Category Archives: Biographies

The extraordinary Female Infidel

A quick reminder about my book on the extraordinary life of Rachael Fanny Antonina Dashwood who married Matthew Allen Lee, son of Robert Cooper Lee and Priscilla Kelly whose letters feature in A Parcel of Ribbons.

You can buy the story of her life from Amazon as a paperback or Kindle.

Hidden black identities

Much work has been done recently demonstrating the presence of people of African origin in the UK for far longer than had previously been thought, notably Miranda Kaufman’s book Black Tudors.

I recently came across the extract above in the parish register of Hunsden in Hertfordshire which highlights two more people whose origins would otherwise be unknown.

I have found no further record of who James March and Francis Dyer were, but their pre-baptism names suggest that James had retained his birth name and may have been a first generation slave, whereas Francis had been re-named by his owner. Possibly he may have been born in Jamaica to an already enslaved mother. Whether the names they chose at baptism were in any way connected with their parentage is not known.

However, we do know quite a lot about Maynard Clarke. He was the son of John Clarke and Susanna Maynard and was born in Jamaica in about November 1717. He was baptised in the parish of St Andrew on 25 November 1717, and his father died in about July 1720. Maynard was apprenticed in England to two attorneys and traded in partnership with various others with Jamaica. He married Jane Wood at Twineham in Sussex in 1739, and their daughter Susanna was baptised in London in 1743. Henrietta who died as an infant was baptised in Little Hadham, Hertfordshire in 1744. I have found no record of Catherine’s birth. A mis-transcription on FindMyPast has confused her with the record above.

Nearly twenty years after his father’s death Maynard took out a case in the Court of Chancery alleging that he had been defrauded of income from his estates. It seems likely that John Clarke had married Susanna, who owned property in Brixton in Devon and Sible Hedingham in Essex, hoping to improve his Jamaican affairs through his marriage settlement. He owned extensive properties and plantations in Jamaica, but must have been in debt, since shortly before his death, he had mortgaged some of it hoping to repay the debts out of the profits of his plantations.

Maynard Clarke’s first wife Jane Wood having died, he re-married in 1757 to Elizabeth Thompson and it seems that, despite a long time spent in England, he soon returned to Jamaica, for he died there about two years later aged about forty-one. Did James March and Francis Dyer return with him? Were they still enslaved or had they been freed?

The Legacies of British Slave-ownership website lists Maynard’s property in Jamaica when his Will was probated there in 1761. “Slave-ownership at probate: 211 of whom 113 were listed as male and 98 as female. 64 were listed as boys, girls or children. Total value of estate at probate: £12,680.77 Jamaican currency of which £8,855.75 currency was the value of enslaved people. ” I don’t have access to this document so don’t know if James and Francis were listed there.

After Maynard’s death, the Chancery Hall estate in St Andrew, once known as Clarke’s, became the property of Samuel Walter and later of his son of the same name. He left a life interest in it to his only daughter Mary Ann Walter, and thereafter it became the property of his great grandson Richard Lacy.

I have found no further record of Maynard’s daughter Catherine, but Susanna Maynard Clarke was buried on the 16 August 1772 in Hammersmith. She left all her property in England and Jamaica to her ‘only two friends’ – Mrs Ann Musgrave, a widow who ran the school in Hammersmith where Susanna died aged twenty-nine, and Miss Rebecca Thompson, Ann Musgrave’s niece.

Ann Musgrave made her Will the day before Susanna’s funeral, on 15 August 1772 leaving everything to Rebecca Thompson and died a year later. Rebecca lived till 1816, having remained unmarried, and left a substantial inheritance to her god-daughter Rebecca Flower.

All of which sadly demonstrates how much easier it is to find out about those who kept people enslaved than about the slaves themselves. However, if descendants of James March, alias Quaw, or Francis Pryor, formerly Neptune, are searching for them this may just help in that search.

The Female Infidel

Regular readers of this website will be familiar with its origins in the letters of the Lee family sent from Jamaica to England. This new book carries on their history to the next generation with the story of Fanny Dashwood who eloped with Matthew Allen Lee. When I found an extensive collection of her papers at the National Archives in Kew, I knew that her story deserved to be better known.

