Diana and Nicole discuss tracing ancestors back to the Colonial Era in the United States, emphasizing the scarcity of immigration records before the establishment of the U.S. Federal Government in 1789. They highlight strategies such as cluster research and the use of DNA testing to overcome the challenge of limited documentation, particularly for those who emigrated from England, Scotland, France, Germany, and other regions. They explain the significance of creating a locality guide based on historical context and settlement patterns to identify an ancestor’s original colony. Through examples like the detailed records of German immigrants to Colonial Pennsylvania, they illustrate the value of specific documentation that did exist, such as oaths of allegiance and captain’s lists. They also point to essential resources, including Filby’s “Passenger and Immigration List Index” (PILI) and various online platforms for accessing immigration records, preparing listeners for the next episode that will explore records from 1820 to 1906.
Transcript
Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 298 Immigration Records Part two Colonial Era. 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 genealogist Professional Diana and Nicole are the mother daughter team at family Locket dot 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. Let’s go.
Nicole (43s):
Today’s episode is sponsored by newspapers.com, your go-to resource for unlocking the stories of your ancestors. welcome to Research Like a Pro Hi Diana
Diana (54s):
Hi Nicole. How are you doing today?
Nicole (56s):
Good. I am just really looking forward to the new Ancestry shared matches page that we found out about at Roots Tech. That’s gonna be neat.
Diana (1m 5s):
Oh my goodness. We’ve been hoping for this for so long, and maybe you can tell our listeners why we’re so excited about this. There’s
Nicole (1m 12s):
A lot of features that we have been wanting Ancestry to give us, and I guess I’m not too surprised that this is the one ancestry decided to do because shared matches is such an important part of research and it doesn’t seem too difficult to go ahead and provide the amount of DNA between your match and the shared match. You know, typically when you look at the list of shared matches on Ancestry, you only see the amount that you share with the shared match, but you don’t know how much the match and the shared match share with each other. How’s that for a tongue twister?
Diana (1m 46s):
And how about wrapping your mind around that? Everyone listening, but this is a key thing that we have been hoping for. It already is there on My Heritage and 23 and Me. So having Ancestry have this ability where we have so many matches will be fabulous. So a way this will really help you is say for instance you have got maybe a second cousin and then their child has tested and they’re a match to you, but you really don’t know the name of this child. If it shows up that they’re a child of your second cousin, that’s gonna be so great because some people don’t put their trees out there, they don’t let you know how you’re connected to them.
Diana (2m 27s):
So we’re hoping this will really help us with some of those mystery matches.
Nicole (2m 31s):
Right. This is exactly what I was thinking too, that when somebody in Ancestry doesn’t have a tree, sometimes it’s kinda hard to figure out where they belong and if we need to build a tree for them. But you can quickly learn how they fit in. If you can see that they’re a close relative of a known match with a tree, you can kind of figure out what branch they belong on in the Descendancy and if they don’t really fit in as a close relative of someone else you’ve already identified, then maybe you do wanna prioritize researching them and figuring out where they fall because they could be on an unidentified branch that you haven’t figured out yet.
Diana (3m 10s):
Oh, that’s a Really. good point. And I also thought that if you see someone who has a tree and seems fairly responsive and then you see a little group of people that are fairly close connected to them, you could reach out to them and say, Hey, how do all these people connect? You know, they don’t have trees, but I see that they’re probably your first cousins and that match probably does know who they are, but we don’t know who they are. So I think there are so many possibilities for us now with this new feature and we’re not sure exactly when it will be released. The latest news we got from the Roots Tech announcement was sometime in 2024, I think the first half.
Diana (3m 50s):
Is that what you remember?
Nicole (3m 51s):
Yeah, I think they said the first half of 2024.
Diana (3m 54s):
So we’re excited about that. And then Ancestry also announced that they’re doing something new with the colored dots, we’ll be able to put little emojis in our colored dots for grouping. So I think it will be fun to see how different people use that. I’m already thinking what I might be able to do with that and the the colors are a little bit different now, so we’re just excited to see what happens when this is all launched and we’ll be talking about it, probably writing about it, and we would love your ideas about how you’re using these new features as they come out.
