French Protestants from the Huguenot community immigrated to the Colonies early, and the Huguenot Society of Pennsylvania was one of the first in North America. Utilise these pedigree-based applications to trace your own lineage.
French Protestants from the Huguenot community immigrated to the Colonies early, and the Huguenot Society of Pennsylvania was one of the first in North America. Utilise these pedigree-based applications to trace your own lineage.
These applications were created to prove lineage back to a Huguenot immigrant and can be a valuable source of information for descendants. Just as with any historical material, however, a careful researcher will verify this material with other sources, as genealogies are only as good as the information available to the family at the time of curation.
These records will often have numerous generations; thus an examination of the entire document should be conducted as well as associated records. There are also two types of documents: applications and relatives.
Applications have the following information for the primary individual:
Relative data has the following information:
Persecution of this denomination, concentrated in the southern and western parts of France, grew in intensity, leading to the French wars of Religion, fought intermittently from 1562 to 1598. The resulting Edict of Nantes of 1598 granted them substantial religious, political and military autonomy, but it didn’t last. Rebellions in the 1620s ended those privileges and finally in 1685, the legal recognition of Protestantism in France was ended; they were forced to either convert to Catholicism or flee as refugees. Not all were able or willing to leave, but the decline of the members in France tells a distinct story, going from 900,000 members in 1685 to just 100,000 or less in 1700.
Huguenot emigration included a number of locations in Europe, the United Kingdom, the Channel Islands and eventually, the North American colonies and the Caribbean. County Kent and London were particularly heavy population areas in England.
After two failed attempts in Florida, they were barred by the government from settling in New France. This led to settlements in New Netherland (later New York and New Jersey) and Nova Scotia. They were the first group of Europeans to settle in Brooklyn.
As many immigrant communities did, eventually societies were created to sustain their culture, beliefs, and heritage, connecting them to their ancestral homeland. The Huguenot Society of Pennsylvania was one of the first to be established for descendants in the United States, created in 1918, with their first official meeting occurring on the 320th anniversary of the Edit of Nantes. As the organization was intended for preservation of their past, the primary eligibility requirement for membership was quickly established and if you desired membership, you needed to prove your lineage to “one of the Huguenot families which emigrated [sic] to America prior to the promulgation of the Edict of Toleration, November 28, 1787.” (There were other options, for scholars for example.) This requirement led to the creation of valuable application papers showing multi-generation pedigrees for members, leaving an important source of information for family historians today.
Most locations are identified as Pennsylvania and surrounding mid-Atlantic states, but all regions of the US are represented, as well as modern-day Canada. There are a small number of entries for Europe.
Transcription: Findmypast Images: Historical Society of Pennsylvania