Category Archives: Genealogy

Genealogy, General Interest

Family stories – the vital clues

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If you ever doubt how much can be gleaned from even the smallest scraps of information left by your ancestors take a look at the piece of paper my mother received in the 1950s in a bundle of family papers collected by an aunt.

Aunt Alice was a young girl when her grandmother, born Charlotte  Heap in 1808, died in 1890, but her grandmother had noted fragmentary details of the family story of an ‘Indian Princess’ and from this eventually grew a database of several thousand close and distant ancestors, and my book A Parcel of Ribbons.

One common, but frustrating, genealogical puzzle comes when you are given only the surname and no first names and this is especially acute if you are tracking through the female line of your family with surname changes every generation as in this example. In the end I came at this problem from two directions at once, both working backwards from Charlotte Heap and also looking for two sisters surnamed Jaques, one who had married a Lee and another a Marleton (in fact spelled Marlton).

Another problem with handwritten notes is interpreting connections without a diagram or helpful punctuation. For example ‘his father married a creole’ in the above example could apply to Richard Lee or to Richard Lee’s father or his grandfather. Another piece of paper written by Aunt Alice said that her father had referred to a creole but she had always heard ‘Indian Princess’.

I had very little to go on geographically other than that the family was based in England, Charlotte was born in Kendal in Cumbria but her mother came from Suffolk and it emerged that the roots were all in London. Without the internet and computerised indexes the search would have been all but impossible.

Two key findings helped in unravelling the story. One was a marriage licence issued in 1720 for Joseph Lee and Frances Jaques (I have still not found the marriage record), and the later discovery that Frances’s sister Mary had married Thomas Marlton. The other was the combined information from the Will of Richard Lee in 1857 (which left a small legacy to Charlotte and various members of her family) together with the 1851 census record for Richard Lee giving his birthplace as Jamaica. This last was a total surprise, since until then no-one in the family had any idea there was a Jamaican connection. Indeed in a family with slight connections with North America and extensive ones from the early eighteenth century in India, the search had been on for either a family Pocahontas or the daughter of an Indian Rajah!

I think there are two lessons to be drawn from all of this. The first is always to take seriously any information your ancestors leave whether as stories or documents. The second is, that having taken it seriously, don’t be surprised if what you find is not at all what you expect. Indeed over the passage of time (Charlotte’s notes were made in the late 1880’s and referred to events nearly a century before she was born) a kernal of truth may well have acquired an auro of myth by the time it comes down to you.

 

 

 

Genealogy, General Interest, London Life

Probate Inventories and a Coat of Arms

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The Arms of William Jaques

Probate inventories can be a surprisingly illuminating aid in your family history search.

They were compiled after a person’s death in order to value the estate. This was especially important if there were unpaid debts or monies owed to the deceased. More modern probate records for England and Wales can be found on Ancestry which has the England & Wales, National Probate Calendar (Index of Wills and Administrations) for 1858-1966, and this will tell you the value of an estate at death and will usually give you the address of the deceased, date of death and to whom probate was granted. This latter is more helpful when probate is granted to a relation than if it is granted to a firm of solicitors.

Ancestry also carries a number of other probate indexes and digital images of some Wills. For Scotland a free search for Wills can be done on Scotland’s People although they charge for downloading images of the documents. It is not often these days that prices are reduced, but I have noticed a small recent price reduction for downloading the .pdf file of Wills from the UK National Archives. They also hold some probate inventories and you can make a document request to get a copy of these.

Earlier inventories were often made on long narrow strips of parchment which were then stored rolled up. I have transcribed two of these from my own family – for Richard Graybee and William Jaques. Richard Graybee was my eight  times great grandfather twice over, since his daughter Mary married Joseph Lee and her sister Sarah married master watch-case maker William Jaques. Their children Joseph Lee and Frances Jaques were my six times great grandparents.

The first  inventory I  investigated was for William Jaques. He died intestate in January 1719/20, and as he was a Citizen of London and a member of the Clockmakers Company, and several of his children were still under age, his case was dealt with by the Court of  Orphans of the City of London. They appointed  Thomas Powle and Solomon Bonquet to evaluate  ‘all & singular the Goods Chattels Rights and Creditts late belonging to and appertaining unto William Jaques of the Parish of St Sepulchre late Citizen and Clockmaker of London deceased’. The parchment roll showing the results of their labours is in the London Metropolitan Archives.

