How does an indentured servant, redemptioner, or enslaved ancestor affect your research?

 

Although data on immigration for the colonial period are scattered and incomplete several scholars have estimated that between half and three quarters of European immigrants arriving in the colonies came as indentured or redemptioner servants. See Rosenblum, Joshua. n.d. “Indentured Servitude in the Colonial U.S.” Accessed February 23, 2023. https://eh.net/encyclopedia/indentured-servitude-in-the-colonial-u-s/. 

An indentured servant is defined as a person who signs and is bound by indentures to work for another for a specified time especially in return for payment of travel expenses and maintenance. Redemptioners are more specifically defined as follows: 

Redemptioners were European immigrants, generally in the 18th or early 19th century, who gained passage to American Colonies (most often Pennsylvania) by selling themselves into indentured servitude to pay back the shipping company which had advanced the cost of the transatlantic voyage. British indentured servants generally did not arrive as redemptioners after the early colonial period due to certain protections afforded them by law. Redemptioners were at a disadvantage because they negotiated their indentures upon arrival after a long and difficult voyage with no prospect to return to their homelands. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redemptioner

As part of the number of indentured servants, approximately 60,000 of them were criminals who were transported to the colonies. Here is a quote about the numbers which vary according to the source. 

Not many people know that between 1718 and 1775 over 52,000 convicts were transported from the British Isles to America, mainly to Maryland and Virginia, to be sold as slaves to the highest bidder. It is reckoned that transported convicts made up a quarter of the British immigrants to colonial America in the 18th century.

Before the Transportation Act of 1718, criminals either escaped with just a whipping or a branding. They were then released back onto the streets to commit more crimes. Or they were hanged. Because the jails were not intended for long-term incarceration, there was nothing in between.

After the passing of the Act, transportation became the main punishment at the courts’ disposal. From May 1718 to the outbreak of the American War of Independence in 1775, over 70 per cent of those who were found guilty at the Old Bailey were sentenced to be transported, compared with less than one per cent in the period from 1700 to March 1718. See https://www.thehistorypress.co.uk/articles/the-land-of-the-free-criminal-transportation-to-america/

 You need to add to that number that current estimates are that about 12 million to 12.8 million Africans were shipped across the Atlantic over a span of 400 years. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade#:~:text=Slaves%20were%20imprisoned%20in%20a,a%20span%20of%20400%20years. In addition, about 59,000 free African Americans lived in the United States in the census of 1790 or about 19 percent of the total population.

All these figures about the percentages and numbers of these early populations are subject to opinion, methodology, and verification. But all things considered, there is a huge proportion of the United States population that has ancestors in these three categories. 

If you think about these numbers for just few minutes, you will understand that if you have ancestors that appear in the American colonies before or about the time of independence from England and you are stuck trying to find how or when they arrived in America, you are very likely to have one or even all three of these categories of ancestors. This is why a remarkably high percentage of the ancestral lines in the United States really end in or before the 1700s. Record keeping and identification of the people in these three categories is often inaccurate or incomplete. 

If you find a family line in the FamilySearch.org Family Tree that goes back to colonial times, you need to carefully document each parent/child relationship because a huge number of these lines come from one or more of these three categories and there are unlikely to be any records showing an actual extension of the family line back to Europe. Of course, tracking an enslaved family back to its origins is one of the ultimate challenges of genealogy.