Workshop: The Philadelphia Indenture Book - A Resource for Social History and Family History
The workshop is now at capacity. To be added to the wait list, sign up here.
Thursday, March 4, 1:00–2:00 p.m. EST
One of the historical treasures for researching early Philadelphia history in the collections of the Library & Museum of the American Philosophical Society is a book recording the details of over 5,000 indenture contracts registered between 1771 and 1773. These entries contain rich information about working people and immigrants who came to Philadelphia in the lead up to the American Revolution. As part of the Library & Museum’s Open Data Initiative, this document is available in the Digital Library both as high-res scans of the original pages and also as tabular data which can be downloaded.
In this workshop, Valerie-Ann Lutz and Kyle Roberts will talk about the importance of this data for researching the individual and family lives of early Philadelphians. They will go over how to access the extracted data and the digital surrogate of the original indenture book, the type of data available in the records, and how to search the data. They will share other resources to use in conjunction with the data to find more information about these historical individuals as well as brainstorming some scholarly and genealogical uses for the data.
The workshop will be one-hour long and will provide opportunities for questions and conversation. The workshop is now at capacity. To be added to the wait list, click on the registration link here.
Valerie-Anne Lutz is Head of Manuscripts Processing, where she supervises a team of archivists who make new collections available. Val has been at the APS since 1999 and has held the positions of archival processor, digital imaging project coordinator, and assistant manuscripts librarian. Previously, she worked at the Philadelphia City Archives and Records Center.
Kyle Roberts is the Associate Director of Library & Museum Programming of the American Philosophical Society Library & Museum. A scholar of Atlantic World religion, print, and urban history, he is also a public historian and digital humanist who has created several digital projects.