DONNA BINGHAM MUNGER

My Own Website

Author, Educator, Historian, Genealogist

                                                                                  Connecticut’s                            

                                                     Pennsylvania “Colony”                    

                                                 1754-1810

                                                    Susquehanna Company

                                                  Proprietors, Settlers

                                                 and Claimants

                                             Volume II

                                             The Settlers

The Connecticut based Susquehanna Company perpetrated one of the greatest land schemes of all times. Arguing that the unsettled Susquehanna River region in the colony of Pennsylvania lay within the charter bounds of the colony of Connecticut, the Company sold rights to land along the East and West Branches of the Susquehanna River. To justify its actions, the Company negotiated a deed with the Indians of the Six Nations conveying the Wyoming region in Pennsylvania to Company proprietors, also called shareholders. For the next fifty years Company settlers, mainly from Connecticut, streamed into northeastern Pennsylvania. Holding title to their land only by virtue of deeds recorded in Company Account Books, the settlers disappeared from legal court records.

The only way to locate these settlers had been in Susquehanna Company records held in private hands for years. Eventually the records were donated to the Connecticut Historical Society and there, a few historians of local history used them to extract significant information, but in the style of the time did not document their source. Years later, Julian Boyd used the Company Minute Book as a framework for his multi-volume Susquehanna Company Papers project. But neither Boyd nor Taylor, the final project editor, used the Company Account - read Deed Books to focus on individuals. With the awakening of family history and genealogy the importance of the Account Books became more obvious in the quest to locate elusive Connecticut ancestors. The first step was to create a database of proprietors containing all information given in the Account Books about each one (see Volume I, The Settlers). The question then arose, of the proprietors, all of whom held a vested interest in settling on Company land in Pennsylvania, which ones actually became settlers? To answer that question a database of settlers seemed to be logical, hence this Volume II, The Settlers.

Volume II makes the task of searching multiple sources manageable and the information understandable by merging thirty-two lists of settlers into one database. The sources begin with a deposition recalling the names of thirteen of the first Susquehanna Company settlers in June 1762 and end with 1150 names on a November 1801 petition to the United States Congress asking for additional consideration and relief. In between, the lists range from the names of the 31 of the “First Forty” present and arrested at Wyoming in March 1769, to a list of the proprietor-settlers of the first five townships in June 1770, and tax lists for 1776-1780.

                               The Seventeen Certified Townships of the Susquehanna Company

              Original in Names of Releasors - John and Richard Penn by Their Attorney Edmond Physick, Vol. A

                                         Land Records Collection, Pennsylvania State Archives

For each person named in a list the database cites date and place present. Many individuals appear on several of the lists as the database clearly shows. As with all publications choices needed to be made so the lists of inhabitants of individual towns at a given time gave way to lists of a more comprehensive nature. Most of the short, township specific lists are printed in early county histories and available on the Internet.

To access the alphabetical database of settlers: name, date present, place, source, you need to use this Volume II.

Use worldcat.org to find Volume II, The Settlers, in a library near you.

Use heritagebooks.com or Amazon.com to buy Volume II. This is not advertising. In return for publication, I gave Heritage Books the royalty income, although I hold the copyright.

All Volumes (I, II, III) may be obtained in the same way.

To buy a searchable, archival quality, at cost, CD of Volumes I, II, III databases contact me. (dgbmunger@gmail.com)

Donna Bingham Munger asserts her right to be identified as the author of this website.