Record of The Hester Family

Generation 1

1. My great grandfather, John Lawrence Hester (Hoerster, in German) was born in the kingdom of Hanover, Germany, about 1738.

He and his wife, Mary Margaret, and three children emigrated to America A.D. 1771. They took ship at Amsterdam and arrived at Philadelphia. Not being able to pay for their passage, which was $300, he and his family were sold into servitude for a term of six years to pay the debt.

The following article will show that this was not a rare occurence.

Early Settlers in Pennsylvania
John R. Commons

Another colony to which all races and religions were welcomed was Pennsylvania. William Penn established this colony both as a refuge for the persecuted Quakers of England and as a real estate venture. He was the first American to advertise his dominions widely throughout Europe, offering to sell one hundred acres of land at two English pounds and a low rental. His advertisements called attention to popular government and universal suffrage; equal rights to all regardless of race or religious belief; trial by jury; murder and treason the only capital crimes; and reformation, not retaliation, the object of punishment for other offenses. Thus Pennsylvania, although settled a half century later than the southern and northern colonies, soon exceeded them in population.

Penn sent his agents to Germany, and persuaded large numbers of German Quakers and Pietists to cast their lot in his plantation, so that, in twenty years, the Germans numbered nearly one-half the population. Again, in the beginning of the eighteenth century, when Louis XIV overran the Palatinate, and thousands of Germans fled to England, the English government encouraged their migration to America. In one year four thousand of them, the largest single emigration of the colonial period, embarked for New York, but their treatment was so illiberal that they moved to pennsylvania, and thenceforth the German migration sought the latter colony. These people settled at Germantown, near Philadelphia, and occupied the counties of Bucks and Montgomery, where they continue to this day with their peculiar language, the "Pennsylvania Dutch." Not only William Penn himself, but other landowners in Pennsylvania, and also the shipowners, advertised the country in Germany, and thousands of the poorer sort of germans were induced to indenture themselves to the settlers, to whom they were auctioned off in payment for transportation. Probably one-half of all the immigrants of the colonial period came under this system of postpaid transportation, just as, at the present time, nearly two-thirds come on prepaid tickets.

It was in Pennsylvania that the largest portion of the Scotch-Irish settled, and before the time of the Revolution that colony had become the most populous and most diversified of all the colonies. It was the only colony, except Maryland, that tolerated Roman Catholics, and with all phases of the Christian religion and all branches of the Teutonic and Celtic races, Pennsylvania set the original type to which all of America has conformed-that of race intermixture on the basis of religious and political equality.-Chautauquan.

The Hester Family were treated with great cruelty by their master; but towards the end of the first year, kind friends loaned them the money to procure their redemption; but their cruel master would not reduce their claim one cent, on account of the year's service, already performed. The husband and father died A.D. about 1785, aged 46. The widowed mother was very strong physically, a woman of great energy and thrift and of deep piety. She kept her family together and reared them to honorable and useful manhood and womanhood. She died about 1800. They were members of the Lutheran Church and lived and died in Greene county, Pa.
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