Thomas and Solomon had gone systematically through the house in Angel Court listing the contents. These included household furniture and items such as feather beds, chairs, tables, dressing glasses, pots and pans, tongs and shovels, 120 pounds weight of pewter items, 170 oz of plate (presumably silver and gold)  and household linen consisting of

16 pair sheets 12 pair of pillocases & 3 damask table cloths & 23 napkins diaper table cloths 40 diaper and Huccaback napkins 3 kitchen table cloths 3 jack towels & 3 doz of hand towels (worth £12 2 shillings).

In addition to all the household items which were listed by room, thus telling us how big the house was, there were all the materials of William’s trade as a master silversmith. This included gold worth £263 and 25 oz of new sterling silver. The presence of bedding in the ‘Shopp’ alongside the tools suggests that an apprentice probably slept there, providing security.

Even the clothes of the dead person were assessed and in William’s case this raised an intriguing possibility.

Apparell

4 Intestate wearing apparel linen and woollen Books & arms & a silver watch £15

This website and the book A Parcel of Ribbons had their origins in my search for the truth behind the story of an Indian Princess which had come down through the family, together with various papers from my great-aunt Alice. She had left a painting of a coat of arms to a cousin of my mother who supplied me with the image above. It seems highly likely that it was this painting that was referred to as ‘arms’ in the inventory. It was also this painting that confirmed for me the link between the Jaques and Graybee families.

William had also owned bonds in the ill-fated South Sea Company, which the executors were able to sell just before the Bubble burst, and the inventory also shows a lengthy list of persons owing money to William, many of whom were clockmakers thus providing further historical information to those interested in eighteenth century clockmaking.

Among the debts owed by William at his death was 10s 6d to the Nurse, so we can infer that he had been ill for a while, if not sufficiently ill to feel the need to make his Will or possibly too ill to be able to do so. His funeral expenses came to £167 16s 6 ½d  which must have produced quite a lavish funeral being equivalent to about £19,600 in modern retail prices.

A generation earlier William’s father-in-law Richard Graybee left a probate inventory which tells us about the contents of his house in Little Old Bailey and about the probable occupation of one of his sons. Although Richard himself was a cooper, there were materials in the cellar of his house suggesting someone involved in the dyeing trade. This ties in with baptism records for the children of a John Graybee who was a silk dyer living close by, almost certainly Richard’s eldest son. Unfortunately the records of the Dyers Company were lost in the Great Fire of 1666 so confirmation is lacking.

One interesting feature of the way the inventories are written is that they refer not to rooms on the first or second floor of the house, but to ‘one pair of stairs’ or ‘two pair of stairs’ as well as garrets, kitchens and cellars. Decoding the values of the goods recorded can be tricky as earlier documents may use Roman numerals for money values rather than arabic, and of course the amounts are in pounds shillings and pence, possibly including halfpennies or farthings.

I have not yet examined any Jamaican inventories, although I hope to do so in future. For anyone interested in Jamaican inventories, you may like to look at that for the estate of Henry Morgan for which Dianne Frankson has made a transcription part of which can be viewed here. One interesting feature of this is the mention of a ‘musketto nett’ which was the first time I had realised that mosquito nets were in use from the earliest times.

When a probate inventory exists it puts flesh on the bones of a person’s Will and gives us a peep into the contents of their home and the way that they lived. It also gives us an idea of the value of the estate left behind and the relative wealth of an ancestor before the formal establishment of the Probate Registry.

 

Biographies, Genealogy, General Interest, London Life

A lunatic in the family

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Hogarth’s image of the Rake’s Progress in which he has finally descended into madness in Bedlam

 

The treatment in the eighteenth century of those born mentally handicapped and those suffering from mental illness was often absolutely horrific.

The history of Bedlam (a corruption of Bethlem, the Bethlehem Hospital) shows that valiant attempts were sometimes made, but frequently failed, and the attitudes that saw the fashionable treating the inmates as a fit subject for sight-seeing demonstrates a lack of empathy we now find deeply shocking.

