Augier or Hosier – name transformations

 

 

When I was transcribing the 1754 census of Spanish Town I came across three people listed as “free Mulattoes or Descendants from them admitted to the privileges of white people by Acts of the Legislature”.  Two of them I knew already – Mary Johnston Rose and her son Thomas Wynter who each lived in the house that they owned. Then there was Susanna Hosier who was recorded as a sugar planter and who owned a house worth £60 that was un-tenanted.  I was surprised that I did not know who she was and could not find any reference to her, since as a mixed race woman she seemed to be unusually wealthy.

Sometime later I was working on the family of Susanna Augier and realised that the name was sometimes written as Augier and sometimes as Hosier.  Once you pronounce Augier as ‘O-gee-er’ with a soft G you realise how it could come to be written as Hosier.  It was also occasionally mis-transcribed as Augire, Angier and Augine.   I often use dictation software when transcribing Wills and writing these blog pieces, and the software delivers ‘osier’ for ‘Augier’ !  It is the kind of name transformation that makes the work of the genealogist both frustrating and fascinating.

Having resolved the name puzzle I was able to build the story of Susanna Augier and her extended family.  She was a quite exceptional woman and well known to the Jamaican Plantocracy. Her case was used to support the argument in the construction of the 1761 act preventing “Devizes to Negroes”, limiting the inheritance of black, mixed race, and illegitimate Jamaicans to £2000. The size of her inheritance seems to have been exceptional, but it provided useful ammunition for those wanting to restrict the size of legacies.

Susanna was the daughter of John Augier, a planter who died in 1722.  He seems to have had little connection to his origins and a fondness and care for his Jamaican family.  Under his Will he freed his daughters Susanna, Mary, Jenny, Frances and Jane.  Subsequent references to his family show that there was a further daughter called Elizabeth and a son called Jacob, and probably a daughter Sarah who died young.  Susanna, who was probably born about 1707, seems to have been particularly favoured and in due course became the mother of four children with a planter called Peter Caillard or Calliard.  Mary, Peter, Frances and Susanna Caillard were born between 1725 and 1728. [But see Postscript below].

Peter Caillard died about 1728 leaving Susanna hugely wealthy. In addition to her inheritance from her father she now had a life interest in several properties in Kingston and Spanish Town and an estate including a Penn in St Catherine and a Mountain at Way Water, all valued for probate at £26,150 8s 1d, and entailed for her children Mary and Peter.  By 1753 Susanna owned 950 acres of mainly good land in the parish of St Andrew (including 40 acres under coffee, 100 acres of provision ground and 800 acres of woodland) with eighty negroes, one white servant and forty-two head of cattle. Like many other free mixed race Jamaicans Susanna owned slaves – for example John Augier ‘a negro man belonging to Susanna Augier’ was baptised in Kingston on the 4th of March 1740. Few women in eighteenth century Jamaica owned estates (most who did were planters widows), fewer still managed them themselves as Susanna appears to have done.

Peter and Susanna Caillard both died young, but in 1738 Susanna applied for the rights of whites for herself and her children Mary and Frances Caillard. A Private Act of the Jamaica Assembly dated 19th of July 1738 granted them the legal status of whites.

Mary Caillard travelled to England, perhaps to meet her father’s family in Bristol, and on the 19th of April 1748 at Henbury, Gloucestershire she married Gilbert Ford who would in due course become Jamaican Attorney General.  It was an unusual marriage for a mixed race Jamaican, even more so for a young English Lawyer.  Ford came from a well-to-do family – his brother James became Physician Extraordinary to Queen Charlotte, Physician Extraordinary to the Westminster Lying-in hospital, and Consulting Man-Midwife to the Westminster General dispensary.  Sadly there were no children of the marriage and Mary died in May 1754 at Clifton, Bristol[1].  It seems to have been after her death that Gilbert Ford went to Jamaica where he married for a second time to Elizabeth Aikenhead.

Within about a year of Caillard’s death Susanna was living with Gibson Dalzell  with whom she had two further children, Frances and Robert, and on his death in about 1755 she inherited a life interest in his estate worth £6854 1s 3d.  Dalzell made full provision for Frances and Robert who by then were living with him in London.

