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Enslavement in PennsylvaniaNorthumberland County Slaveholders, A-ZSlaveholders Listed on This Page
About the information in this listEach listing represents a record of one Black slave or indentured servant (more on terminology below). The list is sorted alphabetically according to the owner's surname. I felt that this order would be the most useful for several reasons. It groups slaves 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 (Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer use Ctrl + F). Dates of birth for the slaves, unless specified in the original documents, have been calculated by subtracting their given age from the date of the record. Very often, their ages as reported in the original records are given as approximations (such as "about 25 years of age"), which is indicated by a lower case "a" following their age. The term Status refers to the slave's relative freedom. Unless specified otherwise, slaves served "for life" prior to Pennsylvania's Gradual Emancipation Act of 1780. Children born to slave mothers after the passage of that legislation were to serve until age 28, which was much of their productive lives. The term Description refers to the main description of the slave as given in the original source (including misspellings). This is often a means by which slaves were put 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" frequently came to mean either someone in indentured servitude or someone employed by the head of the household. 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 people whom I believe were truly in bondage, even though some records list them as "servants." This list does not include white indentured servants, who were an entirely different class of labor from Black slaves and Black "indentured servants." The locations listed for the owners, especially City or Township are greatly 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 very misleading. Enslavement Data
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