For the well-to-do, the alternative to putting a family member in a public institution was private nursing, somewhere quiet and well away from the family (the option taken by the British Royal family in relation to the epileptic Prince John in the early 20th century), or a private asylum. In general such relatives were quietly put aside and forgotten.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a number of private asylums were established on the edge of London in places such as Fulham and Kensington. I first came across this in relation to the fate of a brother of my 3 times great grandmother. The Parmenter family seem to have been particularly unlucky in their sons since a letter written in the 1790s refers to their eldest son Isaac being incapable of work, in some way handicapped, and his brother John being exceptionally small for his age and likewise unsuited to physical work – both died in their twenties. Their brother Robert Lee Parmenter (born in 1792) found work as a bank clerk in the family business, but by the mid 1820s the Lee family cousins were already making provision for care that would last for the rest of his life. When he arrived at the Kensington House Asylum is unclear, but it is to be hoped he was not there during the 1830s.

In 1838-41 it was the subject of an exposé by Richard Paternoster who had been forcibly detained there in 1838. Conditions were nothing like the idylic ones described in its prospectus.

‘He described an overcrowded, badly ordered institution in which the inmates were at the mercy of their often brutal keepers, some of them ex-convicts. “Occuption there was none, amusement none, music none, books none, newspapers none, baths none! cleanliness none, medical treatment none, friends none, food scanty and bad.” Paternoster detailed several examples of violence against patients, one of whom was beaten up for throwing a small bone over the wall into Sir John Scott Lillie’s garden.‘[1]

After the institution came under Cornishman Dr Francis Philp, from 1840 onwards, conditions improved significantly. Interestingly, from a genealogical point of view, although the inmates are easily found in the 1841 census, they are later listed only by their initials. Dr Philp was mis-transcribed as Philip and was away from home in the 1851 census, so the only solution to finding the inmates was to page through the census books to find Kensington House by its geographical location. You can find a fuller account of Kensington House here.

Many of the male patients seem to have been professional men – occupations listed in the 1841 census include farmer, planter, colonel, merchant, surgeon, several French people and a number of clerks. The relatively large number of French patients may have been due to the presence in the area of emigrés from the French revolution and the earlier use of Kensington House by the Jesuits. It is to be hoped that Robert Lee Parmenter did not arrive at the Asylum before 1840, but he was certainly there in 1841 and he died there of bronchitis in 1866.

Another sad and intriguing case is that of the second son of Frances Dalzell, who married George Duff in 1757 in Charles Street, London. Frances was a daughter of Susanna Augier whose family I have previously discussed. It appears that Frances met George in Bath, and although she was nearly seven years older than he was it was a love match. Her father was already dead and she and her brother had jointly inherited the Lucky Hill estate in Jamaica, and would also inherit from their grandfather General Robert Dalzell who outlived all his children and died in his ninety-sixth year.

Frances and George had a son called William Robert baptised in 1758, James in 1760, twins George and Jane Dorothea in 1765 and Frances who was probably born a year later. William Robert seems to have died young, both daughters died in their twenties and George, who went into the army, was for a time disowned by his father because of his wild lifestyle.

Two online references to James refer to him being ‘a lunatic from birth’, and one says that he was cared for in Beaufort House in Fulham under the name of James Thompson. Ironically it seems that he outlived his entire family, dying at the age of seventy-two. I have not as yet been able to verify these on-line references, but if correct they suggest that the care given in Beaufort House was good. It seems to have been a small institution, for a mid-nineteenth century report which listed Kensington House as having 44 inmates (2 under restraint) listed only five for Beaufort House, which also had two under restraint.

Without further information it is impossible to know what was the matter with James. The description of him as ‘a lunatic from birth’ suggests either that he was mentally handicapped, or perhaps that he had Down’s syndrome, although it would be unusual for someone with Downs to live into their seventies. He may have been autistic or have suffered from epilepsy, or perhaps he had a degree of cerebral palsy sufficient to make him socially unacceptable, but not to shorten his life.

Frances Dalzell died in 1778 and in her Will, written two years earlier, she makes no mention of her son William. She left £100 to James and £200 to each of her daughters with the residue of the Jamaican estates left to George. She left her shares in the Sun Fire Office in similar proportions with one each to James, Jane Dorothea and Frances and twelve to George. That she did not leave a substantial share to James, the eldest, reinforces the suggestion that he was incapable of minding his own affairs.

