Yearly Archives: 2012

Genealogy, General Interest, Jamaican Life

Mapping your family history

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I should declare an interest from the start – I love maps! I can look at them for hours.

If a picture is worth a thousand words so too can a map be.

Most people start investigating their family history through photographs, family stories and whatever documents have been kept, moving on to look at old census records and obtain birth, marriage and death certificates.

But when you have these don’t underestimate the usefulness of looking at a map to see where your ancestors lived. Sometimes you will find that two addresses in the same town were just around the corner from each other, or that granny had married the boy next door. Sometimes changes in county boundaries mean that people who appeared to live in different counties were actually quite close. Birmingham is an example, since the Warwickshire village at its core was surrounded by others in Staffordshire and Worcestershire meaning you may have to visit three different county record offices or look at a selection of maps covering the area that now makes up the West Midlands.

When our ancestors adventured abroad they always took a little bit of home with them. Sometimes it was in the form of habits that did not translate well to the new country. Early settlers in New Zealand built their houses facing south as they had done in England. But of course they were now in the southern hemisphere and soon realised that the sunny side was to the north!

In Jamaica, the early settlers often named their houses and plantations after the homes they had left. So the Rose family of Mickleton in Gloucestershire established a plantation called Mickleton, and another called Rose Hall – near Linstead, and not to be confused with the great house now associated with the supposed witch. If you saw a place called Stirling Castle you could be pretty sure the person naming it was a Scot – in this case Archibald Aikenhead who was probably born in Lanarkshire. Lluidas Vale and Landovery had Welsh origins. Other names were simply aspirational – Paradise or Arcadia. An eighteenth century street map of Kingston reveals the names of its most prominent citizens – Beckford, Bernard, Beeston and Lawes among them.

To think yourself back into the early history of Jamaica you also need to consider the terrain faced by the early settlers and how they travelled about. Here the maps in Michael Morrissey’s book Our Island, Jamaica are really useful.  The first and most essential element for settlement is the availability of fresh water, then the availability of land for growing food and cash crops and the materials for building houses, barns and other outbuildings. Once you start to think along these lines you may be able to understand why your ancestors settled where they did. Look too at transport links remembering that in the earliest days it may have been easier to travel by sea than over land, even between places that are now quite close by road. Apart from a few Taino tracks there were no roads for the early settlers.

High rainfall and mountainous terrain often made travel in Jamaica hazardous. The flat bridge in Bog Walk has remained without any railing after repeated floods washed them away. Fording rivers in flood led to the deaths by drowning of more than one early settler. Even after a hundred and fifty years of British settlement, Lady Nugent recorded in her journal the difficult state of the roads as she travelled around with her husband the newly appointed Governor, and she described the loss of a kittareen down a precipice – the officer driving it jumped clear but she didn’t mention the fate of the horse or mule which presumably perished.

After the improved roads, came the railway making more places accessible and in the twentieth century air travel brought more changes to the map of Jamaica.

One of the most useful modern maps available online is the Esso Jamaica road map made in 1967, shown above, and published on the Jamaican Caves website which shows not only the modern road system but many of the names of places and plantations established by the early settlers. A number of places on this map have clickable areas which give even greater detail.

A search online for old maps of Jamaica reveals a wide selection. You can also find some on the Jamaican Family Search subscription website and on the Facebook Group Jamaican Colonial Heritage Society which is a treasure trove of images and information about Jamaica’s past.

So next time you look at the history of your family, take a look on a map at where they lived and work out why they were there rather than somewhere else. I guarantee you will learn something new.

Genealogy, General Interest

The Importance of Family in Family History

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This week’s piece is necessarily brief as family activities have taken me away from the computer, however in the week of my mother’s ninety-sixth birthday I wanted to cherish the importance of those family members who are the custodians and guardians of our history.

The lovely photograph above is my maternal grandmother taken for her wedding in India at the beginning of the twentieth century, whither she had gone as the first white woman doctor ever seen in that part of south India. Her sister Alice was the principal researcher of the family history, but she was following in the footsteps of their great grandfather, and as a result I have inherited a variety of notes and papers compiled in the days when the only way to get a baptism record was to write to the parish priest of the parish where you thought the event had taken place.

Also through my mother, who now holds the family archive, I first heard the story of the ‘Indian Princess’ that led me through a round about route to Jamaica. A tiny fragment of paper with a sketchy line of descent from the eighteenth century had been written down by my mother’s grandfather after a conversation with his mother in about 1889.

From that we arrive at this website, and in due course I hope also a book.

So cherish your family and the stories they tell – you never know where it may lead!