Born to great wealth, but illegitimate, she lost her much loved father Sir Francis Dashwood (he of the Hell-Fire Club) when a small child. Educated in France with princesses, aristocrats and the daughters of Thomas Jefferson, future President of America, she was forced to abandon the studies she loved and return to England at the outbreak of revolution.

Once there she became embroiled in a series of teenage scrapes involving young men, which culminated eventually in elopement, furious rows and separation. Several years later she was abducted and raped, forced to attend a trial that destroyed her reputation and failed to deliver justice. It led Thomas De Quincey to name her as the ‘Female Infidel’.

There are very modern echoes in her persecution by the media, vilification by cartoonists and sufferings at the hands of stalkers. Despite all this she continued her studies and published her Essay on Government, which might have had greater success had she not already achieved notoriety. She is now remembered, if at all, for all the wrong reasons.

History has not been kind to her. I hope this book will help to redress the balance.

Available in perfect bound paperback A5 384 pages with illustrations.

ISBN: 9780244724160

from Amazon in paperback and for Kindle.

The Iniquities of Apprenticeship

If anyone was ever in any doubt about the iniquities of the Apprenticeship scheme that followed the apparent abolition of slavery in the British colonies this little book lays out in graphic detail just how much more dreadful things became for those who had been enslaved.

I say ‘apparent abolition’ because although no-one was now legally a slave, the apprenticeship scheme left the formerly enslaved suffering the worst of both worlds. They were still tied to their former owners and required to work for them, and they had lost what minimal legal protection they had previously had.

Nowhere was this more clearly illustrated than in the testimony of young James Williams, formerly enslaved at Penshurst in the parish of St Ann. With the connivance of a corrupt local law enforcement, his previous owners, a Mr Senior and his sister, inflicted terrible punishments on young James and many of his fellow former slaves. James was about eighteen when he gave his testimony in 1837 and his resilient character shines through it.

When first published in Great Britain it caused an outcry and helped in the final abolition of slavery in all its forms throughout the British colonies. In case any should doubt his account, it was backed up by testimony recorded by a formal Commission of Enquiry.

This little book, which is a gripping and horrifying read, was republished in 2014 by Dover publications, unabridged from the original edition of 1838. It is also available as an ebook from Dover and other sources.

Williams, James. (2015) A Narrative of Events: Since the 1st of August, 1834, by James Williams, an Apprenticed Laborer in Jamaica. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications Inc.

 

 

Robert Cooper Lee – The Lost Miniature

I owe a debt to Michael Hardy who kindly obtained this much better copy of the image of Robert Cooper Lee from the Christie’s sale catalogue of 27 March 1979.

When I call this a ‘lost’ miniature I am sure the owner knows they have it! and I hope they still know who it is – too often miniatures end up being described simply as ‘portrait of an unknown man’ (or woman).

The miniature sold for £60 in 1979. The sale description was:

ROBERT COOPER LEE, English School, circa 1780, facing left in blue coat, white waistcoat and cravat, powdered hair – oval, 2 5/8in. (66mm) high – gold frame, plaited hair panel within blue glass border (damaged)

Robert (1735-1794), son of Joseph and Frances Lee, married Priscilla, daughter of Dennis Kelly and Favell Bourke.

All of which is correct except that the mother of Priscilla Kelly was not Favell Bourke. If you’d like to know more, it’s all in the book!

I do wish the catalogue had said what colour his eyes were, and what colour the plaited hair was. Was it some of his own hair, or perhaps some of Priscilla’s?

It would be lovely to know who now has the miniature, and whether they have any idea of the family history that goes with it.

Invisible Black British History

1820-death-of-betty-harrison

Only relatively recently have many people in Britain become aware that the presence of black and mixed race people did not begin with the arrival of the Windrush in 1948. Indeed we also forget that the ship was called the Empire Windrush reflecting a heritage that was already on the wane.

Most people are still unaware of a black presence that goes back to Roman times and that increased in numbers during the eighteenth century. There are sometimes protests when a black or mixed race actor is cast in a historical drama by those who do not realise that this is an accurate portrayal of society at the time.

BBC Radio 4 is currently broadcasting a series of short talks on Britain’s Black Past and this reminded me of Betty Harrison, servant of the Lee family for nearly sixty years.

Had it not been for the note on a scrap of paper, shown above, I would never have known when she died or how old she was, let alone that she had married.

