A Brief Citizenship

By Eilene Lyon

A record group I have not delved into much is naturalization records in the United States. Of course, someone who came to America from Great Britain prior to the Revolution had no need to file for citizenship.

My 4^th great-grandfather, Thomas Bedford, was born in Old Sampford, Essex, England, in 1765 to a Quaker family.¹ He arrived in South Carolina in 1786 to work for his uncle, Joseph Atkinson. If he applied for citizenship while in South Carolina, it would have been handled at the state level. I have not found a record for this.

Thomas took offense to his uncle’s slave-holding practices and decided to make his own way, wandering north until reaching Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the Quaker State. Here he married Jane Thompson in 1796.² I’ve not been able to locate any record with the names of her parents, so I know little about her.

Thomas’s parents were Isaac Bedford (1742–1797) and Abigail Atkinson (1742–1776). The name Isaac Bedford appears many times on my tree. No doubt my 3^rd great-grandmother, Abigail (Bedford) Jenkins, was named for her paternal grandmother. Thomas had at least seven full siblings and two half siblings.

His older brother, named for the previously mentioned uncle, was Joseph Atkinson Bedford (b. 1762). Because Joseph came to America well after the ratification of the US Constitution, he did apply for citizenship.

The first federal naturalization law (1790) applied to free white persons, age 21 or over, who had resided in the country at least two years. At that time, an applicant did not need to file a declaration of intent. In 1795, the residency requirement went up to five years, and a declaration of intent had to be filed three years prior to applying for citizenship. A 1798 law upped the residency requirement to fourteen years, but in 1802 it dropped back to five. This law remained in effect for over a century.

Joseph A. Bedford was 36 when he came America in 1798, along with his wife Ann (Bowerbank) Bedford and three young sons: Isaac, Thomas, and Joseph. Ann gave birth to three children in Philadelphia. The son, Peter, sadly died in infancy. The two daughters they named Susannah and Sarah.

Family Search (and Ancestry) has a database for Philadelphia naturalization records, and here I found Joseph’s citizenship petition, dated June 21, 1807.³ He presented the document in the US District Court at Philadelphia. Part of the petition includes a character witness—none other than my ancestor, Thomas Bedford. This document contains the signatures of both brothers, which clearly shows their beautiful penmanship.

An interesting modification to the document, given that the men were Quakers, is the word “sworn” is crossed out and replaced with “affirmed” in four places. Another modification is done to remove the word “pray.” Instead of “humbly prays,” Joseph “respectfully solicits.”

Included on Joseph’s petition is a statement about his residency. I found this of particular interest, because it appears that Joseph may have left the state or country prior to filing this document in 1807. He first arrived in Philadelphia in June 1798, leaving in April 1802. It’s not stated when he returned, but it does say he has completed the five-year residency requirement and resided in Pennsylvania for the past year.

A few other records give us a more detailed look at his life in Philadelphia. A city directory from 1799 indicated Joseph worked as an assistant teller at the Bank of Pennsylvania on Elbow Lane (this may have been in the Germantown suburb). Thomas, at the time, appears to have been a shopkeeper. ⁴  Another record from that year has Joseph with Ann and their three sons being accepted into the Philadelphia Monthly Meeting (Society of Friends congregation).⁵

I found the brothers in 1804, both employed as accomptants [accountants] in separate businesses in the old part of the city near the Delaware River waterfront.⁶

In 1807, the year Joseph filed for naturalization and signed his affirmation to the state (on July 26), he worked as a porter to Pennsylvania Bank on York Road above Callowhill. Thomas was still an accomptant downtown on Sassafras St.⁷ (Sassafras is now Race St.)

When Joseph became a citizen, his minor children (under 21) automatically received citizenship, though there is no corresponding paperwork to indicate this. Ann, as a married woman, did not legally exist as a separate entity, so she effectively became a citizen upon Joseph’s death, an event that occurred much too soon. He died at age 51 of a remittent fever on October 13, 1814.⁸ He’d been an American for just seven years.

Feature image: AI-generated image of Joseph and Thomas Bedford presenting their petition to a judge in U.S. District Court, Philadelphia, in 1807. This was my first attempt at using AI to generate images for a blog. I much preferred the first rendering, but when I asked ChatGPT to make both men in their mid-40s, I wound up with the feature image that has the men staring off into space instead of looking at the judge. In the image below (the first rendering) the brothers look more like father and son, but otherwise I was quite happy with this one. It looks much more realistic.