George Duff senior died in 1818 and George junior, described at the time as his only son, died in 1828. James was probably still living at the time.

NOTE I have recently added the following update to my previous article on the Augier clan.

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] British History online.
Biographies, Genealogy, General Interest, London Life

London graveyards and the Wonderful Mrs Basil Holmes

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 “Bella” Holmes, photographed in 1895 (courtesy of Jake Holmes)

But for the efforts of the wonderful Mrs Basil Holmes much of what we know about London graveyards and burial grounds would have been lost. Instead of which we now have not only the results of her labours in her book on The London Burial Grounds, but its descendants in modern websites such as Londonburials to aid in our search for lost ancestors. Many of those who went to Jamaica had London roots, and many who made their fortunes in Jamaica came ‘home’ to settle in and around the capital.

Isabella Matilda Gladstone was born in 1861, the sixth of seven children of John Hall Gladstone (FRS and a Scientific Chemist) and his first wife Jane Mary Tilt. Isabella’s mother, her eldest sister and her only brother died when she was three in an epidemic of scarlet fever and diphtheria. Her father’s second wife died in childbirth six years later, barely a year after their marriage. Margaret, the child of this marriage, would go on to become the wife of Ramsay Macdonald, Britain’s first Labour Prime Minister.

In 1887 Isabella married Basil Holmes who was Secretary to the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association (MPGA) which had been founded five years earlier. Between 1888 and 1896 Isabella had two daughters and two sons, with another son coming along in 1905. During the 1890s the family lived at  5 Freeland Road, Ealing in west London and were able to employ various nursemaids, a cook and a housemaid. The Freeland Road house was a solid brick-built Victorian villa, comfortably situated between Ealing Common and the Ealing Lawn Tennis Club, but the founders of the MPGA were only too well aware that many Londoners lived in squalid slums, seeing little sunlight, rarely seeing any greenery and with no safe places for their children to play.

It was the dawning age of metropolitan socialism that brought about the clearing of slums, the building of ‘model dwellings’ and the first social housing, and the erection of public baths, lavatories and wash-houses for those with no proper sanitation or running water at home.

Before she married Basil Holmes, Isabella had already been providing information to the MPGA. Looking at one of the classic eighteenth century maps of London, by John Rocque, she had noticed that many burial grounds and churchyards marked on it no longer existed. Intrigued, she  investigated what had happened to them and drew up a list which was published in the first MPGA report in 1884.

There was a serious lack of good information. From the mid-nineteenth century many burial grounds were so overcrowded as to become a serious health hazard, the ground level having risen several feet as coffin was piled upon coffin. Many were closed for new burials, and as congregations moved out of the City to the suburbs church attendances fell and churches were closed and demolished, replaced by commercial developments.

In 1884 the Disused Burial Grounds Act was passed with the aim of preventing unregulated development on graveyards. One consequence of this however was that builders finding bones would hush up the discovery and hastily cart away the evidence for disposal elsewhere. Isabella mentions that even in poor Whitechapel building land was worth £30,000 an acre, putting every unrecorded and forgotten burial ground in danger of development.

This then was the context in which she began her work, a task that lasted more than a dozen years, from the early days of the MPGA through marriage, a family, and finally the production of her book in 1896 which accompanied a set of colour-coded maps that she presented to the London County Council. The maps comprised 60 Ordnance Survey 25-inches to the mile sheets, with burial places still in use coloured blue, those that were disused coloured green and those now converted for public recreation coloured red. In the County and City of London she had documented 362 burial grounds, of which 41 were still in use and 90 had become public gardens or playgrounds for slum children. She did not include in this number churches and chapels which had burial vaults but no graveyard. She did however extend her searches to include non-conformist, Quaker and Jewish burial places.

Early on in her work Bella realised that there was no substitute for seeing things on the ground, and off she went notebook in hand searching for burial grounds that she knew should still be there, but which now were often back yards filled with rubbish. Often access was difficult, but a letter of introduction got her into a Jewish cemetery from which her Christian status would otherwise have excluded her. And she was not above climbing fences to peer beyond – ‘One day I climbed a high rickety fence in a builder’s yard in Wandsworth in order to see over the wall into the Friends’ burial-ground. No doubt the men in the place thought me mad, – anyhow they left me in peace.’

