Person:Joseph Rakestraw (5)

!DEATH: "Rakestraw on Delaware" - In "A Record of the Register of Philadelphia Monthly Meeting," p. 280 there is a "Record of Deceased Friends for the Year 1700 in which we find Joseph Rakestraw, son of William Rakestraw, 8th mo. 1, 1700, and this notation added later: "In digging a grave in Friends Burial Ground in Philadelphia in the Spring of 1815, a tomb stone was found with the following inscription,

       Here lies a plant
       Too many seen it
       Flourisht and perisht
       In half a minuit.
       Joseph Rakestraw,
       the son of William,
       Shott by a negro
       The 30 day of Sept.
       1700, in the 19th year
       and 4th month of his age."

In pencil is this: "Joseph Rakestraw printer, had this stone many years and built it up in his grate, it being soapstone. So his sister Sarah told S.L.S."

"A letter of Mr Norris' of the year 1700, explains the circumstance, saying that "Jack, a black man belonging to Philip James, was wording it with Joseph, half jest and half earnest, when his gun went off and killed him on the spot. The negro was put to trial."

1. ↑ George E. McCracken. Rakestraw On the Delaware. (The American Genealogist).

   18 3rd mo. 1680

2. ↑ Pennsylvania Colonial Records
   Vol. 2 pg 11, 14 FEB 1700.

   14th of 12th Mo, 1700
   "A Certain Negroe, named Jack, having sometime in the 6th month last, by firing a Gun, killed a Young English man, Son to William Rakestraw, for which he was Committed close Prisoner in the Goal of Philadia, where he has to this time Continued, And it being necessary that his Trial should be Expedited.
   Ordered, because the late law past in the last Sessions of Assembly for Trial of Negroes, does not look back to acts perpetrated before the Publication of the Said Law, and because the former Law cannot be now thought in force, That the Said Negroe shall be tried by, & According to the Common Law of Engld."

3. ↑ Watson's Annals of Philadelphia and Pennsylvania
   Vol I; Chapter 74 "Churches".
4. ↑ George E. McCracken. Rakestraw On the Delaware. (The American Genealogist)
   Vol. 51, No.1; Jan. 1975.