Nicole (4m 29s):
Absolutely. And There was one more thing. I think they’re going to be putting a little triangulated segment symbol on some of the shared matches, although they won’t probably be giving us any segment information beyond that, you won’t be able to click on it like you can in my Heritage. But though there will be a symbol to show if that person does have a triangulated segment with the three individuals on the shared match page, you the match and the shared match.
Diana (4m 54s):
That’s exciting and I hope they show us how large that segment is because that would be nice as well. Ooh, well it’s something fun to look forward to. We are excited about that. Let’s do our announcements for today. We have our two new Airtable quick reference guides available. We have one for tracking DNA matches. This one is brand new, so if you wanna use Airtable for DNA, this one explains all the different pieces of the 2024 Research Like a Pro, DNA template that Nicole has created and updated from past versions. And then we have the new Airtable research Logs for genealogy second edition with some new additions and some some extra things in that.
Diana (5m 39s):
We are excited about our April Research Like a Pro Webinar will be held April 16th, that’s a Tuesday at 11:00 AM Mountain. And Alice Childs one of our researchers and colleagues, and she’s a Accredited genealogist professional as well, she’ll be presenting a really interesting New York DNA case study about the parents of Maria Terwilliger. So we’re excited to learn more from Alice. She always does a fabulous job on our webinars. We have our next Research Like a Pro Study Group beginning in August, and we hope you’ll think of joining us for that in the fall of 2024. And then we hope you will join our newsletter for news and coupons that we might have for some of our products.
Diana (6m 24s):
And then we are excited to meet some of you in person, or I’m excited to meet some of you in person out in Ohio in Sandusky, Ohio in April. That will be fun, that genealogy conference. And then we will be virtual at the National Genealogical Society Conference in May. So some fun things to look forward to.
Nicole (6m 46s):
Okay, our subject today is continuing from last week, Immigration Records Part two. Today we’ll talk about the Colonial Era. Knowing the history of us Immigration and the types of immigration records created when our ancestors arrived is really important. When considering finding their origins, we need to ask ourselves, did they arrive as part of one of the original colonies or did they immigrate during the 19th or 20th Century? Each Era has different records and different record availability. So in the first part of the series last time, we looked at getting started with research by focusing on the ancestors United States records to help us find clues to their Immigration date.
Nicole (7m 34s):
We also examined the importance of establishing the identity of our Ancestors with a full name, birth or marriage date, ethnicity, religion and family and friend relationships. Because there were so many people of the same name immigrating, there needs to be some way to identify our ancestors uniquely among the other people. So in this episode, we are going to discuss Immigration during the Colonial Era.
Diana (8m 3s):
All right, let’s talk Colonial. Era. I think we all wanna trace back to our earliest immigrant, and if that was in those 16 hundreds or 17 hundreds, we need to know what we’re up against. So from the landing of the English in Jamestown is 1609 to the late 17 hundreds, we had immigrants coming from England, Scotland, France, Germany, Holland and Africa. Not all of these wanted to come to America. Indentured servants, freed convicts and enslaved Africans were forced to immigrate. It is estimated that fewer than a million people arrived during this time. So not a huge number.
Diana (8m 45s):
But before the establishment of the US Federal Government in 1786 after the revolution, the colonies kept few lists of immigrants. And the reason is that most of these colonies were British and the majority of colonists during this Era were also British. So they didn’t feel the need to keep records of passengers and people coming into the colony. You know, we might give up complete hope here, but there are some sources. There are some lists that do exist, and we’ll talk about how to do your reasonably exhaustive research to see if you’ve really done all you can do to locate an ancestor compared to the number of total immigrants.
Diana (9m 27s):
Those present on the lists are relatively small, and usually we’re only going to get the head of household. But because people often immigrated in groups, we can do some cluster research on the associates of our ancestors and that could give us more clues. So we have to really be sure that we are tracing the right person. So we want to start with our ancestor, we know for sure is ours, and then go back generation by generation. And we really would recommend that you do a complete research project on each generation until you get to the hypothesized immigrant. We see this so much in family trees where people have just willy-nilly attached ancestor after ancestor, and there’s really no verification that those lines are correct.
