"The American Weekly Mercury" was the first newspaper published in Pennsylvania and the third in British North America. In the earliest days of publication, what little genealogical material is found in the paper comes chiefly from advertisements for runaway servants or Negro and Indian slaves.In time, however, a steady stream of genealogical data--mainly marriages and deaths--began to appear. Most of the marriage entries pertained to persons of some distinction, such as governors, judges, government officials, clergymen, and eminent merchants, as well as their family members. In the case of death notices, the age of the deceased was noted, sometimes with a brief sketch of his career and with an indication of his place of birth, ancestry, and relatives. Many of the genealogical items were concerned with persons in Delaware, New Jersey, Maryland, South Carolina, and New England, as well as Pennsylvania. The index lists 3,400 names of persons who would otherwise have been relegated to obscurity.

"The data abstracted herein have been collected from over 7,100 issues of eighty-one 18th-century Virginia newspapers."--Introduction.

Researchers on the trail of elusive ancestors sometimes turn to 18th- and early 19th-century newspapers after exhausting the first tier of genealogical sources (i.e., census records, wills, deeds, marriages, etc.). Generally speaking, early newspapers are not indexed, so they require investigators to comb through them, looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. With his latest book, Robert Barnes has made one aspect of the aforementioned chore much easier. This remarkable book contains advertisements for missing relatives and lost friends from scores of newspapers published in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Virginia, as well as a few from New York and the District of Columbia. The newspaper issues begin in 1719 (when the "American Weekly Mercury" began publication in Philadelphia) and run into the early 1800s. The author's comprehensive bibliography, in the Introduction to the work, lists all the newspapers and other sources he examined in preparing the book. The volume references 1,325 notices that chronicle the appearance or disappearance of 1,566 persons.

For the first time, the remarkable story that inspired Robert Louis Stevenson's "Kidnapped." Award-winning author Ekrich recounts an extraordinary family drama of betrayal and loss--but also of resilience, survival, and redemption.