Biographies

Sudden death under the Sun

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The Lee family tomb at St Mary’s Barnes, showing the reburial of Joseph Lee who had died in Jamaica

 

New arrivals to eighteenth century Jamaica were shocked by the apparently callous attitude of the colonists to sudden death. It was not simply that few of the tombstones in the churchyard in Kingston recorded deaths of people over thirty-five, but when people died there was a lack of the respect and extended mourning there would have been in England.

Tropical conditions meant that burials took place within a day or so of the death, and often in the place of death even when that was not the person’s home parish. Although deaths were recorded in the parish register, the burial of members of the Plantocracy often took place on the estate in a family burying ground rather than in the parish church or graveyard. Sadly over the years many of their grave markers have been lost – overgrown or vandalised.

Occasionally a colonist expressed a wish for their body to be returned home to England, and so although a burial took place in Jamaica the coffin was later dug up to be transported back for reburial. A lead coffin would probably have been used, perhaps packed with sawdust.

In the twenty-first century with much increased life expectancy we regard any death under the age of seventy as premature, accidental death as unusual, and death in childbirth as wholly avoidable. Not so in the eighteenth century. Quite apart from the deaths caused by yellow fever, smallpox and malaria, the dry bellyache caused by lead poisoning, and the heart disease and stroke brought on by diet and lifestyle, even a simple accident could result in death. Take the case of a small boy, possibly a slave, in the household of Rose Fuller who shortly before the event had left for England. His Jamaica factor, John Lee, wrote to him:

‘There has been an accident happened to little Tom, Nelly’s Son, who as he was leaving the Cattle fell down and the wain run over him and broke his Leg, he was not far from town when the Accident happened and was immediately brought there. Doctor Worth set the Leg and he was very hearty for thirteen days, on the fourteenth he was seized with spasms and dyed on the fifteenth notwithstanding all the Care imaginable was taken to save him both by the Doctor and Mrs Rose.’

Poor little Tom almost certainly died from infection which today would have been easily avoided with the use of antibiotics.

The same letter listed the latest roll call of the dead, which is typical in such correspondence:

‘Since you have been gone we have lost Mr Baldwin[1], Mr Halked[2] and Mrs Taylor the Widow of Patrick Taylor[3], and last night Mr Henry Byndloss[4] the Attorney General of a very short illness’ .

Not long afterward John was also reporting the death of Dr Worth, and within six years he himself would be dead.

One of the reasons given to account for the failure of Jamaican colonists to establish the kind of society which was built in North America was their inability to reproduce in sufficient numbers to establish family continuity. Some families did succeed of course, although many then left for ‘home’ in England, but the mortality among women and children made the establishing of families difficult and although infant mortality in Europe at the time was high it was far exceeded in Jamaica. Although the colonists were perceived as callous it would be wrong to assume that parents did not grieve for their dead children, and their tombstones often attest to this, but the frequency of the event tended to harden their outward reactions. Hurried burial and the frequent death, or absence through illness, of parish priests also contributed to attitudes regarded by newcomers as irreligious.

We get a glimpse of the reaction of an outsider to the suddenness of Jamaican death in the Journal of Lady Nugent, who went to Jamaica in 1801 as wife of the new Governor. ‘Heard of the serious illness of poor Captain Cathcart. He is a fine young man and I trust may be spared’. On the following day she wrote ‘We all went melancholy to bed, having heard not only of the death of Captain Cathcart, but also of five of his officers!’.

On another occasion she wrote of her shock at the way such deaths were joked about. ‘Mr Mitchell, is a course looking man, but humane, and treats his negroes most kindly. He disgusted me very much the other day, by making a joke of poor Lord Hugh’s death; but it is common custom here’.

 


[1] William Baldwin buried Spanish Town 18 July 1755

[2] Richard Halked buried Spanish Town 13 July 1755.

[3] Martha Taylor, death recorded as Maximilia Taylor, buried Spanish Town 21 July 1755. Patrick Taylor was a Member of the Assembly for St George 1753.

[4] Henry Morgan Byndloss (c.1703-24 Jul 1755, buried Spanish Town the following day.)

General Interest, Jamaican Life

Guinea Grass and Captain Bligh

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Guinea Grass is now grown throughout the world

 

When the first English settlers arrived in Jamaica in 1655 they found large numbers of cattle roaming wild. They had been introduced by the Spanish who had found the herds multiplied and were profitable on native grasslands. The English soldiers of the Penn and Venables expedition, having largely trashed the existing settlements when they could not find treasure, then faced starvation – which you have to say rather served them right!