Robert Dalzell was sent to his father’s college, Christ Church Oxford in 1761. In 1762 aged just twenty he married Miss Jane Dodd, ‘an agreeable young lady of large fortune, and with every other accomplishment necessary to adorn the marriage state.’ [2]  There were three children of his marriage who lived into the nineteenth century and had descendants, owning the manors of Tidworth and Mackney in Berkshire.

Frances Dalzell married the Honourable George Duff, son of the first Earl of Fife, on the 7th of April 1757 and moved into the ranks of the aristocracy.  Tragically her first child was  ‘a lunatic from birth’[3] perhaps severely mentally handicapped, or born with Down’s syndrome.  Her son George and her two daughters died unmarried.

Susanna herself died in February 1757 and was buried on the 12th in Kingston.

 

All of this would be remarkable enough until you take into account the rest of Susanna Augier’s siblings.  In 1747 two Private Acts of the Jamaican Assembly were passed.  The first gave the rights of whites to Jane Augier and her children Edward James, Thomas, Peter and Dorothy.  The second on behalf of Mary Augier gave ‘the same rights and privileges with English Subjects, born of white parents’ to Mary’s children William, Elizabeth, Jane and Eleanor; to her brother and sister Jacob and Elizabeth and to Elizabeth’s son John.  Even this does not tell the whole story.

Of John Augier’s daughters it must be assumed that Jenny and Frances had probably died before 1747 and so were not included in the family’s bid to acquire full white status.  Jenny had a daughter called Sharlott, born in 1729 and dead just under two years later, whose father was the choleric Theophilus Blechynden.

Around the time of his daughter Sharlott’s death he married Florence Fulton the widow of Dean Poyntz who had left his wife an annuity of £200 a year.  Poyntz was in partnership with Mathias Philp and years later Blechynden and his wife sued the estate of Philp’s other partner William Perrin for £10,000 of back payments of her annuity.  The case dragged on for years and was only finally settled by Blechynden’s son when almost all the other parties were dead!

A not untypical example of Jamaican litigation.

Frances Augier had two sons William and John Muir, and a daughter Hannah Spencer born in 1736. Frances probably died in Kingston in February  1738.  Elizabeth whose son John was granted the rights of whites in 1747 had also had a daughter called Elizabeth who died at the age of four, both were the children of Richard Asheton.  Elizabeth was buried in Kingston on the 16th of January 1749/50. Jacob Augier also died in Kingston and was buried on the 18th of September 1751, I have found no record that he had any children.

Mary and Jane Augier both had large families.  Jane had six children with John DeCumming, of whom two died before she could apply for their rights.  It is the children of Mary who have descendants that we know the most about.  Mary had at least seven children with William Tyndall a Kingston merchant, and her daughter Elizabeth (born in 1726) had nine children with the wealthy Kingston merchant John Morse.  Morse also had a daughter called Frances, probably born before he began his relationship with Elizabeth, who was brought up by his sister Sarah Vanheelen in Holland, and who died, unmarried, in London about 1818.  Several of his children died before their father, but his three youngest daughters all married and had descendants.

John Morse had returned to London before his death – he was buried at St Mary Aldermanbury on the 2nd of April 1781. His family may have travelled with him, or may already have been educated in England. Catherine Morse married a young lawyer called Edmund Green at St Mary Aldermanbury in 1777 – the witnesses at the wedding included her uncle by marriage Joseph Royall.

Catherine had eight children, among whom her daughter Frances Ann married William Farington from the Isle of Wight who became an Admiral in the Royal Navy.  Edmund’s training as a lawyer was called into play during a lengthy Chancery suit[4] on behalf of John Morse’s children against the Morse family who were unhappy at the legacies left to his mixed race illegitimate offspring.  In this he may have had help from Robert Cooper Lee who had himself secured his children’s future via a Private Act of the Assembly passed in 1776. Frances Lee, his daughter, left legacies to her friend Catherine Green and her daughter Frances Ann Farington.

