White servitude in Maryland.

[mia]

http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~mobley/WHITESER.TXT

I've long been interested in genealogy and have early Maryland roots. I came across this reading many years ago.

For the punishment and prevention of this wholesale running away very stringent laws were enacted by the General Assembly throughout the period. In March, I64I-2, an act was passed making it felony and punishable with death for a servant to depart secretly from his master or mistress with intent to convey himself out of the province.4 This penalty might be commuted by the proprietor or the governor to servitude not exceeding seven years. Anyone who accompanied or assisted such a fugitive was subject to the same penalty as the fugitive himself.5 This law was super-seded by the act of April, I649-50, which made it felony to assist a
servant in running away, but the servant was required only to serve double the time of his absence and to pay all costs and damages by servitude. The same penalty was imposed upon hired servants, but those who assisted them were not guilty of felony and were required only to pay double damages and costs for the servant's absence.6 It does not appear from a study of the court records that the death penalty, or even servitude for seven years, was ever imposed upon the servant or his accessory, although running away was frequent....

[DebJ]

1. Hi Mia. I have roots in Maryland also

Prince Georges, Charles, St Marys County, back to the 1600s.

Interesting to me were my ancestors who lived in Prince Georges County at a time when free white men, free black men,
slaves, and tenant farmers were all working in the same relatively small area together. That was before racism became a basis for enslavement here.

[mia]

2. From St. Mary's County too - life was not easy back then.

Bones tell of harsh Md. life in 1600s

WASHINGTON -- When archaeologists excavated 18 graves at a 3-century-old Calvert County plantation a few years ago, they had no headstones, no diaries, no letters and no church records. Nothing to tell the stories of those long-vanished colonists.

By studying wear and tear and the shapes and sizes of the bones, Dr. Ubelaker has produced grim snapshots of life on a mid-17th century Maryland settlement: of shoulders strained by heavy lifting and hauling, of clay pipes puffed habitually through clenched teeth, of bones made brittle by disease, of malnutrition and early death.

"The general picture I have is that, particularly for adults, it was a very hard life," said Dr. Ubelaker, the curator of physical anthropology at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History....

The upper bodies of the men showed the strains of heavy physical labor. Many of the colonists -- men, women and even a 13-year-old child -- smoked clay pipes habitually, leaving tobacco stains and circular wear marks on their teeth. About a third of the colonists had suffered broken bones....

http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1993-06-25/news/1993176078_1_bones-ubelaker-calvert/2