She would knock on doors and ask to look out of people’s rear windows to locate old graveyards. Moreover, intrepid but careful, she was quite happy to venture into parts of London she was told were unsafe. ‘An appearance of utter insignificance and an air of knowing where you are going and what you want, is the passport for all parts of London’. One feels she would have made a good spy!

Having collected a wealth of books and information during her searches, Isabella’s own book includes much useful background information on the development of London, albeit some of her archaeological comments have been superseded by more recent work. The book covers British and Roman burying-places; the graveyards of priories and convents; the Cathedral, the Abbey, the Temple and the Tower; the City churchyards; London churchyards outside the City; pest-fields and plague-pits; the dissenters’ burial-grounds; burial places of foreigners in London; hospital, almshouse and workhouse grounds; private and promiscuous cemeteries; the closing of burial grounds and vaults; graveyards as public gardens; cemeteries still in use and a ‘forecast for the future’.

In this last chapter she showed herself somewhat ahead of the times in discussing cremation of the dead, which would help to reduce the need for additional burial places. Not until after the First World War, when so many of the dead had no known resting place, would cremation become as accepted as burial.

The book also has an appendix with extensive listings of extant and disappeared burial grounds, and instructions on how to lay out a burial-ground as a garden. There are also many illustrations of churches and graveyards and contemporary photographs.

It all makes fascinating reading, and moreover her book is still in use by professional archaeologists in London. It is fascinating to compare Isabella’s descriptions of St Pancras after the arrival of the Midland railway, with the Museum of London Archaeology book on the St Pancras Burial Ground, published last year, following the redevelopments for St Pancras International station.

You will be hard put to find a copy of Isabella’s original book for sale, and if you do it will not be cheap, but thanks to print-on-demand technology you can easily obtain  a reprint from the British Library Historical collection.

It is well worth the read.

Genealogy, General Interest

History Blogs – time to go exploring

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With the publication of A Parcel of Ribbons finally completed, I am looking forward to having time to read some of the many history blogs out on the web.

I was delighted to be approached by Julie Goucher of the Anglers Rest blog to do an interview about the book. That and a very kind nomination by the Rebel Hand blog for an Illuminating Blogger award made me realise how much I have been missing by not having time to read many of these wonderful sites.

You may have noticed that I have a link on the left hand side of this page to the Geneabloggers website which is an amazing compendium of hints and tips together with Blog resources and a genealogy blog listing. They list over 2,500 blogs and family history websites and also provide a listing by type which makes it easy to find, say, blogs relating to a particular American state or a subject such as graveyards. Well worth exploring.

One of my favourites (strictly a website rather than a blog) is the Chirurgeon’s Apprentice which is devoted to pre-anaesthetic surgery and medicine, such as was available in eighteenth century Jamaica. You do need a strong stomach for some of the details!

A blog that provided me with inspiration and information early in my researches in relation to Georgian London is by Lucy Inglis who is also blogger in residence for the Museum of London.

From time to time I intend to include a post listing other blogs I have found useful or entertaining. Do let me know of your favourites.

And finally a reminder link for the book, available at the special discount price of £13.49 (plus postage).

Support independent publishing: Buy this book on Lulu.

Perfect bound paperback 6″ x 9″ – 374 pages with illustrations.

ISBN: 9781105809743

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

A Parcel of Ribbons – The Book – Now available

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Support independent publishing

Available in perfect bound paperback 6″ x 9″ – 374 pages with illustrations.

ISBN: 9781105809743

Also available via Amazon

When I set up this website it was with the aim of sharing material I had come across during research into my family history. In particular I was looking for the origin of the story that in my mother’s family there had been an ‘Indian Princess’.

It may seem a long way from an Indian Princess to Jamaica but the trail that led me there was illuminated by the discovery of a wonderful collection of family letters.

I can now share these and the story of the remarkable Lee family with you. I do hope you enjoy their story as much as I have enjoyed writing about it.