As the boom days of Jamaica were coming to an end so the focus of empire switched to India. Catherine’s sisters Ann Frances and Sarah went to India with their brother Robert and both married there in 1780. Ann Frances married Nathaniel Middleton and had ten children born variously in India and England. The Morse/Middleton fortune passed down the generations and  in 1898, at the death of Hastings Nathaniel Middleton, was worth £84,100 15s 7d.

Sarah married William Cator in Calcutta and their daughter Ann Frances became the wife of Colonel Edward Baynes who as Adjutant General to the British forces in North America was sent to negotiate the armistice with the US government in July 1812. After service in North America they settled happily to retirement in Devon, their investments managed by Robert Cooper Lee’s son Richard. Their son William Craig Baynes migrated to Canada taking charge of the extensive estates acquired while his father was serving in Quebec.

Edmund Green eventually won the Chancery case on behalf of his wife and her siblings.

By the early nineteenth century the descendants of the Augier sisters had blended seamlessly into the highest levels of British society, their Jamaican slave roots conveniently air-brushed from history.

————————————-

POSTSCRIPT : 2nd August 2012

I have been looking again at the children of Susanna Augier and I think a confusion has arisen over her children with Peter Caillard. I now think that her children with Peter Caillard were Mary, Peter and Susanna and that there is only one child called Frances – the daughter of Gibson Dalzell.

 

 

 

 


[1] I have a reader of this website to thank for this information. “Last week died at Clifton near Bristol, after a lingering illness, the Lady of Gilbert Ford of the Middle-Temple, Esq.” London Evening Post (London, England), May 7, 1754 – May 9, 1754

[2] ‘Parishes: Tidmarsh’, A History of the County of Berkshire: Volume 3 (1923), pp. 433-437. URL: http://www.british-history.ac.uk

[4] For more detail on the Morse sisters and the Chancery case see Daniel Livesay (2018) Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family 1733-1833. Williamsburg, VA.:Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture and Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

 

7 thoughts on “Augier or Hosier – name transformations”

  1. Rupert Holman

    According to ancestry.co Robert is my ‘fifth great grandfather’. Robert and Jane had a daughter called Juliana-Anne and she married Edward Mascall (who had a senior post in the London Custom House – something like Collector of Customs at the Port of London circa 1800). Their granddaughter (Juliana Dalzell Hamilton) emigrated to Canada circa 1855 and she was my grandfathers grandmother.

    Thank you for all the research you have done. It has filled in some gaps in our family history which we had no idea about – and made things much much clearer…

  2. Anne Powers Post Author

    Dear Rupert, I’m glad it has been helpful. If you have found my Ancestry family tree ‘Jamaican Connections’ you will have found the date for the marriage of Julianna Anne and Edward Mascall, but I hadn’t pursued the family any further, so I am interested to know of the Canadian connection. So many families, including my own, moved from ventures in the Caribbean to elsewhere in the Empire – India, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
    kind regards,
    Anne.

  3. rupert holman

    Dear Anne,

    Ok…I’ll see if I can make this into something like a story…

    …Juliana-Anne Dalzell married Edward Mascall and they had one child, Louisa Eliza Mascall (1797-1829). Edward Mascall, a wealthy civil servant, owned Argyll House on the Kings Road in London and property in a village called Yateley in North West Hampshire. Mascall produced a series of books that list the duties to be paid on imports at the port of London, the first of which includes a preface from William Pitt the younger. Mascall wrote a preface to a later edition himself, extolling the virtues of British commerce.

    Robert Dalzell, son of Gibson and Susanna, and who died in 1821, is buried in St Peter’s Church graveyard in Yateley along with daughter Juliana-Anne and granddaughter Louisa. Louisa married Francis George Hamilton, a younger son in the Hamilton family from Clapton Square, Hackney. (Clapton Square was a nouveau riche enclave in north east London built at the beginning of the nineteenth century on West End lines). Francis was part of a family firm, W Hamilton and sons, of share dealers in the City. The Hamilton family as a whole seems to have been on good terms with the wealthy E J Mascall, presumably the firm helped with his investments and certainly John William Hamilton, elder brother of Francis, was the trustee of a fund set aside for the two year old Juliana Dalzell Hamilton when Mascall died in 1832. (Francis had fallen out of favour with Mascall by the time over a very strange incident that I haven’t the space to explore here!).