The ill-disciplined expedition nearly failed there and then especially as those who ventured outside Spanish Town were frequently picked off by escaped slaves and the remains of the local Taino Indian population. However the reservoir of cattle on the island provided a buffer against disease and starvation and gradually the toe-hold won by Penn and Venables became an British colony.

As agriculture became established the colonists began to grow some of their own food, although Jamaica would remain heavily dependent on imports throughout the eighteenth century. Initially the cattle were simply hunted and killed with their hides forming the basis of a profitable leather industry, but gradually the cattle too began to be farmed. The areas given over to raising stock and food crops were known as penns, and names of some survive today as in the town of May Pen, on land that once belonged to the Rector of Kingston William May.

On to the scene came Guinea grass.  In one of those little accidents of history it arrived from Guinea in Africa together with some exotic birds brought in 1744 to George Ellis Chief Justice of Jamaica by the captain of a slave ship. The seed was intended as bird food, but the birds died and the story goes that the seed was simply thrown out, whereupon it thrived and grew seven feet tall in the ideal conditions of tropical Jamaica.

It was discovered to be excellent for grazing, it made good hay and it grew on land that could not be used for sugar. Altogether it was in many ways as valuable as sugar, for to cultivate that crop large quantities of animals were needed – oxen and mules as draught animals and cattle to feed the local population (although slaves were mostly fed on salt fish). Slaves walking home from a day in the fields were expected to bring back a bundle of the grass with them to feed the animals. Guinea grass spread across the world for pasture, silage, hay and it is also used for mulching land in dry areas prior to establishing a crop and planted to stabilise land to help control soil erosion.

Human beings however could not live off grass, and the planters ever looking for cheaper ways of feeding their slaves heard that the breadfruit of Otaheite (now Tahiti) might provide the answer.

Breadfruit

Enter the much maligned Captain Bligh. I say much maligned because he seems to have been considerably less  brutal than other naval captains of his day, a fact supported by the number of his crew who in 1789 opted to go with Bligh rather than join the mutineers.

Bligh attempted a landing on the small island of Tofua where one crewman was stoned to death by the islanders. Then by a feat of incredible seamanship and with only a quadrant, a pocket watch and a memory of charts he had seen, Bligh navigated the 23 foot open boat across 3,618 miles of the Pacific to Timor and did not lose a single man. It took them forty-seven days and they had been given only enough food for a week.

Four years later following a second attempt Bligh finally delivered another cargo of breadfruit plants to the Bath Botanical Gardens in Jamaica, where it became established as a staple food. The town of Bath, named for its English counterpart because of the spa and springs there, today holds an annual Jamaican Breadfruit Festival.

 

Guinea grass: Photograph from http://www.fao.org/ag

Breadfruit: Photograph from http://www.soniatasteshawaii.com/

 

General Interest, Jamaican Life, London Life

Green Turtle and other delicacies

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Chelonia Mydas – The Green Turtle

In July 1772 Robert Cooper Lee wrote to his wife, who was on holiday with their children in Margate  ‘Captain Hepburn sent me the Turtle yesterday.  What was I to do with it?  I thought it would die before it got to Margate, or you should have had a Turtle Feast’.

There are numerous references in these family letters to turtles arriving from Jamaica for the family to feast on. Presumably once caught in the Caribbean they were kept alive in barrels of sea water until the ship arrived in England, once out of the water their survival time would have been limited.

On one occasion the Lees sent a present of a turtle to their sons’ headmaster, which caused no little stir in the school!

That such a present could be sent on the assumption that the headmaster’s cook would know what to do with the creature shows how widespread was the delicacy, even if it was still something of a luxury item.

To cook the turtle it would be killed and the head removed, then the whole animal plunged into boiling water for about ten minutes to make further preparation easier, once removed from its shell, gutted and skinned, the flesh could be cut up and treated much as you would chicken – perhaps coated in flour and seasoning, fried and then slowly stewed.

The fat of Chelonia mydas has a greenish tinge, which is how this species came to be called the green turtle, and it was much valued in the creation of turtle soup.

Needless to say overfishing and environmental challenges due to pollution, noise, light disturbance of nesting sights and the dangers posed by fine filament fishing net fragments have all contributed to a huge decline in turtle numbers since the eighteenth century. Most species are now protected and hopefully their numbers will recover.

Jamaica offered a large number of other delicacies not obtainable in Europe, and there are references in correspondence to candied ginger, pimentoes (allspice), yams, cashews and chocolate in addition to the sugar, coffee and rum that formed the greater part of the island’s exports.

 

 The wonderful photograph is courtesy of Brocken Inaglory

(Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Genealogy, General Interest

Scots in Jamaica

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Robert Burns, the most famous Scot who never went to Jamaica!