Biographies, Genealogy, General Interest, Jamaican Life

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

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 Image:Wikimedia Commons

It is entirely down to my own ignorance that until I began researching Jamaica in the eighteenth century I had no idea that the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning had any connection with the island. My image of her and her family was conditioned by the 1934 Film The Barretts of Wimpole Street, starring Charles Laughton as the domineering father who forced her to remain indoors and threatened to kill her dog Flush when he heard she had eloped. The truth, of course was rather different and has been much discussed since.

The Barrett family wealth derived from their Jamaican estates. The first Barrett in Jamaica was Hercie Barrett who arrived with the 1655 expedition of conquest, and at first he may have lived in Spanish Town. The first patent to a Barrett was granted in 1663 for footland in St Catherine, a house and yard in St Jago de la Vega (though it is not certain if this was Hercie Barrett). Five patents were granted to Hercie Barrett between 1665 and 1670. His eldest son’s descendants seem to have adopted the spelling Barritt, and the line that would lead to Elizabeth Barrett Browning derived from Hercie’s youngest son Samuel. Samuel’s son, another Samuel, had fifteen children and his third son Edward born in 1734 married Judith Goodin. They were the great-grandparents of Elizabeth.

Samuel’s daughter Elizabeth married Charles Moulton, a merchant from Madeira, and their son Edward later changed his name so he became Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett. His daughter Elizabeth Barrett Moulton-Barrett was born in 1806 at Coxhoe Hall in Durham, since by then her family had become largely absentee landlords of  the more than 2600 acres of Jamaican plantations developed by Samuel Barrett. Prominent among these was Cinnamon Hill where the great house was protected against hurricanes by a ‘cutwind’ buttress. Edward Barrett also built a substantial town house in Falmouth, sadly now derelict with its upper storeys gone.

On Edward Barrett’s death in 1798, Charles Moulton’s brother Robert wrote ‘It has pleased Providence to deprive us of our Friend Edwd. Barrett…The bulk of his immense fortune has devolved on my Brothers two Boys.’  The signing of this Will just three days before Edward’s death channeled the fortune in a quite different direction from what would have happened if he had made no Will. The ramifications of the Barrett family in Jamaica and the management of the plantations by relations and attorneys led to endless disputes down through the nineteenth century.

At the turn of the nineteenth century the estates were at their most profitable and between 1799 and 1804 the Cinnamon Hill, Cornwall, Cambridge and Oxford estates shipped 5255 hogsheads and 1038 tierces of sugar and 2037 puncheons of rum. (A hogshead was about 16 hundredweight of muscovado, a tierce one-third of that, and a barrel of rum would have contained about 110 gallons). If we contrast this wealth with the mere £300 a year that Robert Browning’s father earned we can understand why Elizabeth’s father might have seen him as a fortune hunter! Indeed Elizabeth had some independent fortune of her own as she had been left shares in the ship the David Lyon by her uncle Samuel Moulton Barrett, and this meant she need not be dependent on her father.

Elizabeth’s mother Mary died in 1828, leaving her rigid and uncommunicative father with eleven children to bring up (a twelfth child, Mary, had died young). In due course he sent his fifth child, Samuel, to Jamaica where in February 1840 he died of yellow fever. Hardly had the news arrived in England than Elizabeth’s brother Edward, only a year younger than she was, drowned that July while out sailing in Babbacombe Bay in Devon.

This series of disasters, combined with ill health and her father’s obsessive behaviour sent Elizabeth into the deep depression from which she was eventually aroused by meeting and falling in love with Robert Browning.

After the death of Edward Moulton Barrett in 1857 five of his eleven surviving children were left £10,950 each – Arabel, George, Henry, Septimus and Octavius. Charles John inherited the Jamaican estates. Among themselves they agreed that Alfred, Henrietta and Elizabeth who had all been disinherited when they married should each receive about £5000.

Charles John and Septimus both made their homes in Jamaica, Charles was buried at Retreat Pen in 1905 aged ninety-one. Septimus (Sette) died in 1870 at Cinnamon Hill. After Sette’s death Charles John began the gradual sale of  Barrett lands to pay off the huge debts incurred by Septimus, amounting according to his daughter to £30,000.

Although the huge wealth of the Barrett family was not to last, the descendants of Hercie Barrett had left an indelible mark on the landscape and history of Jamaica.

 

 

 

 

 

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!