Category Archives: General Interest

Biographies, Genealogy, General Interest, Jamaican Life

Never Give Up – seeking John Augier

A three masted barque and a small pink – Atlantic pinks were much larger

By way of an occasional post, this is an illustration of why you should never give up on a brick wall.

Many years ago I discovered the wonderful Augier sisters, their name recorded sometimes as Hosier, and the name of the father who freed them in his Will was John Augier.

He was that mystery person, the one you can never get beyond, whose origins remain mysterious. But he is also an example of why it is always worth re-visiting those brick walls.

Recently I have been concentrating on local history in England. But this week I was contacted by an Augier descendant which sent me back to look at my previous research.

New material is added to online resources all the time and with help from a relatively recent family tree on Ancestry, and a new search for John Augier in other sources, I think I can update what I know about him through a story of piracy in 1671 and naturalisation in 1693.

In May 1672 Peter Brent, Serjeant Plumber to his Majesty, and John Augier, part owners of the pink Peter of London presented a petition for compensation following the seizing of their ship whose other owner was Charles Cogan1. A ‘pink’ was a small ship with a narrow stern, derived from the Dutch word pincke meaning pinched. They had a large cargo capacity, were generally square rigged and the larger type were used in the Atlantic trade.

On board the ship, sailing from Jamaica to New York in August 1671 were the master Thomas Wayt (or Weight); John Patten a merchant, who lost in money, goods, and plate to the value of £300; Simon Reynolds and Nathaniel Radcliffe, gentlemen; merchants Richard Cook, John Pate, Robert Wendall, John White and Richard Elliot who claimed £1,435 between them. Thomas Wayte claimed £40 and Charles Cogan £1,000. All these made their claim in Jamaica in January 1672 and in May Peter Brent and John Augier claimed a further £1,000. The claims were recorded in the Calendar of State Papers, Colonial, America and West Indies which can be viewed in British History Online.

Those on board the ship, which was seized by a Captain Candelero of the St. Francisco, were taken with the ship to Campeachy (now Campeche) in Mexico. They were stripped of their clothes and possessions, had their trunks ransacked and their papers taken in spite of telling Candelero that a peace treaty was now in effect. The ship was stripped of sails and rigging before the crew and passengers were eventually released. Presumably Candelero had no use for the ship itself or not enough men to crew it.

Now here’s a small puzzle.

If John Augier part owned a ship trading between Jamaica and New York in 1671 he must have been at least in his early twenties. If he fathered daughters in the first two decades of the eighteenth century he was by then quite an old man for the times. So could the man who freed his enslaved children have been the son of the part owner of the Peter? I have found no baptism record to confirm this, but Kingston parish records do not exist before 1721.

On 05 September 1693 John Augier and his business partner Peter Caillard (who later had children with John’s daughter Susanna) both obtained naturalisation in Jamaica.2 Earlier, on 15 April 1687, a Peter Caillard was one of hundreds of Huguenot refugees naturalised by the Crown.3

My first reaction was that this must mean that John Augier was probably a French Huguenot, and correspondence in French to Caillard and Augier from the Huguenot Crommelin family, who were using them to forward correspondence to Daniel Crommelin, might support this.4 At the time of this correspondence Caillard and Augier were based in Kingston.

The John Augier who obtained naturalisation in 1693 may have intended to patent land in Jamaica which he could not do if he was not British. Perhaps having started out trading in enslaved Africans and goods exported from Jamaica to America and England, he also wanted to settle permanently in Jamaica and profit from ownership of a plantation.

Alternatively it is possible that rather than being French John Augier was the son of a British citizen, but had been born abroad and was thus regarded legally as an alien who would have to become naturalised in order to own land in Jamaica. This situation changed in 1700 after which the children of British citizens born abroad were regarded as British.

More detail might be added to the story of John Augier by examining Jamaican land patents with which the naturalisations were recorded. These have been microfilmed but are not online.

Because Augier is a relatively uncommon name I think it is reasonable to conclude that the man who was part owner of the ship Peter sailing from Jamaica in 1671 was either the father or the grandfather of Susanna Augier and her sisters. Also that he was in partnership in Kingston, trading in enslaved Africans and Jamaican produce, with Peter Caillard the father of some of his many grandchildren, and that he owned property in the parish of St Andrew where his daughters Jane and Sarah were baptised (albeit the transcriptions have different spellings of the surname).5

  1. ‘America and West Indies: May 1672’, in Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies: Volume 7, 1669-1674, ed. W Noel Sainsbury (London, 1889), pp. 354-364. British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/cal-state-papers/colonial/america-west-indies/vol7/pp 354-364 [accessed 1 September 2024]. ↩︎
  2. Bockstruck, LLoyd DeWitt. 2005. Denizations and Naturalizations in the British Colonies in America, 1607-1775. Baltimore, USA. Genealogical Publishing Company. p.9. https://www.ancestry.co.uk : accessed 05 September 2024. ↩︎
  3. Agnew, C.A.1871. Protestant Exiles from France in the Reign of Louis XIV. London: Reeves and Turner, p.45. ↩︎
  4. https://www.crommelin.org/history/Biographies/Frederic/Year1694-3.htm ↩︎
  5. Baptisms (PR) Jamaica, St Andrew. 04 April 1710. AUGINE, Jane. Jamaica, Church of England Parish Register transcripts (Image 36). https://familysearch.org : accessed 05 September 2024.
    Baptisms (PR) Jamaica, St Andrew.13 November 1712. AUGIRE, Sarah. Jamaica, Church of England Parish Register transcripts (Image 37). https://familysearch.org : accessed 05 September 2024. ↩︎
Biographies, Genealogy, General Interest, London Life

The extraordinary Female Infidel

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

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

Biographies, Genealogy, General Interest

Hidden black identities

Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Biographies, General Interest, London Life

The Female Infidel

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

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

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

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

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

Available in perfect bound paperback A5 384 pages with illustrations.