For those who have not read A Parcel of Ribbons I should explain that Betty Harrison travelled to England from Jamaica with the Lee family in 1771 and lived with them until her death in 1820. The entry for her burial at St Mary’s Barnes, alongside members of the Lee family who had been buried there since 1732, gave her age as 70 and her parish of residence as St Marylebone, but made no reference to her origins. Like many other black British residents her colour was invisible, and yet in the 1920s the family biographer Audrey Gamble referred to her as the Lee’s ‘black mammy’ and she was so much a part of the family as to merit burial with them rather than in London.

Elizabeth Harrison was born in Jamaica about 1750 and must have joined the Lee family at about the age of ten, probably as nursemaid to their eldest child Frances. It is impossible to be certain of her birth, but there is a baptism on 13 March 1758 in the parish of St Catherine for Thomas and Elizabeth, the children of Elizabeth Harrison a mulatto woman. There is no record of whether Betty was free or enslaved, but it seems probable that she was free.

The Lee children maintained an affectionate relationship with Betty all their lives, referring to her in their letters and bringing back presents for her from trips abroad. Robert Cooper Lee left her a life-time legacy of £20 a year, equivalent to an income of about £40,000 a year now (source: www.measuringworth.com). She had saved enough to be able to lend £30 to a Lee family member in 1804 so her circumstances were prosperous for a servant.

After the deaths of Robert Cooper Lee and his wife Priscilla their house in Bedford Square was sold and their children all set up separate homes. Betty Harrison stayed with Frances Lee who moved to Devonshire Street in Marylebone and it was probably there that Betty died in 1820.

The real mystery to me, and one I have yet to solve, is who was Mr William Pack, and when did Betty marry him? There was no mention of him in any of the Lee correspondence that I have seen and without the scrap of paper shown above (probably written by Frances Lee) I would never have known he existed.

Was he also a Lee servant? Were they married in England? When and where was he born and when did he die? And was he also of African origin? To date I have found none of the answers, but as more and more records come online I hope to one day.

Meanwhile a huge amount of work is now being done on the British people whose African origins have so far been invisible. You can read about Black British History Month here and if you are in London you can visit Black Chronicles: Photographic Portraits 1862-1948. There are also many regional events taking place helping to raise awareness of history that should be better known.

 

 

 

 

All roads lead to Jamaica

Bamboo Avenue early coloured postcard

Bamboo Avenue, Jamaica – early coloured postcard

Well, genealogically speaking, it sometimes feels like they do !

Having finished my postgraduate studies until September I was asked to look into the origins of Dr Benjamin Bates (1737-1828) who was a member of the Hellfire Club, a friend of Erasmus Darwin and of the painter Joseph Wright of Derby, among others. Bizarrely his Wikipedia entry appears to combine the life stories of three quite different people – and if you were to believe it he was commanding a ship of the line in his eighties while simultaneously being a successful merchant in America and a physician in Buckinghamshire !

Only the last is true of the man I am looking at.

Not much was known of his origins in Nottinghamshire, but he married twice, lived to over ninety, and had one surviving daughter Lydia Bates who died unmarried in 1843. Having found her Will I was faced with the genealogist’s greatest challenge – a lovely collection of legatees but almost all female, some widowed, and some referred to as cousins but with no easy way of connecting them into the family tree.

If your cousin is the daughter of your father’s married sister who then herself married (perhaps more than once) there will have been at least two changes of surname from the main tree. Add in a few common surnames such as Smith and it’s no wonder these puzzles are often called brick walls. If your ancestors hale from Scotland you may fare better since Scottish baptism records usually name both parents and include the mother’s maiden name.

My help in this case came from a couple of unusual names and the wonderful 1851 Census, which has so often come to my rescue since, in England, it was the first time people had been asked to say exactly where they were born.

For my own family it was a huge surprise to discover Richard Lee who was born in Jamaica in the mid-eighteenth century but lived into his nineties and was present in the 1851 census – leading ultimately to the creation of this website and my book A Parcel of Ribbons.

