’s unique to Pennsylvania Germans. Well,
Diana (24m 35s):
Well, I’m just looking at some of these fracture and tout shine images that you have shared links to, and they are absolutely beautiful. What a treasure, if you can find one that is in your family. So, wow. Thanks so much for opening our eyes to that. I love it.
Nicole (24m 55s):
Yeah. This one is beautiful. It looks like it’s an example for a woman named Joanna Intelius and it terror birth and baptism certificate. So this is the example that Alice put up on the blog post, but it’s really pretty, it’s like a heart or with writing inside and flowers on the outside, on old looking paper. And I’m guessing this was included in some kind of family album or,
Alice Childs (25m 18s):
Yeah, I can’t remember exactly. I don’t have the blog post open, but I found a couple of different ones and got permission from the people that had posted them online to republish them on the blog. It’s fun to find it, look and see all the different ones and the creativity of the people who created them. I guess a lot of times it was a school master that they would hire to create the certificate for their child. So that makes sense. Yeah. And so there are different school masters, you know, the different collections, we’ll talk about the work of this school master or that school master or whatever. It’s really fun to dig into these.
Nicole (25m 54s):
Well, it kind of reminds me of the tradition we have in our family of like cross stitched birth date things for each child, right? Mom.
Diana (26m 1s):
Yeah, absolutely. I think every generation has the thing that they do and cross-stitch was big for a while. And, you know, back in my grandmother’s day, it was more samplers have a sampler see, and my mom did so anyway, it’s kind of fun that home craft and these do remind me a little bit of the toll painting we did in the 1970s.
Alice Childs (26m 25s):
I remember
Nicole (26m 28s):
This has been a wonderful series and thanks for doing these posts, Alice, and it’s just kind of scratching the surface of what records you might locate for your Pennsylvania, German ancestors. There’s so many more things available. And Pennsylvania as we’ve heard is a wonderful state for genealogical research. So hopefully you can use the information provided in this series to get started and also be sure to do your own work, to find additional records in the county where your ancestors lived, make a locality guide for that area and see what you can find out and then stay tuned because Heidi Mathis will be helping us wrap up this series by talking about using DNA evidence to help us research our Pennsylvania German ancestors.
Nicole (27m 10s):
So we look forward to that. All right. Yeah.
Alice Childs (27m 13s):
Thank you so much for inviting me to be on the podcast.
Nicole (27m 16s):
All right, everybody have a great week and we’ll talk to you again next week.
Nicole (27m 58s):
Thank you for listening. We hope that something you heard today will help you make progress in your research. If you want to learn more, purchase our books, Research Like a Pro and Research Like a Pro with DNA on Amazon.com and other booksellers. You can also register for our online courses or study groups of the same names. Learn more at FamilyLocket.com/services. To share your progress and ask questions, join our private Facebook group by sending us your book receipt or joining our courses to get updates in your email inbox each Monday, subscribe to our newsletter at FamilyLocket.com/newsletter. Please subscribe, rate and review our podcast. We read each review and are so thankful for them. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.
Links
Part 8: Pennsylvania Germans: Additional Record Types – https://familylocket.com/part-8-pennsylvania-germans-additional-record-types/
RLP 210: Pennsylvania Germans Part 4 – Probate and Church Records – https://familylocket.com/rlp-210-pennsylvania-germans-part-4-probate-and-church-records/
RLP 209: Pennsylvania Germans Part 3 – Land Records – https://familylocket.com/rlp-209-pennsylvania-germans-part-3-land-records/
RLP 208: Pennsylvania Germans Part 2 – Emigration and Guiding Principles – https://familylocket.com/rlp-208-pennsylvania-germans-part-2-emigration-and-guiding-principles/
RLP 207: Pennsylvania Germans Part 1 with Heidi: History – https://familylocket.com/rlp-207-pennsylvania-germans-part-1-with-heidi-history/
214 Free Online Databases from Fold3 – list from The Ancestor Hunt blog
Research Like a Pro Resources
Research Like a Pro: A Genealogist’s Guide book by Diana Elder with Nicole Dyer on Amazon.com – https://amzn.to/2x0ku3d
Research Like a Pro eCourse – independent study course – https://familylocket.com/product/research-like-a-pro-e-course/
RLP Study Group – upcoming group and email notification list – https://familylocket.com/services/research-like-a-pro-study-group/
Research Like a Pro with DNA Resources
Research Like a Pro with DNA: A Genealogist’s Guide to Finding and Confirming Ancestors with DNA Evidence book by Diana Elder, Nicole Dyer, and Robin Wirthlin – https://amzn.to/3gn0hKx
Research Like a Pro with DNA eCourse – independent study course – https://familylocket.com/product/research-like-a-pro-with-dna-ecourse/
RLP with DNA Study Group – upcoming group and email notification list – https://familylocket.com/services/research-like-a-pro-with-dna-study-group/
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