Georgia Family History Research From Ancestry.com Wiki This
entry was originally written by the Johni Cerny and Robert S.
Davis, in Red Book: American State, County, and Town Sources.
Georgia was founded in 1733 to give new lives to deserving non-
Roman Catholics in the New World. Despite involvements of
Georgia’s founder, James Oglethorpe, with debtors’ prisons, no
debtors or criminals were allowed to be sent to Georgia.
Nevertheless, the myth that Georgia was a debtors’ colony or a
type of Botany Bay seems impossible to lay to rest with the
truth. Trustees of the colony sent about 5,000 persons from
Great Britain to Georgia, and information about most of those
colonists is published in E. Merton Coulter and Albert B. Saye,
A List of the Early Settlers of Georgia (Athens, Ga.: University
of Georgia Press, 1949). Each colonist received fifty acres of
land, while those who paid their own passage might have received
up to 500 acres. The Salzburgers, central European Protestants,
became the first non-British grou