Diana (10m 18s):
So we wanna make sure that we have done our due diligence. And we’d also recommend that you consider Confirming those lines with DNA, because we can do that for quite a ways back. You could use autosomal D-N-A-Y-D-N-A and mitochondrial DNA. And if it is aligned that you know eventually will be beyond the scope of autosomal DNA, we can seek out A-Y-D-N-A test taker who comes through that patrilineal line, and that can help us to connect with other people who might have a better paper trial. So once we have done this work in the documents and DNA Confirming and we have a pretty good hypothesis of the ancestor who immigrated, then we can look at all the available sources.
Diana (11m 4s):
And this is location specific, so we will need to create a locality guide for the colonies we suspect our ancestors came to originally. And how are we going to do this? Well, we can learn about history and settlement patterns that can give us some clues. There’s a lot of research out there on these early immigrants. So for example, I have Scott’s Irish ancestors and I have not really traced them back further. I don’t even know who the original immigrant is, but I do know that Scott’s Irish likely immigrated during the 17 hundreds and settled in North Carolina. This would be a good place to possibly pinpoint an ancestor.
Diana (11m 46s):
There was religious persecution in the old country, lack of land war. These are all reasons we know that might have caused an ancestor to have made the journey across the ocean.
Nicole (11m 58s):
Well, to give you an idea of how many immigrants from each country arrived before 1790, here’s a list. Africa, 360,000 England, 230,000 Ulster Scots, Irish 135,000 Germany, 103,000 Scotland, 48,500 Ireland 8,000, which is included in the Scots, Irish Netherlands, 6,000 Wales, 4,000 France, 3000 Jewish, 1000 Sweden, 1000 other 50,000 total in the British Isles, 425,500 and total from all 950,000.
Diana (12m 51s):
I think that’s really interesting to see a breakdown and helps you understand kind of the challenge of trying to figure out your immigrant ancestor and sometimes even the country, the specific country. So we have a challenge ahead of us in doing this kinda research. Well, let’s do a word from our Sponsor newspapers.com. Dive into the newspapers where your family’s history unfolds as you search nearly a billion pages in seconds. newspapers.com offers an unparalleled treasure trove of historical newspapers providing a window into the past with papers from the 17th Century to today. Newspapers.com is the largest online newspaper archive, it’s a gold mine for anyone seeking to uncover stories from the past.
Diana (13m 36s):
Whether you’re a seasoned genealogist or just starting your journey, newspapers.com makes it easy to search for obituaries, birth announcements and the everyday stories that shaped your family. It’s like having a time machine at your fingertips. And here’s the best part, our listeners get an exclusive offer. Use promo code FamilyLocket for a 20% discount on your subscription. That’s FamilyLocket at Newspapers.com. Sign up today at newspapers.com and embark on a journey of discovery. Well, let’s do an example of a place and a group of people that actually do have records. And this is the German Immigration to Colonial Pennsylvania.
Diana (14m 18s):
This is an exception that most immigrants won’t be found on a list. And the reason why is that Colonial Pennsylvania, the government There was getting a little bit worried about all of these German immigrants coming over. And so they passed an ordinance or a law that required non British immigrants to be identified. And these were primarily German immigrants. The 1727 requirement created captain’s lists of their passengers, lists of oaths, of allegiance to the British King and lists of those men age 16 and over, who signed an oath of fidelity and aboration. So three different records they had to create.
Diana (15m 1s):
And those originals have been compiled and published and can often be accessed on ancestry.com or family search. So for example, we have a Valentine Schultz who arrives in Pennsylvania in 1738. And per this requirement to record the non British immigrants, he was named. And we have a wife, Anna Kund, a child, George Henrich, a child, Johan Peter and a child, Anna Barbara, and a child Anna Magdalena all listed with him. And very soon after, he signed the oath of allegiance required by the colony. And this record first named a list of foreigners imported in the ship, Pennsylvania Merchant John Steadman, master from Rotterdam qualified September 11th, 1731.