ISBN: 9780244724160

from Amazon in paperback and for Kindle.

General Interest

Data privacy and GDPR

You may be aware that data privacy has been much in the news lately. Not only in relation to the mis-use of data gathered via Facebook, but also because on 25 May 2018 new General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR for short) come into force across Europe and by extension across the world. You can read more about GDPR here.

If you subscribe to this website to receive notifications of new postings I receive your email address together with the IP address from which you subscribed and the date you confirmed your subscription. This information is used only to notify you of updates to the website.

You can choose to unsubscribe at any time after which your details will be deleted. The options are to the right of this post.

If you choose to post a comment on the website I will receive your name and IP address, and if you post a link to a personal website that will be publicly accessible together with your name.

This website and all details are stored on a secure server. I never sell your details nor share them with anyone without your explicit permission.

Thank you for your continuing interest in A Parcel of Ribbons.

Anne M Powers

30 April 2018

Biographies, General Interest, Jamaican Life

The Iniquities of Apprenticeship

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Biographies, Genealogy, General Interest

Robert Cooper Lee – The Lost Miniature

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Genealogy, General Interest

Family Trees undergoing revision

Some readers will be aware that I am currently studying for a post graduate Diploma in Genealogical, Palaeographic and Heraldic Studies with the University of Strathclyde. I am hugely enjoying the course, but one of the things I have learned is the inadequacy of the way in which, in the past, I have recorded the sources of the information for the family trees I have posted on this website.

Pending being able to revise them and bring them up to an acceptable standard I have removed the links from here. Meanwhile if anyone has a specific query relating to any of the following families please feel free to get in touch and I will do my best to provide an answer.

Allen
Blankett
Dehany
Halhed
Herring
Kelly
Lee
Long
Rose
Ross
Scott
Serocold
Welch
Winde
Wynter

 

Anne M Powers
29 March 2017
General Interest

Crowdfunding before the internet

A Victorian Workhouse (http://www.open.edu/)

We think of crowdfunding as a modern phenomenon. When a family loses everything due to a fire in their home just before Christmas, thousands of people respond to an appeal by their friends on the internet, donating toys, clothes and money. One family were so overwhelmed by the response that they were able to donate a huge number of duplicate toys, wrongly sized clothes and excess food to local charities.

For the eighteenth or nineteenth century family suffering such a disaster the prospects were potentially disastrous. Death of a breadwinner meant that the workhouse loomed.

While researching something else a few days ago in the wonderful British Newspaper Archive, I came across a sad tale, made bearable by the generosity of friends. The Public Ledger and Daily Advertiser for Monday 22 March 1819 carried an advertisement inserted by the friends of a ‘Widow and Ten Children’. Her husband had been a Captain in the West India Service, and formerly a Master in the Royal Navy. Once the Napoleonic Wars ended of course there was no further need for the large numbers of soldiers and sailors who had fought, and many became destitute. A former Naval Captain would probably have been pensioned on half pay, but as the article does not name him we cannot know if this was the case.

Wanting to provide for his family this former Navy man set himself up to trade, but he suffered ‘severe losses at sea’, trade was generally depressed and he became bankrupt.

He had many good friends however, and they set him up with a new ship and he began once again trading with the West Indies, hoping to repay the debts and to be able to support his wife and ten children. One of the children, a boy of six, was described in the newspaper as being ‘an idiot’, the general description at the time for any form of mental handicap. This child was said to be ‘quite incapable of taking the least care of himself’.

Then disaster struck again. The captain fell ‘victim to the fever at Jamaica’ and died. Those familiar with the dangers of yellow fever, malaria, smallpox, dysentery and the like at the time will know it is a sadly familiar story.

Step up Messers Godfree, Greensill, Harmer, Salter, Wilson and Wallis, all at various London addresses, who were advertised as being willing to authenticate the story and receive subscriptions on behalf of the poor widow and her children.

Calling for subscriptions in this way had been facilitated by the rise of a mass market press. Indeed the terrible hurricanes of the 1780s that destroyed plantations and caused huge loss of life in Jamaica, and the reaction to them back in England, had spawned what was probably the first ever mass campaign for donations in the face of a natural disaster.

Let us hope that the readers of the Public Ledger and Daily Advertiser were as generous as those who had responded to the hurricanes and the people who now respond to appeals on social media to help those who have suffered loss and disaster. Sadly, since the widow is not named we will never know what happened to her and her many children, but I think there is a very good chance that she and they were able to avoid Christmas Day in the workhouse.

Biographies, Genealogy, General Interest

Invisible Black British History

1820-death-of-betty-harrison

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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