So it was the 1851 census that came to my rescue with the Bates family connections via a man called Leigh Churchill Smyth who lived to be 83. He was born in Jamaica and baptised on the 25th June 1801 in St Catherine’s parish to Ann Eleanor Largue, recorded in the baptism records of her children as a free quadroon. There were five children, all baptised there as Smith, but with no father named. This suggests that he acknowledged the children to the extent of giving them his name, but not of having his full name recorded as their father. Jane Beazle Smith was baptised in 1790, Ann Frances in 1796, Leigh Churchill in 1801, Penelope Sophia in 1804 and Henry Shepherd in 1807.

Some time in the latter part of the eighteenth century the family went upmarket in the spelling of their name and Smith became Smyth.

Henry, who wrote his middle name as Sheppard, later recorded his place of birth as Kingston so it’s possible that Ann Eleanor took her children from there to be baptised in Spanish Town. Ann Eleanor herself was baptised there in 1775. She was the daughter of Ester Beazle or Beazley who was born in 1745 and recorded as a free mulatto when she was baptised with her son Stephen Adolphus Beazle in 1768.

Little Ann Frances Smith died of fever before her first birthday, but in the 1841 census Leigh, Penelope and Henry were all living with Matilda Eleanor Archer Smyth in London and Jane was living in Buckingham with Penelope Box (who was another widowed cousin mentioned by Lydia Bates). At first I assumed Matilda was their mother, but it seems possible she was their unmarried aunt.

Matilda had four brothers any one of whom might have been the children’s father. I can only find a record of the death of two of these brothers in England – Samuel Chester Smyth who died in Blackfriars schoolhouse in 1813, and Thomas William Anthony Smyth who killed himself on board his ship HMS Duncan in 1830.

As the Jamaican parish burial registers are not yet indexed on-line, the only way to find out if one of the two remaining brothers died there is to page through the images in the parish registers. For a name as common as Smith and a register with as many deaths as Kingston this is a lengthy task which I will undertake when I have time.

There is another possibility. Just as I was about to post this story I came across reference in an early 20th century book of pedigrees to Henry Sheppard Smyth being the son of Charles Smyth of Spanish Town and grandson of Sir Richard Smyth, a one time Sheriff of Buckinghamshire. This puts a gloss of legitimacy on his birth and pedigree which was obviously important in enhancing his social status as a ‘Gentleman at Arms’.  It also fits with the Smyth family associations with Buckingham. But I have been unable to verify it, though while searching I came across both a Leigh Smyth and a Churchill Smyth and a number of Penelope Smyths.

Leigh Churchill Smyth married and was a successful solicitor, perhaps with a wealthy wife, for at his death in 1884 he was worth over £36,000. His wife died a few months later worth even more, and there appear to have been no surviving children. His spinster sister Penelope who had been a governess had an estate valued at under £300 at her death. Jane was also unmarried and left what she had to her brother Leigh. Henry married late and had two children who were still very young when he died in 1866 leaving his wife less than £300. She died in 1870 leaving less than £600 and their children seem to disappear from the record.

So I wonder if there remain any descendants of Ann Eleanor Largue, and if so do they know of their Jamaican heritage?  Will they, like me, make the surprising discovery of how often British middle and upper class families had enslaved ancestors, and will they find the road to Jamaica?

 

 

 

 

 

Serocold and Sorocold – the Merchant and the Engineer

London Bridge Watercolour1799

London Bridge – late 18th century – the waterwheels can be seen at far end of the bridge

 

I have written before about John Serocold and his son of the same name who were Jamaica merchants during the 18th century, based in London. John Serocold senior was married to Martha Rose one of the daughters of Captain John Rose who made some of his money transporting rebels to Jamaica after the Monmouth Rebellion[1].

9 December 1685 – Invoice of sixty eight men servants, shipped on board, Capt Charles Gardner, in ye Jamaica Merchant (ship) for account of Mr.Rose and Comp.,they being to be sold for ten years..

Martha’s sister Elizabeth married Samuel Heming and had at least five children baptised in Jamaica. Another sister Frances married Dr John Charnock and had two children baptised and died in Jamaica before his death at St John’s in Jamaica in 1730. Afterwards she returned to London and married wealthy merchant Robert Fotherby who had a position in the Royal African Company and was almost certainly dealing in slaves shipped to the West Indies.

Mary Rose, older than her sisters,  married first Thomas Halse of Halse Hall, then John Sadler and finally wealthy merchant John Styleman after her return to London. You can read more about her here.