Diana (15m 50s):
So we get quite a bit of detail about exactly when it came in, where it came from. The name of the ship master, the name of the ship, and we always want to examine these sources, especially when they are records from the Colonial Era so that we can learn more about them. This was from a book that’s digitized on ancestry and there is an editorial note at the very beginning. So you have to go all the way to the beginning of that film. So I often will put in image one so I can get to the beginning and learn more about the source. So the source at the beginning says The originals in the possession of the commonwealth have been badly mutilated by searchers for untold fortunes.
Diana (16m 31s):
It has been deemed advisable to publish the entire record under the authority of the state. And the lists have been carefully compared and collated to make the same of permanent value. A complete Index of surnames is given. In some few cases. The entire list of ship passengers is preserved with the ages of all. Originally, these were furnished by the proper authorities, but unfortunately one by one they have been abstracted. Wow. So that gives us a lot of details and a lot of information about how this record, this book came to be. And then the editorial note also gives the complete text of the oath of allegiance to King George II and finishes with this little snippet.
Diana (17m 11s):
All males over 16 years of age were obliged to take this oath and declaration as soon after their arrival as possible being marched to the courthouse. Although in a number of instances, they were qualified at the official residence of the magistrate. So I thought that was so fascinating, just envisioning these people coming in and then having to go take this oath right away. And if you look at this source on ancestry, this book, you can see the ship’s Passenger list that’s been abstracted. And you see that you have a list of men above 16 who took the oath, and then there’s a full list of passengers with men first and then women, and then children under 16. So we have lots of different lists, we have a lot of things to work with as we start to understand more about our Ancestors immigration.
Nicole (17m 59s):
Wonderful. That is a, a good thing to envision there if they really help you think of it, what it would be like when they’re marching them to the courthouse,
Diana (18m 9s):
Right?
Nicole (18m 9s):
If you have a Pennsylvania German ancestor who arrived during this Era, then you’ll likely find him in these types of records. But what about those British citizens who arrived during the Colonial Era? Some of these lists survived and have been published, but the challenge comes in determining if the ancestor is yours or someone of the same name. Careful research and analysis are required to connect to people on the Colonial Era lists. For example, our earliest Royston ancestor Thomas Royston, received several land grants in Gloucester County, Virginia between 1662 and 1693. The earliest grants of 1662, 1667 and 1669 referenced his transporting a total of 38 people under the head right system.
Nicole (19m 1s):
Thomas received 50 acres of land for each person whose passage he paid. We have a blog post that talks a little bit more about this if you want to read. It’s called Visiting the Land of Colonial Immigrant Ancestor Thomas Royston. And it gives more details on him and his Virginia land. So when did Thomas first arrive in Virginia? Well, possibly in 1635. At the age of 25. An early list dated August, 1635 gives the names of men and women who were transported to Virginia on the Elizabeth D. Lowe. The men took the oaths of allegiance and to supremacy. If this were the same Thomas Royston who began transporting people from England in 1662, he would’ve had almost 30 years to become settled in Virginia before paying the passage for others.
Nicole (19m 53s):
Another hypothesis is that Thomas Royston had a son of the same name who built upon his father’s wealth and began transporting people from England to Virginia. Learning more about the source can help us know how to evaluate the information When. we see a list like the one listing Thomas Royston in a digitized book. We can look at the front matter, which could be a preface author’s note, introduction or table of contents. For this specific list, we can learn that Michael Tepper edited Passengers to America, which consists of excerpts from selected volumes of the new England historical and genealogical register. The table of contents describes the various issues as you might expect, most cover passengers arriving in new England.
Nicole (20m 42s):
But why is Virginia included in a journal about new England immigrants? The article states the following. We are again enabled to lay before our readers a list of early immigrants to Virginia. It has just been received from our correspondent in London HG Summer b Esquire, but of the precise locality of the original record, he does not advise us. It is probably from the same source as that we gave in the last number of the register pages 112 and 113. Namely the records in the custody of the master of the rolls. These passengers, though they shipped to go to Virginia, it is quite probable that many intended to come to New England.
Nicole (21m 23s):
It might have been difficult for some of them to have obtained permission to come here while no objection might be made to their going to Virginia.