    By this time two of the other Hamilton brothers had made it to Canada. Gavin Major Hamilton was a military officer who died in the late 1810s. Robert Hart Hamilton started as a naval attache in Montreal, but by the 1850s had become, like Mascall in London before him, the Comptroller of Customs in the Port of Montreal. He was also President of the Montreal St Georges’ Society. And it is here, in Montreal, that Juliana Dalzell Hamilton first appears in the late 1850s. Juliana married William Boyd, an average insurance adjuster from Montreal in 1858. Boyd came from a second generation Ulster Scots family. His father had taken part in the suppression of the Patriots’ War in 1837, the predominantly French Canadian uprising against British colonial rule and his son would take part in the suppression of the North-West uprising in 1886, the uprising of the Metis people. Juliana died in 1868, aged 41, along with her eldest son Francis of some unspecified illness, leaving four boys behind (one of whom was my great grandfather).

    Hope this is clear enough, and explains the arrival in Canada,

    best wishes

    Rupert

  4. bev thatcher

    Thanks Rupert….Juliana Mascall nee Dalzell was my GGgrandmother, Henrietta Theresa Carolina Jackson nee Dalzell’s sister….. so Jane Dodd & Robert Dalzell were my ancestors also.

    I had tracked Juliana Dalzell/Mascall to Yateley but thankyou as you have given me lots more to add to my family history!

    As your branch went to Canada, mine went to New Zealand.

  5. Baylus C. Brooks

    Have a question for you:

    Have you come across any information in John Augier’s will or other documents about another John Augur/Augier from Jamaica who may have left for the Bahamas and become a pirate there. John Augur was hanged there 12 Dec 1718 after a trial 9-10 Dec.

    I am a maritime researcher and genealogist who recently studied the family of Edward “Blackbeard” Thache on Jamaica. My publication “Quest for Blackbeard” just came out last month ( https://www.amazon.com/Quest-Blackbeard-Story-Edward-Thache/dp/136532821X/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8 ).

    In this research, I found that Cox Thache/Teach had a child with Jane, a slave of William Tindale/Tyndale of Kingston. Cox was Blackbeard’s half brother. William Tindale was also involved with Augiers and had children by them. This note appears in Q4BB on page 415:

    “Jamaica Church of England Parish Register Transcripts, 1664-1880,” FamilySearch, Mary Augier in entry for Jenny Tyndall, 16 Jul 1729, Jenny Augier in entry for Sharlott Blichandon, 16 Jul 1729, Susanna Augier in entry for Frances Dalzell, 18 Jul 1729, Christening; citing p. 19, Susan Augier in entry for Robert Dalzell, 08 Nov 1742, Christening; citing p. 70, Mary Augier in entry for Mary Tyndell, 06 Aug 1724, Christening; citing p. 5, Frances Augier in entry for John Muir, 13 Apr 1732, Christening; citing p. 29, Frances Augier in entry for Hannah Spencer, 05 Mar 1736, Christening; citing p. 45, Jane Augier in entry for Edward James Decumming, 13 Nov 1733, Christening; citing p. 34, Jane Augier in entry for Dorothy Decumming, 07 Nov 1737, Christening; citing p. 48, Jane Augier in entry for Peter Ducommun, 05 Apr 1747, Christening; citing p. 91, Elizabeth Augier Or Tyndall in entry for Sarah Charlotte Morse, 07 Mar 1748, Christening; citing p. 99, Abigal Augier in entry for Mary Mahony, 27 Jan 1748, Christening; citing p. 98, Lucretia Teach, 02 Jan 1746, Christening; citing p. 90, Lucretia Teach in entry for Jonathan Parkinson, 30 Dec 1748, Christening; citing p. 98, Kingston, Jamaica, Registrar General’s Department, Spanish Town; FHL microfilm 1291763; “Jamaica Church of England Parish Register Transcripts, 1664-1880,” Kingston > Burials 1722-1774, Vol. 1 > image 3 of 245; Registrar General’s Department, Spanish Town.

    I’d love to speak with you about this… thanks.

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