Martha Serocold died after presenting John Serocold with the second of two daughters both of whom died in infancy, and three years later he remarried with his second wife producing two sons – John and Thomas. John carried on his father’s business trading with Jamaica, later as the firm of Serocold and Jackson, in partnership with his son-in-law John Jackson.

The company of Serocold and Jackson got into severe financial difficulties but came to an arrangement with its creditors in 1782 (Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette – Thursday 28 March 1782). Given the date it is not impossible that their troubles were connected with the disasters of the hurricane years in the early 1780s. They must have continued to struggle, for in 1786 John Serocold of Love Lane in the City of London was declared bankrupt. At his death two years later John Serocold was described as ‘formerly an eminent West India Merchant’ (Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette – Thursday 13 November 1788). His brother Thomas outlived him by several years, having opted for the life of country gentleman at Peterborough.

I was intrigued by the name Serocold which is quite unusual, and all the more so when I came across George Sorocold who is often credited with being Britain’s first great civil engineer and who was the designer of the world’s first factory, Derby’s Silk Mill.

George Sorocold was a quite remarkable man, but the dates of his birth and death are unknown. He was probably born about 1666 and died after 1738. It seems likely that his family origins were in Lancashire but this is difficult to establish with any certainty partly because there are so many different versions of the name. So far I have found the following variant spellings, some in original documents and some in transcriptions: Sorocold, Sorrocolde, Sorrocoulde, Soracowle, Sorocale, Sorracoll, Seracold, Serocold, Sarracold.

I have as yet found no evidence for the suggestion made by others that his father was James Sorocold who had already moved to Derby when George Sorocold married there in 1684.

There is no record of how George acquired his education and when I first saw that he appeared to have married at the age of sixteen I was inclined to disbelieve it since this would be unusually early for an educated man of middle or upper-class origins. However I then found a more or less contemporary account which suggested that his wife had already had thirteen children (with no multiple births) eight of whom were still living by the time George was twenty-eight – pretty much a mathematical impossibility unless he had fathered his first child aged fifteen or sixteen. Perhaps it was a shotgun wedding!

The account of Sorocold’s fecundity was recorded in 1715 by a man called Thoresby who knew Sorocold, and who had an interest in compiling accounts of very large families, including Jane Hodson who  according to her epitaph in York Minster, died on September 2, 1636, aged 38, during the birth of her 24th child and another woman said to have had 53 children in 35 births.

They made them tough in those days!

It is a shame that we don’t know more about George Sorocold since his achievements in civil engineering were very considerable. He created a public water supply for Derby by raising water from the river Derwent into a tank that supplied a pipe system that lasted into the nineteenth century. Moreover the waterwheel was designed to rise and fall with the water level in the river to maximise supply even in periods of dry weather.

He went on to work on a system of waterwheels and pumps under Old London Bridge and created the public water supply in a number of major cities including Leeds. At Liverpool he engineered the city’s first wet dock, contributing indirectly to its rise as a major slaving port.

Sorocold waterwheel c 1700

Waterwheels at Old London Bridge about 1700

 

Interest in George Sorocold’s engineering achievements means that there is now research on-going to try to find out more about his origins and background. It seems highly likely that there is a connection between the Sorocolds of Lancashire, the merchant Sorocolds of London and the eminent engineer George Sorocold – a work in progress.

 

Pictures are taken from Old London Bridge where you can find the history of the changes that took place during the eighteenth century when the old bridge was modernised before being completely replaced in the nineteenth century.

[1] The original lists of persons of quality; emigrants; religious exiles; political rebels; serving men sold for a term of years; apprentices; children stolen; maidens pressed; and others who went from Great Britain to the American Plantations, 1600-1700 : with their ages and the names of the ships in which they embarked, and other interesting particulars; from mss. preserved in the State Paper Department of Her Majesty’s Public Record Office, England
by Hotten, John Camden, 1832-1873, London 1874.

How not to jump to conclusions!

2-Tenby-early-1024x691

Tenby Harbour

 

I had a salutary lesson in the dangers of jumping to conclusions in genealogy this week.