Diana (21m 33s):
It’s always so interesting to read about these records and to learn a little bit more about why they were kept and where this originally information came from. And the tricky thing with the Colonial immigration is there have been so many subsequent books and collections made from this original data. So you just really gotta figure out where it came from. So, what we can do is start with indexes. And this is a huge search, this immigration, but we have got a really great Index. And the most comprehensive is that created by P William Filby and first published by Gale Research in 1981.
Diana (22m 14s):
Supplements have been added regularly with the latest update being 2022, and Filby’s Passenger and Immigration list Index is also known by the acronym, PILI, can be found in many locations. It’s on my Heritage Ancestry family search. But you want to make sure you understand what version of the Passenger and Immigration List Index is being used. And the latest 2022 supplement is available in print, and you can look in WorldCat to see where you might be able to view that supplement. I know the Family History library or the family search library in Salt Lake City does have all of the the latest supplements.
Diana (22m 56s):
And so I would imagine that any large genealogical library would have the latest. So a note from the 1990 edition reads, PILI has been compiled directly from published sources. The information about each arriving Passenger and those accompanying him or her was edited to a standard format. Cross references were made for each identified accompanying Passenger. Since without those cross reference, much valuable information would be lost. So the Filby Index will give you the name of the Passenger, the place of arrival, the year of arrival, and the source. So as in any derivative record, and this is derivative, it’s an Index, you would then want to go look at the original list and the supplements.
Diana (23m 44s):
You’d really want to Discover more about that specific record. So it’s your starting point, but it’s a wonderful place to start.
Nicole (23m 52s):
Let’s talk about finding the records in published sources and online collections. The immigration records for the Colonial Era have been published first in books and now digitally and like we’ve talked about, some of them have been published over and over and republished. A good place to start looking is in the Family Search research wiki. Using Connecticut let’s see what’s available. The Connecticut Immigration and Immigration page has Links for Passenger lists, broken down by Era and Links to collections on family search ancestry, find my past and my heritage. The Wiki Links to a page on the family search catalog, which has been filtered for Connecticut Immigration.
Nicole (24m 32s):
Further filter by online records to see what is available to view from home or at a family search center. I love it when the family search Wiki has Links right to the catalog. It’s so convenient.
Diana (24m 43s):
It is. It’s a great place to start.
Nicole (24m 45s):
Ancestry has a lot of published sources, and to find those applicable to your family history, you can go to Ancestry’s card catalog, then you can filter by immigration and Immigration, then filter to the United States, and then filter to the state that you’re looking into viewing the offerings for Connecticut. We can see there are 69 collections. Many are for post Colonial Era, but there are some for the 16 hundreds and 17 hundreds, ancestry has indexed most of these digitized collections. But be sure to browse if you suspect your ancestor could be included and is not found in the Index. Also, be sure to do a search with various surname variations.
Nicole (25m 27s):
Discovering more about our Colonial ancestors, Immigration may seem a daunting task, but we can learn about the records available and the history of the area as we research. We can Discover family members and associates who might have immigrated with our ancestor helping to uniquely identify him. Well. These collections on Ancestry and the ones in the Family Search catalog can certainly help us as we try to do this. And it’s exciting to begin to find new avenues for finding out about our immigrant ancestor and to be determining where they came from.
Diana (26m 1s):
Right? And you know, we might have an instance where we really cannot figure out this immigrant, but we might have a good hypothesis like with the Thomas Royston. You know, I’m not sure if there’s one generation, there are two, but we can write that up and we can leave it open for interpretation for others, giving our best hypothesis and our reasoning for why an immigrant would be connected to us. And it’s all kind of the fun of the hunt and the fun of putting the pieces of the puzzle together. So we hope this podcast has given you some ideas about what you can do with your Colonial immigration research. So thanks everyone for listening, and we’ll talk to you next time.
Nicole (26m 43s):
Bye-Bye bye. 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 at DA 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
Back to the Basics with Immigration Records: Part 2 – Colonial Era – https://familylocket.com/back-to-the-basics-with-immigration-records-part-2-colonial-era/
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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
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