Lancaster County, Pennsylvania Slaveholders P - R |
Slaveholders Listed on this Page
About the data in this listEach listing represents a record of one Black enslaved person or indentured servant (more on terminology below). The list is sorted alphabetically according to the owner's surname. This order seems to be the most useful for several reasons. It groups enslaved persons together who would have lived with the same owner, and increases the likelihood of finding persons related to each other. Records of slave surnames are rare, many being identified only through their given name. You can search this listing for a specific slave given name by using your browser's Find feature. Dates of birth shown for the enslaved persons, unless specified in the original documents, have been calculated by subtracting their given age from the date of the record. Their ages as reported in the original records are frequently given as approximations (such as "about 25 years of age"), signified by a lower case "a" following their age. The term Status refers to the enslaved person's relative freedom. Unless specified otherwise, slaves served "for life" prior to Pennsylvania's Gradual Emancipation Act of 1780. Children born to enslaved mothers after the passage of that legislation were to be kept in bondage until age 28, which was much of their productive lives. The term Description is the description of the enslaved person as given in the original source (including misspellings). This was often a means by which those in bondage were placed into certain categories according to race and relative age. Terminology, and other notesThe terms "slave" and "servant" were often used interchangeably, especially in the earliest years of the time period covered in this study. After the Gradual Emancipation Act of 1780 was passed in Pennsylvania, the term "servant," originally meaning either someone in indentured servitude or someone employed by the head of the household, was increasingly used to refer to the children of enslaved mothers who, being duly registered, where enslaved for twenty-eight years instead of for life. The passage from "slave" to "servant" was often indistinct for many Blacks, many of whom remained with their former owners after being legally emancipated. For simplicity I have used the term "slave" to represent these persons whom I believe were truly in bondage, even though some records list them as "servants." This list does not generally include white indentured servants, who were an entirely different class of exploited labor from Black slaves and Black "indentured servants." The locations listed for the slaveholders, especially City or Township are mixed, and represent the location listed in the original record. As township boundaries shifted and new townships and counties were created, the original listing may be different from modern boundaries. Enslavement Data
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