As part of the work I did on the Hungerford Morgans from Bristol I had located the man I thought was one of the sons of the first James Hungerford Morgan who had lived and died in Jamaica. There was a well constructed and sourced line of descent from his eldest son Henry Rhodes Hungerford Morgan but not much to go on in relation to either of his siblings baptised in Jamaica after him – a sister called Juliana after her mother and a second James Hungerford Morgan baptised in June 1792, and born in May of that year.

The man who was apparently James Hungerford Morgan II was an unmarried retired  Lieutenant living on half pay,  in Tenby in Wales, by the time of the 1841 and 1851 censuses. This fitted well enough with the fact that Henry Morgan, his apparent grandfather, had died in Wales.

Further investigation revealed a sister called Mary Morgan who outlived him, and that’s when the alarm bells started ringing, for at his death in April 1851 she was referred to as his only living relative despite the fact that the family of Henry Rhodes Hungerford Morgan were alive and well, living mainly in London and India.

Moreover when Mary Morgan died a few months later without having administered her brother’s Will it was left to her nephew the Rev Thomas Sleeman to tidy things up. If James and Mary had a nephew with a different surname it implied that there must have been another sister in the picture, albeit one who had died before 1851. It turned out this was not Juliana Morgan born in Jamaica, but an Elizabeth Morgan who had married wine merchant Thomas Sleeman at Tenby in 1806. A search for the Will of Thomas Sleeman and a bit more investigation made it quite clear that I was dealing with a different family from the one with the Jamaican connections.

Fortunately all these documents were easily available via the National Library of Wales website where you can view them for free and download for £3.50.

I had been a little wary from the first when the census data about dates and places of birth did not match up with what was known about the Jamaican family, but the census enumerators often did make mistakes in copying out their returns, so on its own it was not enough to do more that raise a nagging doubt.

In the end although I proved that James Hungerford Morgan baptised in Tenby in 1788 was not the same as James Hungerford Morgan born in Jamaica in May 1792 there is the intriguing possibility that the families were actually connected and that the coincidence of names may not be mere coincidence.

The father of the Tenby Morgans was called Harry Morgan and it seems likely that he was the Harry Morgan who married Elizabeth Dew in 1779 when he gave his parish as St Nicholas, Bristol. On his early death in 1793 at Tenby, after he had become bankrupt,  he gave his profession as mercer. Newspaper reports of his bankruptcy referred to him as a linen draper like the linen drapers of the Bristol family of the other Morgans and Hungerfords, many of whom lived in or were associated with the parish of St Nicholas.

St_Nicholas_from_Bristol_Bridge

St Nicholas from Bristol Bridge

So we have two families called Morgan with connections to Bristol, who shared a trade and were in some way linked to the Hungerfords.

This time I’m not going to jump to conclusions – but my instinct says there is a link to be found.

What do you think?

 

Picture of St Nicholas from Bristol Bridge – By NotFromUtrecht (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Brickwalls and a Bristol Linen Draper

Brickwall

 

Brickwall is the term used in family history research to describe the situation that arises when you are completely stuck in trying to trace your ancestors further back. Sometimes the solution is not to try to batter your way through but to work your way around it.

There are some family names that are so common that they make research particularly difficult. My father’s family name Wilson was once said to be the most common name in the Glasgow phone book. When I worked on a human resources system, based largely in London, Williams and Patel were the most common names.

So when I was contacted by someone with the surname Morgan my heart did sink a little. Of course Henry Morgan is one of the most famous names associated with early Jamaica, but there was no suggestion that this family were related to him.

My starting point was James Hungerford Morgan who was listed in the Bristol Poll Book for St Nicholas in 1774 as a linen draper. On the 29 November 1782 he married Juliana Wisdom James, from a long established colonial family, in Trelawny, Jamaica. They had four children baptised there before James died in April 1792. Juliana remarried the following year on the Fontabelle estate to William Pitter and had four more children with him.

The line of descent from the two sons of James and Juliana (Henry Rhodes Hungerford Morgan and James Hungerford Morgan II) had already been well traced by my enquirer who really wanted to know who were the parents of the first James Hungerford Morgan after whose marriage many descendants bore the double name Hungerford Morgan, sometimes hyphenated. This certainly suggested that Hungerford was an important family name and a connection to be cherished.

