One of the most frequently asked questions is, "Where do I find the ship's list of passengers?" The answer in the eighteenth century is that unless you are talking about Philadelphia, there are no passenger lists. However, many of the Germanna people came through Philadelphia. For example, we have Andreas Gar who arrived at Philadelphia, lived for a while at Germantown, and then moved to the Robinson River community.
In Pennsylvania, three ships in 1717 carrying 363 Palatines arrived at Philadelphia. Klaus Wust puts the number at a higher level than this, saying that perhaps one thousand "Palatines" left that year. (We do know that seventy-odd of these people who intended to go to Pennsylvania did not make it. Instead the captain highjacked them and took them to Virginia.) In Pennsylvania, Gov. William Keith was concerned that so many "foreigners" were immigrating. The Council ordered that the captains turn in lists of names of the people that they had brought. The order may have been too late, as many of the passengers may have dispersed already. We do know that no lists have survived of these passengers.
For the next ten years, the order of the Council was ignored even though the ships were bringing in an increasing number of immigrants from "foreign" parts. A new governor in 1726, Patrick Gordon, was concerned at the number of people who were entering without the permission of the Crown. (Of course, William Penn had made a determined effort to get people from Germany to come to Pennsylvania.) Gordon was also upset that some of these people settled on land without making any application to the Proprietor who now owned the land. He was perhaps even thinking of the Tulpehocken settlers who came in the back door from Schoharie in New York and settled on the western lands beyond the general limits of civilization at the time.
Gordon started enforcing the existing law and added the requirement that these foreigners must take an oath of Allegiance to King George II, including signing their name. These names were entered into the minutes of the Council.
The first 43 oath lists are preserved in the "Minutes of the Provincial Council of Pennsylvania," sometimes called the "Colonial Records." These lists are incomplete as many of the passengers were too sick to attend the ceremony. Other lists have been published in the "Pennsylvania Archives", where many of the captain's lists are also to be found. One might think that the Captain's lists and the oath lists would duplicate each other but there are differences.
The captains did not always follow the same rules in preparing their lists. Some only listed males above the age of sixteen. Some listed all family members. If the male head of the family died on the trip, the odds are that the rest of the family will not be listed. The only rule of regularity is that each captain prepared his list according to his own rules.
In addition to the captain's list and the loyalty oath, there were naturalization lists. With all of this information, one might think it would be possible to compose a complete list of the Philadelphia immigrants in the eighteenth century (after 1727). Two extensive compilations have been made, but we'll talk about those in the next note.
My understanding of his subject has been helped by hearing a presentation by Annette K. Burgert. Using lists of emigrants from German sources, she has pioneered in matching emigrants to immigrants. She has become very familiar with the Pennsylvania lists.
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the Germanna-L@rootsweb.com email list from 1997 to 2008. We are equally thankful to George Durman (Sgt. George) for hosting the list and republishing the notes via rootsweb.com.