 

Family commitments over Easter mean this week’s piece will be a short one, but as I am half Scots I have a particular interest in the role of Scots in eighteenth century Jamaica.

It is sometimes said that most of the planters in Jamaica were English in origin whereas the Scots supplied the bookkeepers and overseers on the estates.  Like all generalisations this is only partly true.  There were Scots such as Hercules Ross, James Wedderburn, Colin McKenzie and others who were highly successful planters and merchants, just as there were English bookkeepers and overseers.  There were also many Scots doctors in Jamaica some of whom, in addition to providing medical services, were also planters.

The events that drove Scots to seek a future in Jamaica were however rather different from those motivating the English.  Deportations of Scots to Jamaica by Cromwell, and following the failed Monmouth rebellion in the 17th century, were augmented by three huge historical events that resulted in the young Scots arriving in Jamaica.

The first of these was the Darien disaster, a “noble undertaking” of Scots empire building that envisaged a New Caledonia linking the Pacific and the Atlantic in Central America.  Vast sums of money were raised in Scotland, and a large fleet fitted out.  When the whole affair ended in disaster and enormous financial losses to the backers in Scotland a handful of survivors ended up in Jamaica.  If you are interested in reading more, The Darien Disaster by John Prebble[1] provides an excellent account.

Scots also suffered from the failure of two Jacobite rebellions, in 1715 and 1745, both of which resulted in migrations to Jamaica.  James Wedderburn, already mentioned, left for Jamaica after watching his father hanged, drawn and quartered in 1746 following the defeat at Culloden Moor. The family estates were confiscated and sixteen year old Wedderburn was left to make his own way, something he did with conspicuous success, returning to Scotland a very wealthy man.

In this he was far from alone.  Edward Long in his “History of Jamaica” in 1774 wrote that:

Jamaica, indeed, is greatly indebted to North Britain, as very nearly one third of the inhabitants are either natives of that country, or descendants from those who were….. To say the truth, they are so clever and prudent in general, as, by an obliging behaviour, good sense, and zealous services to gain esteem, and make their way through every obstacle.

According to T.M.  Devine, in his book Scotland’s Empire 1600 to 1815[2], in the period 1771-1775 Scots accounted for nearly 45% of all probate inventories valued above £1000, and about 40% of personal property inventories were those of Scots.

Another book that tells the story of Scots in the Caribbean in the latter part of the 18th-century is Scotland, the Caribbean and the Atlantic World 1752-1820[3] by Douglas J Hamilton.

If you are searching for Scottish ancestors who may have been in Jamaica, you will find David Dobson’s book Scots in Jamaica 1655-1855[4] a very useful reference work.  It is an alphabetical listing with brief references to the sources of information on each individual, together with two pages of details of some of the ships that sailed between Scotland and Jamaica.

Oh, and in case you did not already know, Robert Burns was nearly lost to Scotland and poetry when he planned to migrate to work as a bookkeeper for Dr Patrick Douglas. Fate intervened, delaying the ship he should have sailed on in August 1786, until after the birth of his twin children and the sudden success of the ‘Kilmarnock Edition’ of his poems.


[1] The Darien Disaster, John Prebble, Pimlico, New edition,2002. ISBN-10: 0712668535, ISBN-13: 978-0712668538

[2] Scotland’s Empire 1600-1815, T.M.Devine, Penguin, 2004. ISBN-10: 0140296875, ISBN-13: 978-0140296877

[3] Scotland, the Caribbean and the Atlantic World 1752-1820, Douglas J.Hamilton,Manchester University Press, 2010. ISBN-10: 0719071836, ISBN-13: 978-0719071836

[4] Scots in Jamaica 1655-1855, David Dobson, Clearfield, Baltimore, 2011. ISBN 978-0-8063-5540-5

Biographies, Genealogy, General Interest, Jamaican Life, London Life

Augier or Hosier – name transformations

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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.

 

General Interest, Jamaican Life

Wet Nursing in Jamaica

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Cover image from Wet Nursing by Valerie Fildes*

 

In January 1784 Frances Lee wrote from Bath to her brother Richard, “ The Duchess of Devonshire is here but she goes little into Public as she is at present a nurse – a very extraordinary circumstance in these refined times”.

At a time when it was unfashionable for the upper classes to breast feed their own infants, the Duchess of Devonshire’s insistence on doing so was much remarked upon.  It was also disapproved of by the Duke’s family.  The child was a daughter, there was great pressure on the Duchess to produce a son, and it was well known that breastfeeding would delay the chances of her getting pregnant again.