The obvious starting point was to look for a marriage between a Morgan and a Hungerford and sure enough there was George Morgan married to Mary Hungerford in August 1685 in London’s St James Dukes Place, which had a reputation as a ‘marriage factory’ where you could go to get married in a hurry and relative anonymity. It may be that Mary was already pregnant or that her family disapproved of George, or both, since back in her home parish of Windrush in Gloucestershire the following year their daughter Margaret Mary was baptised in July and their son James in November. The Hungerfords were prominent in Windrush but when James was baptised the parish register only recorded him as James with no middle name. In any case it seemed likely that James Hungerford Morgan was born in the early 1750s so although geographically Windrush and Bristol are not far apart this left a period of about seventy-five years to bridge.

Looking again at the Bristol records there was a Henry Morgan, also a linen draper, in the Poll books at the same time as James Hungerford Morgan. There is also a catalogue entry in the Bristol Record Office dated 1778 for a mortgage “James Hungerford Morgan, planter of Jamaica, now resided in Bristol, to Henry Morgan of Bristol, linen draper”. This also suggests a connection between the two, perhaps as brothers, uncle and nephew, or father and son. Unfortunately there is no online record for a baptism for James Hungerford Morgan, although plenty for James Morgan in and around Bristol in the relevant period. Of course with the surname Morgan he might have been an incomer from Wales, there being regular commerce and connections across the River Severn down the centuries.

The solution came via a catalogue entry at the National Archives for a legal case involving ” Henry Morgan, linen draper of Bristol and Catherine Morgan his wife (late Catherine Oliver, spinster)”. When I found that Catherine had a brother named Hungerford Oliver I knew I was on the right track – her first son Edward was named after her ironmonger father Edward Oliver and James after, it must be presumed, her favourite brother. Hungerford Oliver later married Prudence Milward of Old Swinford, Worcestershire, apparently rather against her father’s inclinations and had something of a reputation as an eccentric. Sadly their son Thomas Milward Oliver who trained as a doctor was later to hang for murder.

The confirmation of the parentage of James Hungerford Oliver comes from a series of family Wills, although finding his father’s Will proved challenging. Catherine Oliver’s mother Jane was clearly a wealthy woman with property in Bristol and on her death in about 1772 she left legacies to numerous family members including her grandchildren among whom were Thomas Hungerford Powell (son of her daughter Jane) and the four children of her late daughter Catherine and Henry Morgan, who was one of her executors.

Tracking down Henry Morgan’s Will took a bit of guesswork. There was no Will for a Bristol linen merchant of that name so I wondered, since his grandson James Hungerford Morgan II had died at Tenby, whether Henry Morgan had retired to Wales. There were four plausible candidates and looking at the map of south Wales I opted to start with “Henry Morgan of St Brides in the County of Glamorgan Gentleman” and struck lucky. It was not uncommon to make the transition from trade to gentleman, and Henry’s Will finally confirmed for certain that he was the father of James Hungerford Morgan. How the name Hungerford came into the Oliver family and whether there was any connection to the Hungerfords of Windrush must remain a question for another day.

That James Hungerford Morgan who became a Jamaican planter came from Bristol is not surprising. With connections to the haberdashery and linen trades and a grandfather who was an ironmonger, it is highly likely that his extended family had been exporting goods to Jamaica for some time. What direct connection they may have had with the slave trade, other than as owners of slaves in Jamaica is unclear, but his son Henry Rhodes Hungerford Morgan died a wealthy man and his estate made compensation claims on two estates.

old_derbyirongate

All Saints Derby – now Derby Cathedral

Henry Rhodes Hungerford Morgan had married Elizabeth Lawson from Falmouth who, according to Morgan family tradition, later burnt most of the family papers! Whether she was just obsessively tidy or was trying to conceal something is unclear. Her husband left a legacy of £200 to a young woman called Julia Hungerford, and, curious to know whether she would explain the link to the Hungerford family, I tracked her down in the parish register of All Saints Derby, where in 1842 she married Richard Lindley giving her father’s name as Henry Rhodes. The later census records show her as having been born in Jamaica, so it seems likely that she was the illegitimate, probably mixed race, daughter of Henry Rhodes Hungerford Morgan, baptised in Manchester Jamaica in 1819, about three years before his marriage to Elizabeth Lawson.

So if you have a brick wall in your current research do not give up, the solution is often out there and with more records becoming available online every week it may just be waiting to be found.