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Perhaps more than half of all immigrants arriving in the mid-Atlantic region in the 18th century were persons engaged to work for a fixed term of years--runaway servants, convicts, or apprentices--and, owing to various tribulations, thousands of these laborers absconded from their contracts, leaving their masters little choice but to advertise in the newspapers for their capture and return. Over the years many thousands of ads for runaways were placed in the centrally situated Pennsylvania Gazette during its years of existence, 1728-1796, and they give many pieces of information on these individuals that are of interest to genealogists. In this work, Prof. Farley Grubb has extracted all relevant details on 6,000 runaways who had been advertised for during this period. Data presented, for example, includes colony or county of residence, national origin, age, occupation, circumstances of employment, date of escape, height and physical features, place and time of arrival in America, and a variety of specialized information.

More than forty percent of all German immigrants entering the port of Philadelphia in the early 19th century entered into servitude as a means of paying for their passage. After the servant contract was negotiated and the shipper paid, the contract was registered with the government. This register of servant contracts, one of the few existing documents that can be used to identify German immigrants for the period 1817-1831, contains a summary of the key elements in the actual contracts, including the servant's name, buyer's name, occupation, township, county and state of residence, length of servitude, and the amount paid to the shipper. Altogether nearly 1,200 of these contracts were registered in the years 1817-1819, with only 73 entries recorded between 1820 and 1831. Thus this is an indispensable finding aid for the period just prior to the keeping of official passenger arrival records in 1820.