"SO  THAT   HIS   MASTER
MAY   HAVE   HIM  AGAIN":

The Pursuit of Indentured Property
in the Pages of the Pennsylvania Gazette
 

T. K. HuMER
 

a;
 

degree of infamy brings inden¬
tured servants to our attention in
.-the form of runaway advertise¬
ments taken out by masters seeking to recover them. The notices are a point
of intersection for apprentices, indentured servants, convicts, and slaves; it
is in the advertisements that the status of indentured servants as property
becomes evident.

Manually searching the pages of the Pennsylvania Gazette for runaway
notices in the twenty-one-year period between 1729 and 1750—an under¬
taking of tremendous proportions—is both time consuming and
painstaking. It requires reading each issue of the Gazette in full without the
benefit of the indices and regular sections present in modern-day newspa¬
pers such as the New York Times. With its multicolumn format, the Grtzc^cwas
a disorganized jumble of news, opinions, and classifieds: no index, no
sections. An advertisement for a runaway could be placed adjacent to,
above, or beneath an announcement of the newest ship to enter port from
foreign parts, of a woman who left her husband, or of an attempt to clear
one's name from being ill-used. The possible embedding of a runaway
notice within another announcement further complicates such an investi¬
gation.

However, a fully searchable electronic text of the Pennsylvania Gazette
(Malvern, Pa.: Accessible Archives, 1991-) is a boon to the scholarly
researcher. It allows for the extraction of information in ever broader or