Before the easy availability of contraception a woman who was lucky enough to keep her health and survive childbirth, might expect to deliver eight or a dozen children and sometimes more.  The Duchess of Lennox who was married at seventeen, and after the birth of her first child advised not to breastfeed because of a fear of making her “weak eyes” worse, produced twenty-two living children in thirty years[1].

When researching family history a useful rule of thumb is to expect one child every 18 to 24 months on average, and if you find a large gap in the record this generally indicates a lost pregnancy, or a missing record.  Using this principle I successfully tracked down thirteen of the fifteen children of a family who spent the last four decades of the 19th century moving hither and thither across England building and repairing the railways.  I knew there were fifteen children to find because half way through my researches the 1911 census became available. For the first time the 1911 census gives information on the number of children born to a couple, and whether alive or dead.  Had I been prepared to spend more money guessing which birth certificate to purchase (the family name was a common one and often misspelled) I might have been able to find the last two children.

It seems clear that it was well known for centuries that breastfeeding limited the chance of getting pregnant and of course there was no real substitute for human milk. Babies might be fed on cows milk, often contaminated and a source of tuberculosis, or on pap – a mixture of flour and water.  Weaning generally took place from a child’s second year, which helps to account for high levels of infant mortality as the child was exposed to a wider range of risks. Teething is often recorded as a cause of death both in parish records and later on death certificates and was regarded as particularly dangerous for the child.  However it is more probable that infections picked up as a result of weaning with contaminated food were the cause, although the practice of lancing a child’s gums to encourage the teeth to come through would also have introduced infection.

The women who were employed as wet nurses came from a variety of backgrounds.  Overtly the only qualification was to have a plentiful supply of milk to feed a baby, and in some cases particularly among poorer women this resulted in professional wet nurses who farmed out their own babies in order to obtain employment.  In many cases they would have been women whose own child had just died.  The fate of a child whose mother had died in childbed depended entirely on immediately finding a wet nurse.

For those employing them the moral character of the wet nurse was important, not only might a single mother be a threat to the marriage if she was a “loose woman”, but it was believed that more than nutrition flowed with mother’s milk, moral character might  also. Some medical texts advocated that the wet nurse’s own child should be of the same sex as the one she suckled – some thought mothers of boys produced better quality milk and others that inappropriate sexual characteristics might be transmitted in the milk if the babies were of different sexes.  There was also medical discussion as to whether a mother’s milk improved or deteriorated as her baby grow older and therefore whether the age of her baby relative to the age of the one she nursed was important.

For the wealthy upper classes there is evidence that the wet nurses they employed came not from the poor or single mothers, but from the social class immediately beneath them.  One study of the wet nurses employed by Sir Roger and Lady Mary Townshend in the 17th century[2] shows that the women were the wives of prosperous yeoman farmers and other respectable local people who had previously been servants in the Townshend household and were consequently well known to the family.

When we come to the colonists in Jamaica and the wealthy families of the plantocracy we can see that they had a dual problem in finding wet nurses for their children.  Although white society in Jamaica was more socially fluid than in England, it was relatively small in number and generally lacking in the intermediate social class of respectable white servants, yeoman farmers and well to do village craftsmen from whom Sir Roger Townshend’s family drew its wet nurses.

White women were always a scarce commodity in eighteenth century Jamaica.  Moreover death and disease took their toll so rapidly on new white settlers that the numbers of white women were further reduced and the numbers among them who might potentially have been available as wet nurses were very small indeed.  And yet although the pressure for women to breastfeed their own children must consequently have been greater the impression given by the spacing of baptisms suggests otherwise. There is enough evidence to be found in the spacing of plantocracy families, baptising one child a year over a period of the decade or so, to suggest that many of the women were not breast feeding their own children, although this conclusion is necessarily speculative as it is not always possible to establish whether the child lived to grow up.  For example Elizabeth Langley the wife of Dr Fulke Rose, one of Jamaica’s early settlers, produced eleven children baptised between May 1679 and April 1694, and a further four children with her second husband Sir Hans Sloane.

The dilemma for white women in Jamaica who did not breastfeed their own children was whether to employ a black wet nurse.  Just as medical opinion recommended that the wet nurse’s child should be of the same sex, and debated the nutritional quality of the wet nurse’s milk, so there was debate as to what adverse effects being suckled by a black woman might have on a white child.  Both Sir Hans Sloane, and later the Jamaican historian Edward Long commented on the fact that planters avoided the use of black wet nurses.

