Servants appeared when as minors, their ages had to be judged, when they petitioned for their freedom, when they had been captured after running away, and when they were accused of bearing baseborn children. There are indentures of servants recorded in the Baltimore County land records, and the published abstracts of Dorchester and Talbot County land records contain similar indentures. The court and land records of Queen Anne's County contain many references to convicts. These have been abstracted by Robert A. Oszakiewski and published in a recent article in the Maryland Genealogical Society Bulletin . Newspapers contained many advertisements for runaway servants, often giving a physical description, age, and place of origin.
Newspapers also contain notices of arrivals of ships carrying redemptioners or convicts.
These can be compared with lists of ships published in Coldham, to give some idea of the possible destination of the convicts contained in Coldham's work. Merchants engaged in shipping servants to the colonies often kept lists of sales of convicts. The Cheston-Galloway Papers, at the Maryland Historical Society , contain many references to the sales of indentured servants and convicts and have been described in a paper by Robert Oszakiewski. Naturalizations During the colonial period there were very few naturalizations, except for settlers from the continent of Europe. English, Welsh, Irish and Scottish settlers were all considered merely to have moved from one part of the empire to another.