She Snuffs, Drinks and Smokes

The demand for labor in the colonial period was such that by 1775 an estimated 350,000 to 500,000 indentured persons had been transported to America. Given the scale of indentured servitude, runaway servants were not an uncommon phenomenon in the 18th century. This book, Joseph Lee Boyle's sixth collection of runaway servant ads for 18th-century Pennsylvanians, spans the era of the American Revolution. Mr. Boyle's transcriptions of the runaway ads, taken from thirty-three different colonial newspapers (including papers from New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maryland, New York, and New Jersey, as well as Pennsylvania), provide valuable demographic information on about 2,800 additional individuals, with name, age, sex, height, plate of origin, clothing, occupation, speech, physical imperfections, and sometimes personal vignettes.