“Planters eschewed black nurses ‘for fear of infecting their children with some of their ill-Customs’.  The blood of black women was ‘corrupted’ and their milk ‘tainted’, differing distinctly from that of European mothers.”[3]

In the 1780s William Dwarris wrote proudly that his wife fed her babies herself “which I assure you is rather uncommon here”.  His wife Sarah regarded breastfeeding as a means of birth control and recommended it to her sister.  She also disapproved of the custom of using black and mulatto wet nurses.  “I should be very unhappy to have him suck a Negro, there is I think something unnatural in seeing a white child at a black breast besides that of being obliged to put up with their ill manners for fear of hurting your child.”[4]

There was an additional practical problem, that of the low birthrate among female slaves.  Much literature has been produced both about white society in Jamaica failing to reproduce itself and increase in numbers in the way that it did in North America, and about the problem that planters faced owning a slave population that did not reproduce itself let alone increase.  Only after the cessation of the slave trade did planters in general make effective efforts to encourage the natural reproduction of their enslaved workers.  So enslaved black women who might have welcomed the relatively easier work of wet nursing, were deprived of the opportunity by their own low fertility rates, by the relatively small numbers of pregnant plantocracy wives and by the prejudiced fears of contamination among the whites.

It may be that white families in Jamaica sought wet nurses among the mixed race women of their servant class, whose social status was more akin to that of the wet nurses used in England and whose ‘diluted’ colour might be thought to diminish any supposed disadvantage.  I’m not aware that any study has been done on this however.

There are few documented references to family wet nurses other than in the kind of estate accounts used for the study of Sir Roger Townshend’s family. I have however come across the following in the Will of Major General Samuel Townsend (no relation) whose wife Elizabeth Aikenhead (born in Jamaica about 1734) was the widow of Gilbert Ford (Attorney-General for Jamaica 1760, Member of the Assembly for St. John’s 1761, Member of Council 1764, died 1767):

“I give devise and bequeath unto my present Housekeeper Mrs Mary Collins the Sum of Ten Pounds Yearly for and during the term of her natural life as a mark of my intire approbation of her fidelity and good behaviour as well as of her great care and unvaried attention to my children whom she suckled.”

 Mary Collins was clearly a much loved member of the household, for when Elizabeth Townsend died in 1800 she left her £150. Incidentally we also know that Mary was literate since in 1796 she signed an affidavit concerning the validity of the handwriting in the Will of Elizabeth’s sister Milbrough McLean.

 

*Valerie Fildes, Wet Nursing A History from Antiquity to the present, Basil Blackwell, 1988

[1] Stella Tillyard, Aristocrats:Caroline, Emily,Louisa and Sarah Lennox 1740-1832, Chatto and Windus ,1994

[2] Linda Campbell, Wet-Nurses in Early Modern England: Some Evidence from the Townsend Archive, Medical History, 1989, 33:pp.360-370.

[3] Barbara Bush, Slave women in Caribbean Society 1650-1838, Heinemann Publishers (Caribbean) Kingston, Indiana University Press, James Currey, London 1990, p.15

[4] Lucille Mathurin Mair, A Historical Study of Women in Jamaica 1655-1844, University of West Indies Press, 2006, p. 119.

Genealogy, General Interest

Jamaican Ancestry by Madeleine E. Mitchell – Book Review

Comment

 

Madeleine Mitchell’s really useful book on researching Jamaican ancestors first came out in 1998 and a revised edition was published in 2008.

In the Preface to the first edition she described herself as a family historian who had been working on her own Jamaican ancestry for more than a decade, that experience now stretches to quarter of a century and more, and some of the useful online links she has discovered over the years can be found on the Rootsweb site that she maintains.

She begins the book with the golden rule of genealogy – to work backwards from what you know to the unknown.  In the Jamaican context she stresses the importance of oral history and of knowing the parish with which your family were or are connected, and to help with this the book includes three maps showing the early parishes, the 19th-century parishes, and the modern boundaries in Jamaica.  There is also a list of critical events in the history of Jamaica.

The topics covered in the book include finding your way among the records for civil registration, church records, monumental inscriptions, maps and land records, records relating to immigration and naturalisation as well as emigration.  There is information about military records; schools, Colleges, and Universities; printed sources of information which may include relevant records such as handbooks, directories, court records and newspapers.  There is also a short but useful section on occupations, and a diagram showing the hierarchy of occupations underneath the owner, and the planting attorney who managed an estate.

Although the various sections act as pointers towards original sources, both online and manuscript or published, there is a huge amount of useful background information as for example in relation to the immigration of Scots to Jamaica covering the Darien disaster in the late 17th century whose remaining colonists fetched up in Jamaica.

Twenty-five years ago most sources for genealogy research were only available in physical form, with the arrival of the internet all that has changed. In addition to references to online sources throughout the main text, a section at the end of the book lists a range of web based resources, and a topic and full name index completes the book.

