ROOTS & BRANCHES

When I volunteered to do a webinar titled “Pennsylvania German Enslavers: Initiating a Re-Examination” for Katy Barnes, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania’s genealogy director, I knew I was tackling a topic with the potential for fraught conversation.

But with encouragement from both Barnes and Justina Barrett, the society’s director of education and programs, we were all of the same mind that this is a time and place in which, fraught or not, such conversations need to be had.

When I announced in “Roots & Branches” a couple of months ago that we’d be doing this webinar, some readers were not so convinced.

“I am completely wary of any discussion of the history of slavery and racism in light of how politics is involved,” Steve Kleiner of Blair County wrote.

Frequent “Roots & Branches” correspondent Eric Bender was equally skeptical but also immediately signed up for the webinar and attended.

As I was putting together the lecture, I felt it presented opportunity to learn more deeply about the records involved here … and make attempts to understand their nuances.

For instance, it seems that most enslaved people in my home Berks County were used for industrial labor—forges, furnaces, etc.—or as domestic labor. Relatively few seem to have been used in agriculture … distinct from their use in the South.

The presentation ran the gamut of records in which enslaved persons might be mentioned, including some that have been recently rediscovered by researchers such as Scott Gordon, a Lehigh University professor, who found the 1780 register of the enslaved for Northampton County right in miscellaneous court papers at HSP.

From a large database of more than 6,000 enslaved persons compiled from the 1780 registers across the commonwealth and others like it, I noted that several early Hiester men in Berks County were enslavers. Since my mother’s maiden name was Hiester, I was familiar with these men but not their status.

One was Daniel Hiester, a brick maker whose two 18^th century homes have survived, and who noted in his will that his “Negroes” were to be divided among his sons but made an allowance for one enslaved man, Leonard Coff, to be supported by those sons once he could no longer labor.

I also showed the manumission papers of enslaved people held by my direct-line ancestor Nicolaus Kintzer of Tulpehocken Township, Berks County; they were given freedom by Kintzer’s executors.

Much of the presentation dealt with another Hiester relative of mine, Joseph, who climaxed a long political career as governor of Pennsylvania.

But his is a tale for next week’s edition of “Roots & Branches.”