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Did your family live in Pennsylvania long ago? This record set may help you find them. It covers people from the 1600s to the 1800s.
You will find almost 190,000 names in these records. Many are from times before the United States kept regular records.
Pennsylvania did not have one place for birth, marriage, or death records before the late 1800s. Many early records were lost or never written. This collection brings many of them together.
You can find names from newspapers, land records, court papers, and family stories. There are also papers about becoming a citizen.
One important part is the Pennsylvania Gazette. This was Benjamin Franklin’s newspaper. It has marriage and death notices. It has ads for runaways. It shares news from daily life.
There is also the American Weekly Mercury. This paper is even older than the Gazette. Both papers list names you may not find anywhere else.
Another part is the Colonial Records series. These books have meeting notes from early leaders. They show how the colony was run.
Other helpful books are listed below:
Additional Resources:
- Virginia Court Records in Southwestern Pennsylvania, Records of the District of West Augusta and Ohio and Yohogania Counties, Virginia, 1775-1780
- Index to Pennsylvania’s Colonial Records Series
- Early Pennsylvania Land Records: Minutes of the Board of Property of the Province of Pennsylvania
- Colonial and Revolutionary Families of Pennsylvania, Volumes I, II, and III
- Names of Foreigners Who Took the Oath of Allegiance to the Province and State of Pennsylvania, 1727-1775
- Persons Naturalized in the Province of Pennsylvania, 1740-1773
- Names of Persons who Took the Oath of Allegiance to the State of Pennsylvania Between the Years 1777 and 1789
- Abstracts from Ben Franklin’s ‘Pennsylvania Gazette,’ 1728-1748
- Genealogical Abstracts from ‘The American Weekly Mercury,’ 1719-1746