Madeleine Mitchell was born in Browns Town, Saint Ann, Jamaica and went to school in Browns Town and Kingston, later studying in Canada at McGill University.  She now lives in Florida.  Among her other work on Jamaican genealogy is an index to early Wills of Jamaica.

For anyone interested in researching their own Jamaican ancestry, this is an essential handbook and for anyone with but a passing interest it is full of fascinating background to Jamaica and its colonial past.

Madeleine E Mitchell, Jamaican Ancestry How to Find Out More (revised edition), Heritage Books Inc.,  Westminster, Maryland, USA, 2008. ISBN-13: 978-0788442827.

 

 

And as a quick footnote – Can I remind you that the page called ‘Latest Additions’ on the left hand menu will take you to a list of – latest additions to the site!

This week I have added several Wills relating to the families of the Aikenhead sisters, daughters of Archibald Aikenhead of Stirling Castle, Jamaica.

Biographies, General Interest, London Life

The Queen of Hell in Portman Square

Comment

 

How did young Elizabeth Gibbons born in Jamaica about 1704 come to be known as the “Queen of Hell “?

She was the only surviving child of William Gibbons and his wife Deborah Favell, and consequently heir to his plantations of Dry River and Bay Marazy in Vere, jointly known as Gibbons.  At the age of about sixteen she was married to James Lawes, eldest son of Sir Nicholas Lawes who was Governor of Jamaica.

Sir Nicholas had come to Jamaica as a young boy his parents having suffered under Cromwell, and had built up a huge fortune. He introduced the growing of coffee to Jamaica, set up the first printing press, and married five widows (in succession I hasten to add).  No children survived from the first three marriages but James and Temple Lawes were the sons of his fourth wife Susannah Temple who had previously been married to Samuel Bernard. His youngest surviving daughter was Judith Maria who married Simon Luttrell, Lord Carhampton.

By all accounts at a time when the Jamaican Assembly was a hotbed of rivalry, in frequent opposition to interference from Whitehall, and suffering from the problems of absenteeism and the sudden deaths of colonists, James Lawes was a difficult man to deal with.  The Duke of Portland wrote that he left “nothing untry’d to create trouble”, complained of his unconventional behaviour and said that he would not allow his wife to pay any compliment to or visit the Governor’s wife.  Either James reformed or he learned to play politics more effectively, for after a visit to England in 1732 he was appointed Lieutenant Governor as deputy to Sir Robert Hunter.

However Jamaica claimed him as yet another early death and his widow created an elaborate marble monument for him at the church of St Andrew, Halfway Tree, with the following inscription (translated from Latin)[1]:

Nearby are placed the remains of the Honourable James Lawes: he was the first-born son of Sir Nicholas Lawes, the Governor of this Island, by his wife Susannah Temple: He married Elizabeth, the only daughter and heiress of William Gibbons, Esq; then in early manhood, when barely thirty-six years of age, he obtained almost the highest position of distinction among his countrymen, being appointed Lieutenant Governor by Royal warrant; but before he entered on his duties, in the prime of life – alas – he died on 4th January 1733.

In him we lose an upright and honoured citizen, a faithful and industrious friend, and most affectionate husband, a man who was just and kind to all, and distinguished by the lustre of genuine religion.  His wife, who survived him, had this monument erected to perpetuate the memory of a beloved husband.

Even allowing for conventional sentiments honouring the dead, there is nothing in this to suggest that it was anything other than a very happy marriage.  There appear to have been no children, or at any rate no surviving children, and at some point in the next decade Elizabeth left Jamaica for good.

Nine years later on the 25th of December 1742 the widowed Elizabeth married William the Eighth Earl of Home (pronounced Hume).  Curiously within eight weeks on the 24th of February 1743 he left her.  There is apparently no record of why. It seems likely that he was some years younger than Elizabeth, and not impossible that she consented to a marriage of convenience to protect a young man whose sexual preferences lay with his own sex. If they had a blazing row it has not been recorded, and she remained on good terms with his family, remembering some of them in her Will.

William had been commissioned in the second Regiment of Dragoon Guards in 1732 and had fought against the Jacobites at Prestonpans in 1745.  After leaving his wife he continued to pursue his military career. In 1750 he became colonel of the 48th (Northamptonshire) Regiment of Foot and in 1752 he became colonel of the 29th Regiment of Foot. In 1757 he was made Governor of Gibraltar and in 1759 he was promoted to Lieutenant General.  He died at Gibralter on the 28th of April 1761.

