March 28, 1776

Many advertisements for runaway servants described the person’s physical features and ethnicity in an effort to recover the individual. Apart from advertisements for enslaved people and indentured Black servants, the people advertised in Philadelphia in 1776 were often German, Dutch, or Irish. In this case, the servant was Italian. John Donominceas ran away from John Peters, who described his servant as a twenty-eight-year-old man with a slender build and his hair in a ponytail. Donominceas was a biscuit baker. He was also multilingual, able to “speak good French, Italian, Portuguese,” and understood “a little English.”

John Donominceas was not the only baker who ran away from John Peters. In December 1777, during the British occupation of Philadelphia, Peters published an advertisement for a twenty-three-year-old Black servant named Will, who had been “brought up a baker.”

Pennsylvania Evening Post
Printed by Benjamin Towne

Philadelphia, March 27, 1776.
TWO DOLLARS Reward.

RAN away from the subscriber, a servant man named JOHN DONOMINCEAS, an Italian, about twenty-eight years of age, five feet five inches high, slender built, brown complexion, has his hair tied in a tail, can can speak good French, Italian, Portuguese, and understands a little English, a bisket-baker by trade. He had on and took with him, when he went away, one suit of olive colour velvet, one drab coloured sagathy coattee, one red-striped jacket, one pair of light coloured knit breeches, one light coloured knap-jacket, a pair of brown cloth trousers, two pair of blue stockings, two pair of shoes, one brown, one white, and one check shirts, one Indian blanker, and an old castor hat. Whoever takes up said servant, and secures him so that his master gets him again, shall have the above reward and reasonable charges.

JOHN PETERS.