Having acquired the title of the Countess of Home, and continuing to enjoy the wealth from her Jamaican estates, Elizabeth moved to a large house on the south side of Portman Square.  However in spite of owning this recently built mansion, in 1773 she then proceeded to commission Robert Adam to build a particularly grand house on a very large plot on the north side of Portman Square and moved into it three years later. There she entertained lavishly, particularly the friends of the Duke of Cumberland and his wife Ann Luttrell, daughter of her sister-in-law Judith Maria Lawes.

Ann Luttrell, already a widow at twenty-eight was described as having “the most amorous eyes in the world and eyelashes a yard long; coquette beyond measure, artful as Cleopatra and completely mistress of her passions”, in other words in the eyes of the writer Horace Walpole, a gold digger. Lady Louisa Stuart called her vulgar, noisy, indelicate and intrepid. It may be the rumbustuous reputation of Ann’s sister Elizabeth, and Ann’s reputation for coarse language that contributed to Elizabeth Gibbons’ title as “Queen of Hell”. The name was bestowed on her by Elizabeth Montagu, wealthy bluestocking and coal heiress, who herself built the grand Montagu House on Portman Square and whose parties seem to have been of a rather different character from Elizabeth Gibbons’, excluding as they did either card playing or strong drink!

On the 16th of  January 1784 twelve year-old Matthew Allen Lee wrote to his brother Richard Lee, who was in Hamburg, “the Dowager Lady Hume died the day before yesterday and left the great house in Portman Square with almost all her fortune to Billy Gale Mr Farquhar’s Ward who is lately gone to Jamaica, expects about 13 thousand pounds in Legacies.”

Billy, or William, Gale was at that time under age and only distantly related to Elizabeth Gibbons who was herself, in the manner of the Jamaican colonists of the period, related to half the most prominent island families.

The residuary legatee in the event of William’s death without children (as indeed happened) was Peter Dixon. William and Peter had a grandmother in common – Gibbons Morant who had married first Jonathan Gale and then Peter Sargeant. The most likely explanation for the connection of all of these to Elizabeth Gibbons is the marriage of John Morant (father of Gibbons Morant) to a sister of William Gibbons – but as this would have taken place some time in the 1690s in Jamaica I have not so far found a record to prove it.

If this seems complicated that’s because it is, and it is absolutely typical of researches into 18th-century Jamaica.  Intermarriage between the main planter families, remarriages following the death of a partner and the desire to consolidate estates and keep them in family hands are all exemplified here.

As for why Elizabeth decided to build a second house on Portman square when she had a perfectly good one already, it seems likely that she was building it deliberately to house two very large full length portraits of the Duke and Duchess of Cumberland painted by Gainsborough.  Adam’s drawings for the design of the house show space for the two portraits either side of a large fireplace in the upstairs ‘Capital Room’. In her Will Elizabeth offered to leave the portraits to the Lord Mayor of London for display in the Mansion House, with the proviso that if the Cumberlands requested it they should have the pictures back.  There is no evidence the pictures ever hung in the Mansion House, and they are now in the Royal Collection.  The Cumberlands were not flavour of the month with the King at the time and it may be that the City of London felt it politic not to accept pictures of one of the King’s sons who had married against his wishes and to his great displeasure.

The house was clearly very splendid and is described by its present occupants as Robert Adam’s finest surviving London town house[2] .

 “The interior is conceived as a series of grand reception rooms, beginning with a typically austere hall, leading to one of the most breathtaking “tour de forces” in European architecture; Adam’s Imperial staircase, which rises through the entire height of the house to a glass dome, revealing the sky above.

On the ground floor are the Front Parlour and Eating Room, the latter being decorated with symbolic paintings of banquets and the harvest by Zucchi, the husband of artist Angelica Kauffman. On the first floor is a series of ‘Parade Rooms’ featuring the Ante-room, the Music Room, the Great Drawing Room and finally, one of the most original rooms in England, the Countess’s Etruscan State Bedroom, whose pagan decorations derive from the excavations of Pompeii.”

Home House Dome

For someone who had gained the title “Queen of Hell”, even if only in the popular press, Elizabeth seems to have taken great care not to forget any one of her friends, relations or servants in her Will.  If she was indeed eccentric and outspoken, she was also kind and considerate in her many bequests and attempted to ensure that her Jamaican estates would be left to someone who would remain resident there.

[1] Lesley Lewis, Elizabeth Countess of Home, her House in Portman Square,The Burlington Magazine, Vol.109, No.773, August 1967, pp.443-453.

[2] The house has recently been restored, having for some years housed the Courtauld Institute, and is now an exclusive Club.

Photograph of Home House Dome By Rictor Norton & David Allen from London, United Kingdom (38 Home House) [CC-BY-2.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons