Tag Archives: Jamaica

Biographies, Genealogy, General Interest, Jamaican Life

The Story of a Mourning Brooch

Comment

 

One of the delights of running a website like this is when a reader gets in touch to provide further information relating to something they have read here.

When I wrote about Marchant Tubb and his wife Ann in one of my earliest pieces I was not then certain who his wife was. I did know that she had previously been married to Stephen Morant and had a daughter called Mary Powell Morant.

The reader who contacted me collects mourning brooches such as this lovely Georgian example made for Mary Powell Royall to commemorate her mother, and where possible researches the person commemorated. By a piece of clever detective work, decoding the coat of arms on the tomb that Marchant Tubb had erected for his wife, my informant was able to show that Stephen Morant’s wife Ann was called Ann Anderson and that they were married in Jamaica on the 4th of June 1737.

Ann Morant gave birth to two children, Stephen and Mary Powell Morant, before her husband died on 30 October 1742. Mary Powell Morant was baptised when she was eight months old, her baptism being recorded in the register for St Thomas in the East “Christen’d at Wheelersfield in Plantain Garden River a female child of Stephen Morant and Ann his wife aged 8 months 2 days and named Mary Powell whose Godfathers are Messrs Thomas Wheeler and Richard Swarton ye first of ’em being represented by Mr Gibbons Hodgins and Godmothers Mrs Mary Crames and Mrs Elizabeth Swarton, ye first of ’em being represented by Mrs Mary Cussans the father and mother being present.”

On the 14th of February 1745 Ann Morant remarried to Samuel Wheeler who in turn died about 1755. Some time after this she married her third husband, the surgeon Marchant Tubb, but sadly neither I nor my informant have been able to track down a record of this marriage which I am sure took place in Jamaica. By 1768 Marchant and Ann Tubb were in England together with their daughter Mary Powell Morant.

Mary Powell Morant was a considerable heiress and when after her mother’s death she decided to marry Joseph Royall in 1782, her stepfather took great care to ensure that the marriage settlement protected her rights, for as a femme couverte she might have lost control of it all to her husband. It provided further considerable work for the lawyers when, within a very short space of time, she left her husband and returned to live with Marchant Tubb. Temperamentally it seems the couple were completely unsuited, at least according to Mary ‘s very close friend Frances Lee who wrote to her brother “And what do you think is come to pass? Mr and Mrs Royall are separated by mutual Consent. They each complain of the violence of the others Disposition. Mrs R. is returned to her father whom she no longer calls Tubby. The marriage was concluded in such haste that I am not the least surprised at the separation – I pity neither.”

When Marchant Tubb died Mary inherited the share of the Wheelersfield estate that had come to him via his marriage, and on her death in 1816 she in turn left it to Frances Lee. There is no specific mention in Mary’s will of items of jewellery or the mourning brooch, although she did leave all her clothes to Elizabeth Pack (formerly Elizabeth Harrison) the black servant who had come to England with the Lee family in 1771.

There is one further little mystery that my informant found as a result of the researches into the mourning brooch. On 22 June 1739 a child called James Morant was baptised at Wheelersfield in St Thomas in the East said to be aged one year ten months and eight days old, the son of Stephen Morant and Ann Gowing. Stephen Morant was present at the baptism but Ann Gowing was not, and his godmother was Mrs Ann Morant. The infant James Morant appears to have been born about two and a half months after the marriage of his father to Ann Anderson.

Exactly one month later the adjacent record in the parish register shows the marriage of Ann Gowing to James Frazier a bricklayer. The marriage was by special licence rather than by banns which means that someone was able to put up the money for the licence and it took place in the house of Mr Roger Wood with Mr Richard Jephcott a millwright standing in place of the bride’s father.

Illegitimate children were of course very common in Jamaica, and in this case it would appear that Stephen Morant’s new wife was entirely happy to stand godmother for his illegitimate child, and that provision was being made for his mother. There is no mention in the parish register (which does generally record colour) of Ann Gowing’s colour or status, and therefore it seems possible that she was a poor white girl, perhaps a servant, rather than a slave or “housekeeper” to Stephen Morant.

Whatever the actions of Mary Powell Morant’s father, the brooch she had made to commemorate her mother and the tomb created by her stepfather for his wife are tributes to someone who was clearly very much loved during her lifetime.

Biographies, Jamaican Life, London Life

Mixed Race Jamaicans in England

2 Comments

The status of  mixed race Jamaicans in eighteenth century Jamaica was always going to be less than than of white colonists, but it was possible for them to become established and successful in England. A case in point are two of the children of Scudamore Winde.

Ambrose Scudamore Winde (he seems to have dropped the Ambrose early on) was born about 1732 at Kentchurch in Herefordshire, son of John Winde and Mary Scudamore.  The beautiful Kentchurch Court is still in the hands of the Scudamore family as it has been for the last thousand years or so. In 1759, following the suicide of his father, he and his brother Robert went to Jamaica where Scudamore Winde became an extremely successful merchant.  He was also Assistant Judge of the Supreme Court of the Judicature and a member of the Assembly.

Like many white colonists of the island he had relationships with several women but did not marry.  When he died in late September 1775 he left generous legacies to his various children. His business had prospered and a large part of his assets were in the form of debts owed to him. According to Trevor Burnard[1] he had  personal assets of £94,273, of which £82,233 were in the form of debts. This would be equivalent to about £9.3 million relative to current retail prices or £135 million in relation to average wages today.

Scudamore Winde freed his negro slave Patty who was baptised as Patty Winde in 1778 at Kingston when her age was given as about 50.  Patty and her daughter Mary were left land that he had bought from Richard Ormonde in Saint Catherine’s with the buildings on it, and £100 Jamaican currency together with two slaves called Suki and little Polly.  It is not clear whether Mary was Scudamore Winde’s daughter for although her name is given as Mary Winde she is referred to as a negro rather than mulatto.

Scudamore Winde had a mulatto son called Robert, possibly the son of Patty, who was born about 1759, and three children with Sarah Cox herself a free negro or mulatto (records vary).  Her children were Penelope, John and Thomas born between 1768 and 1774.  John may have died young and Thomas elected to remain in Jamaica where he had a successful career as a merchant in Kingston.  Robert and Penelope travelled to England under the eye of Robert Cooper Lee who was trustee and executor of his close friend Scudamore Winde’s Will.

Robert went into business in London as a merchant, listed in various directories from 1784 and for some of the time in partnership.  The firm of Koithan & Winde traded out of 20 St Martin’s Lane London in the 1780s, and there are records of Robert Winde ‘gentleman’ at 48 Jermyn Street in the 1790s when his wife Jane is listed as a haberdasher taking out fire insurance with the Sun Insurance company.

Robert married Jane Bateman at Holy Trinity Clapham in 1781 and they had at least six children. Four were living in 1794 when Robert Cooper Lee left legacies to ‘the two sons and two daughters of Robert Winde’, but only Jane Anne seems to have lived to adulthood.  She married late in life to a widowed solicitor called Henry Pinniger of Westbury in Wiltshire, who had seven children by his first wife.  The implication is that Jane Anne Winde had inherited sufficient income of her own to live comfortably as a spinster until then.

Robert Winde’s partner Frederick Koithan was born at Bremen in Germany and applied for naturalisation in England in 1791 by Private Act of Parliament.  He died in 1809 but the partnership seems to have ended before this with Robert Winde then trading on his own.  I have not found a burial for Robert Winde, but his wife Jane was recorded as living in Downing Street Westminster at her death in 1822.

Robert’s half sister Penelope married a young lawyer called David Steel on 1 May 1786 at St Martin Orgar and St Clement Eastcheap.  Robert Cooper Lee was a witness at the wedding.  Penelope was a considerable heiress. She had been left  £2000 in the first part of her father’s Will with a further £2000 on the death of her brother John plus another £1500 in a codicil.

This is particularly interesting since under the 1761 Act of the Assembly illegitimate mixed race Jamaicans were debarred from inheriting more than £2000 and I have not found any private Act permitting the Winde children to have more. I can only guess that since Robert Cooper Lee was administering the trust from England he had liquidated the Jamaican assets so the trust fund was based in England and therefore exempt.

Although David Steel began married life as a barrister, on the death of his father he took over his business as a nautical publisher and bookseller.  When he died in 1803, aged only 39, the Gentleman’s Magazine recorded

David Steel Esq. of Little Tower Hill. He was universally respected by those who had the pleasure of his acquaintance, and has left a widow and a large family to lament the irreparable loss of an affectionate husband and fond father in the prime of life. Mr. S. was orginally employed in the Navy Office, but quitted his situation to the study of law and practiced for several years with the profession of a barrister; he quitted the profession on his father’s death and succeeded him in his business as a book, map and chart seller. The literary world are under great obligation to him for the active part which he took as one of the committee for obtaining the repeal of the duty on paper[2].

 

He had been publisher of the Navy List and of “The Elements and Practice of Rigging and Seamanship and Naval Tactics” which is still available as a digital reprint.

Penelope found herself a widow with five small children and remarried to William Mason in 1806.  It seems likely that her eldest son David Lee Steel did not get on with his stepfather, and when he died at the age of 31 of “a rapid decline “(probably tuberculosis) his obituary in the Gentleman’s Magazine hinted at a family row over his inheritance.

 Gentleman’s Magazine  Vol.88 Part 1 Jan-June 1818, p.572

 

His younger brother Scudamore Winde Steel was made of sterner stuff and had a long and distinguished career in the Indian Army ending up as a Lieutenant General and with a knighthood. Their sister Penelope Sarah became a schoolmistress at the National School, Batson Street, Limehouse and lived to the age of 84.

Lt.-Gen. Sir Scudamore Winde Steel

Anne Steel followed in her father’s footsteps marrying twice into the printing and publishing trade. Some of her descendants live today in the USA but her nephews and nieces had all died without children by the early twentieth century.

Her nephew Charles, son of Sir Scudamore Winde Steel, married the sister of Kitty O’Shea – but that as they say is another story.

 

 


[1] Kingston Merchants and the Atlantic Slave Trade in the Eighteenth Century, Trevor Burnard, BGEAH, Stirling, 3 September 2009

[2]    Gentleman’s magazine Vol. 73 (1803), p 93.

 

Biographies, Genealogy

Wills, silver candlesticks, and green handled knives

4 Comments

Samuel Alpress c. 1780

 

The most disappointing Wills from every point of view are those where a man leaves everything to his ‘beloved wife’ (un-named) and says nothing else, apart perhaps from commending his soul to God and requesting payment of all his just debts – not the unjust ones of course! Admirable as it is that he provides amply for his widow, he leaves little to the family historian.

The best Wills for a genealogist are those that mention lots of friends and relations by name, perhaps even including their home town or street. If they also include details of the relationship so much the better, although you do have to remember that ‘my sister’ might be ‘my sister-in-law’, my niece could be a great niece and ‘my kinsman’ may give you weeks of work trying to work out just how they were related.

By far the greatest quantity of seventeenth and eighteenth century Wills relating to Jamaica were written by men, but there are Wills for those women who outlived their husbands and had property in their own right. In some cases such as thrice-married Mary Rose who I wrote about a while ago, although the main part of her husbands’ estates went to her sons she still had property of her own.

In the case of Margaret Eleanor Alpress, whose Will I recently transcribed, she had outlived her husband by many years and was wealthy in her own right.

Margaret Eleanor Alpress ‘of the City of Bath in the County of Somerset Widow but now in London’, was born Margaret Aikenhead in Jamaica in the early 1740s and married Samuel Alpress in the parish of St Andrew on the 27th January 1761.  He died in 1784 leaving his widow and three surviving daughters.

Samuel’s father George Alpress had owned 125 acres in Clarendon and 51 acres in Vere in 1754 and used his wealth to send Samuel to be educated in England where it has to be said he did not shine! During his time at Jesus College, Cambridge Samuel  was said to have started a riot in Ely and in a letter to Stephen Fuller in 1757 (the Fuller family were in loco parentis on George’s behalf) William Hawes wrote that ‘The conduct of Mr Allpress does not warrant his remaining at college’. He also appears to have run up considerable debts.

Samuel returned to Jamaica where his father died sometime before 1766. His mother Jane remarried on the 25th of June 1766 to Dr Cholmondeley Dering of South Carolina but was drowned at Dry River four days after her wedding while returning  from Spanish Town to Withywood. Samuel inherited £4000 Jamaican currency and the plantations.

Samuel and Margaret had at least three daughters born in Jamaica of whom only Elizabeth survived. Two more daughters followed – Milborough, who may have been born in Jamaica, and Jane Eleanor born in London in 1771. It was to these daughters that Margaret left her most personal possessions.

Elizabeth who had married Kean Osborn at Spanish Town in 1780 was left a silver christening bowl; and Milborough, married to Richard Crewe of Crewe Hall in Cheshire, was left a silver epergne. It was the youngest daughter Jane Eleanor who received the bulk of her mother’s personal possessions. Whether this disparity reflected earlier gifts to the older daughters, their husbands’ relative wealth or favouritism to the youngest is unclear. Kean Osborn and his heirs are shown as owners of the Caswell Hill property mentioned in the Will in various early nineteenth century listings, by which time they were absentee landlords, its size given as over 2000 acres in 1845. Jane’s husband Richard Bulkeley was the sole executor. It is possible both other sons-in-law were out of the country, Kean Osborn in Jamaica and Major General Richard Crewe serving with the army.

Jane received ‘three Mahogany Cases with Silver Locks and Handles, the two larger Cases containing two Dozen Green handled Knives and Forks ferrelled with Silver and one Dozen of Table Spoons, and a Marrow spoon in each Case and the smaller Case containing one Dozen of Green handled knives and forks ferrelled with silver and one dozen of Desert Spoons, and also a Silver Cruet stand both Compleat, two pair of high Silver Candlesticks, one flat silver candlestick, one large silver Tankard and Cover, two Silver Cups and Covers ,one large round Silver waiter, one ditto next size two hand round Silver waiters, one Silver Tea urn, one Tortoises Shell Tea Chest with silver Canisters Compleat, fifteen Silver Tea spoons and a pair of silver Tea Tongs’.

Margaret’s sister Elizabeth Townsend received a large square silver tea board, her sister Milborough McLean a large silver saucepan and cover, niece Elizabeth Trelawny Townsend a silver teapot, and a friend called Mary Stern a small silver saucepan for cream.

There were jewels also, with daughter Elizabeth receiving ‘my Diamond Necklace and Ear Rings, one large Diamond Pin, and her Father’s Picture set round with Diamonds’, while Jane was left ‘my two next sized Diamond Pins and six smaller ones, my Diamond Pin with her Father’s Hair and a smaller Diamond Pin with Hair in it and my Rose Diamond Ring’.

There was a hoop diamond ring for god daughter Elizabeth Raine(?) Wilhelmina Pringle and money gifts to grandchildren including grandson Kean Osborn, who sadly would die at Salamanca during the Peninsular War.

The item that most intrigued me was the green handled knives and forks with their silver ferrells. A little research showed that such handles were often made of ivory stained green. If anyone can tell me how this was done I’d love to know.


 

Biographies, General Interest

Robert Kelly – Master at Arms

2 Comments

The taking of the Princessa a Spanish Man of War, April 8, 1740, by his Majesties Ships the Lenox, Kent and Oxford

By Peter Monamy (Collections of the National Maritime Museum) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

 

In 1758 Robert Kelly, a Jamaican in the Royal Navy, endured an adventure that included capture by the French, imprisonment, escape and resulted in him fetching up in London penniless and alone.

Robert was the son of Ann Rose, sister of Mary Johnston Rose, mentioned here before. His uncle was Denis Kelly of Jamaica and Lisduff in Ireland, and his father was therefore one of Denis Kelly’s brothers – Edmund, Darcy, Charles or John, all of whom lived in Jamaica between about 1710 and 1740. Sadly gaps in the parish registers mean it has not been possible to establish which one was the father of Robert nor exactly when he was born, although it is likely this was in the 1730s making John Kelly the most likely candidate for his father since the other three all died between 1728 and 1731.

By 1757 Robert was a Master at Arms on board the Oxford, a man of war in the Royal Navy when the ship was paid off at Plymouth. He was promised a place on another ship, but having heard nothing decided to make his way to London on board a merchant ship in order to contact the Admiralty directly. The condition of the roads was generally so bad that travel by sea would normally have been the quicker route.

Somewhere in the English Channel the ship was captured by a French privateer and all on board were taken to Bayonne in France where Robert was imprisoned. The ship in question may have been either The Africa or The Venice, both of which were reported in the Leeds Intelligencer of Tuesday 15th March 1757 as having been captured by Bayonne privateers.

Another report refers to Bayonne as harbouring over thirty such privateering vessels. These were privately owned vessels licenced by Letters of Marque to prey upon ships of an opposing country, and whose master and crew hoped to make their fortune taking rich prizes. As such they aimed to capture a ship rather than engage with it or sink it. Sale of the captured goods and ransom of any important prisoners added to their income.

Robert was not wealthy, nor was there anyone who would have paid a ransom for him but by a stroke of luck after eight months in prison he was able to escape and made his way across the border to Spain, having by now lost everything he had. Somehow he found himself a ship, probably working his passage, and eventually arrived back in London expecting to be able to make contact with his uncle Denis Kelly. Disaster struck again, for he discovered that his uncle had died in an accident in Ireland the previous December when an eagle had attacked the horse of the chaise he was travelling in causing it to be overturned.

Robert now found himself at the Ship Ale House in Buckingham Court, Charing Cross, with the promise of a ship from Admiral Forbes and a lodging bill he could not pay. Unless he could discharge the debt he would be prevented from taking up the warrant from Admiral Forbes and would be destitute and deprived of all means of earning a living.

We know all this because Robert then wrote to the only person he could think of who might be able to help – Rose Fuller for whom his aunt Mary Johnston Rose had been housekeeper for many years, and who he had last seen sixteen years previously.

There is no account of what happened next, but I am inclined to think that Rose Fuller did come to the rescue – for one thing the letter from Robert Kelly is among his personal papers (East Sussex Record Office ref: ESRO SAS-RF/19/167). Also there are Admiralty records for a Robert Kelly who was a gunner in the navy between 1779 and 1783, although that may of course be another Robert Kelly.

It was a great pity that Denis Kelly, erstwhile Chief Justice of Jamaica, did not live to learn of his nephew Robert’s resourcefulness which was in stark contrast to the behaviour of his brother Edmund’s legitimate son Henry Kelly (who died in January 1745 aged nineteen). Henry was packed off back to Jamaica by Thomas Beckford in December 1740, his behaviour in England having been thoroughly reprehensible.

Having put him on board the Ashted, Beckford wrote to Denis Kelly, who was then still in Jamaica:

I am very much concerned that he should have made no better use of the Education You have been at the expense of for him, and wish you may be able to turn his mind to better Principles; No advice would do him any service here, and had he stayed, I should have expected to have found him in some Gaol, for some Crime or other.  Mr Corkran, who I understood had married a Gentlewoman who was his Relation, was so good to invite him to his house, a little way from the Town, on purpose to divert him, and keep him from Ill Company, as well as to give him good advice, but he gave him the Slip, and Carried away two books which he sold.

(National Library of Ireland, Westport Papers, MS 40,910/5(5) ).

Henry Kellys’ behaviour was relatively extreme, but the lot of small children of the colonists was not always a happy one. Sent to England for the sake of their health and to obtain an education, they often lacked both love and supervision, boys in particular were often subjected to regular beatings at school. It is probably not surprising that some of them went wild.

I’d love to know what happened to Robert Kelly in the end, but as with so many of those we encounter in old letters and documents, we glimpse a moment in their lives and then they fade from view.

Genealogy, General Interest

My Ancestor Settled in the British West Indies – Book Review

Comment

 

If you are looking for a Christmas present for someone researching their family in the West Indies, this new publication from the Society of Genealogists may be just what you are looking for.

The book covers Anguilla, Antigua, Bahamas, Barbados, Bermuda, British Guiana (Guyana), British Honduras (Belize), The British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Dominica, Grenada, Jamaica, Montserrat, Nevis, St Kitts, St Lucia, St Vincent, Tobago, Trinidad and the Turks and Caicos Islands. (Bermuda is included, although not in the Caribbean, because administratively it was considered by the Colonial Office in London to be part of the West Indies.)

The author, in his introduction says “To write about genealogical research in the West Indies is to aim at a moving target; archive holdings may be augmented or reduced, be catalogued or left in a chaotic mess; the repositories where records are held may change, as may their addresses; websites come and go, urls are often altered or lost without trace, and new sites are appearing almost daily”. It is to provide some guidance among this confusion that the book has been written.

The book opens with a general survey of genealogical sources, including manuscript, printed and internet resources. A chapter on the historical background is followed by separate chapters for each individual territory. These are treated systematically under the headings of Location, History, Economy, People, Records held in the UK and Records held locally, Secondary Sources, Further Reading, Maps and Websites.

Whether you are just starting out on the search for a West Indies connection, or have been researching for some time there will be something for you in this book.

Available in paperback from the Society of Genealogists in London. There is a glitch on their website preventing some people from ordering online, but my telephoned order was with me the following day, and you can order by email.

 

My Ancestor Settled in the British West Indies (with Bermuda, British Guiana and British Honduras), John Tilford, Society of Genealogists Enterprises Ltd, London 2011. ISBN:978-1-907199-08-0.

Paperback. Price £9.99, reduced to £8.99 for members.

 

General Interest

Newspaper Libraries on-line

1 Comment

This is just a brief posting to alert those who have not yet discovered them to two on-line sources for old newspapers.

You can find the Jamaica Gleaner archives dating back to 1843 here.

The latest addition to the world of digital newspapers is the British Newspaper Archive which came on-line this week.

Both are subscription services – the Jamaica Gleaner offers a one day pass for $7.95 with reductions on quarterly and annual membership. Searching without having taken out a subscription displays the number of potential hits for your target but no detail.

The British Newspaper Archive operates a points system, searching is free and displays a brief few lines of context (often with optical character recognition problems which don’t affect the article when displayed). The charge to access the articles is points based, a two day 500 credits account costs £6.95 with subsequent reductions for a thirty day or annual subscription.

Unless you are going to need regular access, I’d suggest dipping your toe in with a basic package. I was amazed at how much I found out in a couple of days, including extra information about the Landovery that I included in the article about Stephen Blankett, and the bankruptcy of an ancestor that I’d had no idea had happened.

The earliest British newspapers date from 1700 and there are mentions of Jamaica from very early on. The organisation of early papers is very different from now and you will find brief news items of all kinds mixed in with advertisements for patent medicines, war reports and local news. If you are searching for Jamaican shipping news you will find details of the departures and arrivals and of ships that have been lost or captured by an enemy or by privateers.

Both sites offer the option of obtaining print-outs. The Jamaica Gleaner offers a full-sized reproduction of any newspaper page in the archive, and the British Newspaper Archive offers A1 sized prints of scans of any page printed on quality paper.

Biographies, Jamaican Life

Stephen Blankett – A Captain on the Jamaica run

2 Comments

 

Ships in Kingston Harbour c.1745

I first came across Stephen Blankett when he was mentioned in the Lee letters as captain of the Landovery, the ship in which Robert Cooper Lee sailed to Jamaica.  I was curious to know what might be discovered about such a man and amazed to see how much I could find out armed with only the name of the ship and her captain’s surname.

Stephen Blankett must have been born about 1705, or perhaps a little earlier, for he married Elizabeth Born in 1726 at St Marylebone by Vicar General’s licence issued on the 15th of September.  He may have come from a family of Thames lightermen, the skilled sailors of small boats who plied their trade in London’s river ferrying goods to and from larger ships anchored there, and acting as a river taxi service for passengers wishing to avoid London’s crowded  streets, or to cross from one bank of the river to the other.

Stephen and Elizabeth settled in Maidenhead Court in Wapping where the first six of nine children were born between 1728 and 1738, and baptised at the church of St John at Wapping.  About 1740 they moved across the river to Rotherhithe where three more children were born and baptised at St Mary’s Rotherhithe.  Living so close to the river was obviously ideal for someone who earned his living from the sea.

The first official record I have come across for Stephen Blankett and his ship the Landovery is in 1740 when for several months they were held in port, fully loaded and ready to sail, but unable to do so because no convoy was available to protect them on the voyage to Jamaica.  On June 25, 1740 the Landovery was waiting at Deptford, and the Sheldon under Captain William Bird was moored nearby at Gallions Reach.  By the 4th of July it was reported that The Industry a stores ship, with William Clarke as Master, was at Blackwall and due to leave for Spithead and then Jamaica with a cargo similar to that of the Sheldon and Landovery.  Official papers recommended that she should sail with the same man of war as the other two ships.  On the 7th of  July Stephen Blankett arrived at Spithead and wrote to request orders to sail.

However the National Maritime Museum holds a letter written in early October from “the owners of the Sheldon, Landovery and Industry transports who have been ready to sail for 3 months. Captain Renton, who was due to convoy them, sailed in July. Commodore Anson sailed on the 18th Sept without them. They claim demurrage from that time and ask for a special convoy.”  In four months the ships had only travelled as far as Portsmouth.

Sailing in the Caribbean carried with it the risk of hurricanes and in 1749 several ships leaving Jamaica in early September suffered severe damage, the Landovery however, leaving on the 1st from Pig Bay had escaped.

Throughout the 18th century, apart from the hazards of the weather, ships regularly faced the danger of capture by privateers, or opposing navies.  This posed particular problems for the colonists in the Caribbean islands who were far from being self-sufficient, unlike those on the mainland of North America, and who were over dependent on imported supplies.

Jamaica had virtually no indigenous manufacturing and imported a huge range of necessities.  The cargo of a ship like the Landovery would have included items such as barrels of salt beef and pork; casks of butter from Ireland (its rancid flavour on arrival being something of an acquired taste!); beer and wine; oil for lamps; clothing and shoes; rolls of cloth; pots and pans; powder and shot; copper stills for rum making and sugar boiling equipment; iron collars and shackles for restraining slaves; agricultural tools for working the plantations; high quality ready-made carpentry such as window frames for planters’ mansions; and luxury items such as tea, furniture, silverware, oriental silks and porcelain.

And of course there were passengers such as the young Robert Cooper Lee.  We sometimes underestimate the extent to which people travelled to and fro across the Atlantic during the 18th-century, and it was common for merchants and planters to make trips back to Britain on business, for families to travel “home” perhaps to visit England for the first time, for sick colonists to travel back to Europe in the hope of regaining their health, and for quite young children to be sent to England for their education. On the outward voyage there would also be young men (and they were mainly men) off to seek their fortune, and particularly in the early part of the century indentured servants who had sold their labour for a fixed term and hoped to gain independence and some land at the end of it.

The convoy eventually sailed, but in November 1744 the Westminster Journal was again reporting that the Jamaican convoy had been held in port since April for want of a naval escort.  It must have been a considerable relief to everyone concerned when the War of the Austrian Succession came to an end in 1748 and for nearly a decade the seas were a little safer – until the outbreak of the Seven Years War in 1757.

It was common for Jamaican ships to be named after the estate which they supplied, and there was a Landovery estate in the parish of St Anns, so it is likely that the original owners of the ship were the owners of the Landovery estate.  Stephen Blankett may have had a share in his ship, or he may simply have made use of the opportunities it provided.  Either way by the early 1760s we find him trading as a merchant in his own right when ‘Stephen Blankett and Company of Rotherhithe’  based at Princes Street, owned a ship called the London, a vessel of 300 tons armed with 18 carriage and 4 swivel guns.

The Landovery herself seems to have had a chequered history during the 1750s. In November 1753 returning from Jamaica under Captain Miller, she was listed as lost off Boulogne and 20 crew were reported drowned. There may in fact have been more men on board than normal, for another newspaper reported that she had picked up the crew of the  Charming Betty sailing from Dublin to Bordeaux which had been run down by a Dutch dogger heading from Cork to Nantes. It seems possible the Landovery was successfully salvaged. At the time  “forty puncheons of rum and some planks of mahogany” were recovered, and in October 1756 the Leeds Intelligencer reported that a ship of the same name sailing from Liverpool to Jamaica under Captain Johnson was captured and taken to Havre de Grace.

By the time Stephen Blankett made his will in 1762 he was a relatively wealthy man able to leave much stock and personal property to his wife Elizabeth, and to request that she should sell enough of his investments in the 3% consols to provide each of his children with £500.  Blankett died at 26 Princes Street Rotherhithe in March 1765 and was buried at St Mary Rotherhithe on the 29th of March.

In June of 1765, two months after the death of Stephen Blankett, Princes Street in Rotherhithe, was largely destroyed in a terrible fire caused when a pitch kettle boiled over.  More than two hundred houses, numerous warehouses and other buildings were destroyed and 250 families were made homeless.

Of Stephen Blankett’s nine children, at least five lived to grow up.  William became a shipbuilder, Lydia married John Beach a mariner of Princes Street, Esther married Samuel Meek a ship owner, and Elizabeth married George Dominicus an East India merchant.

John Blankett (1741-1801) following his father to sea, had an interesting naval career. At one point condemned to death in Gibraltar for a murder, he was later reprieved and attempted to gain support for various voyages of exploration but was turned down in favour of Captain Cook.  By 1799 John Blankett had become a Rear-Admiral and commander of the Leopard. He died on the Leopard near Mocha on the 14th of July 1801.  According to the Dictionary of National Biography, he was described as ‘an unusually good linguist, having a perfect mastery of French, Italian, and Portuguese. Seen by many as a good officer and an accomplished and amiable gentleman, he was criticized by others for his bad temper and eccentricity during his last days in the Red Sea.’

Elizabeth Blankett outlived her husband by a decade, and was buried at St Mary Rotherhithe on the 8th January 1775.

Jamaican Life

The Maroon War settlement of 1739

1 Comment

Cudjoe and Colonel Guthrie under Cudjoe’s cotton tree

The escaped slaves of Jamaica had one big advantage over slaves in many other places, that the geography of the island provided them with areas where they could hide and live with much less fear of discovery.  The original Maroons were freed or runaway Spanish slaves, whose name is thought to come from the Spanish word cimarrón, meaning wild or untamed.  Over time two main areas of Maroon settlement developed, the Trelawney Maroons lived in an area around Maroon Town and Accompong in the Cockpit country, and the Windward Maroons lived on the northern slopes of the Blue Mountains.

The territory occupied by the Maroons was ideally suited to guerrilla warfare, although that name for the technique would not be used until the time of the Peninsular War at the end of the 18th century.  Led by an extremely able commander called Cudjoe, with his brothers Accompong and Johnny in the West, and sub-chiefs Quao and Cuffee in the East, the Maroons avoided open fights preferring ambush.  Camouflaged from head to foot in leaves, surprise and their accurate shooting often brought them quick victory after which they would melt back into the woods to prepare another attack.

Various armed attempts to subdue them were made by British troops and in 1734 a Captain Stoddart led a party that attacked and destroyed Nanny Town in the Blue Mountains.  The town was never resettled and even now is believed to be haunted by the ghosts of those who died.  Nanny the Maroon chieftainess after whom the place was named is now a National Hero of Jamaica.  Although the Maroons had suffered severely under this attack many escaped, some to build a new village further inland and others removed to the Cockpit area of Trelawney.

Maroon raids increased and so did the fear of the colonists that they would encourage a mass uprising of slaves on the plantations, where they now outnumbered white settlers by about 14 to 1.  The Jamaican Assembly voted money for a large-scale campaign and the Maroons found themselves in a desperate situation, however the government did not realise this and, eager to end the fighting, they sent Colonel James Guthrie with a detachment of militia, and Lieutenant Francis Sadler with a party of soldiers, to seek out Cudjoe and offer him favourable terms for a peace.`

The negotiators exchanged hats as a sign of friendship, as depicted above, and the treaty was agreed on 1 March 1739 beneath a large cotton tree, afterwards known as Cudjoe’s Tree.  Under the settlement Cudjoe and his followers were all to be free, and any slaves who had joined them were given the choice of remaining with the Maroons or returning to their masters.  It would be interesting to know if any did, somehow I doubt it!  A land grant was made to the Maroons of 1500 acres in Trelawney, where they would have hunting rights and it was agreed “That they shall have liberty to plant the said lands with coffee, cocoa, ginger, tobacco, and cotton, and to breed cattle, hogs, goats, or any other flock, and dispose of the produce or increase of the said commodities to the inhabitants of this island”.

In addition Cudjoe and his followers were to assist the British in pursuing any remaining rebels and in the case of foreign invasion they would assist the British against the invader and in return would receive their protection.  The Maroons agreed not to harbour runaway slaves but to return them for a reward of ten shillings per slave.  Cudjoe himself was given the right to dispense justice within his community and the succession was assured, naming Accompong, Johnny, Quao and Cuffee, and after their deaths such leaders as might be appointed by the Governor.  The Maroons were required to build and maintain a road to Trelawney Town, and four white persons were to be nominated to live with the Maroons in order to facilitate communication with the government.

Following the agreement with the Maroons the Jamaican assembly rewarded several negroes who had assisted the authorities to bring about the peace.  Three men named Cuffee, Sambo, and Quashey were manumised and their owners were compensated to the value of £40 per man; and two women called Venus and Affiba were also freed with their owners being paid £30 for each.

One further consequence of the events leading to the peace was the award of £1500 to Guthrie (who however died in June 1739) and £600 to Francis Sadler who subsequently received land grants totalling 1200 acres which formed the basis of the Montpelier estate.  When Francis Sadler married Colonel Guthrie’s widowed daughter Janet Hynes in 1742 he extended the Montpelier estate still further.  This Francis Sadler, who took the name Francis Sadler Hals when he inherited Halse Hall from his half brother, was the son of Mary Rose whose life in Jamaica has already been described on this website.

So successful was the peace agreement of 1739 that it lasted for more than fifty years.

The full text of the agreement and the subsequent Act of the Jamaican Assembly can be found here.

 

A note about the picture: When I first saw the picture of Colonel Guthrie and Cudjoe I thought it an attempt to belittle the latter with a caricature. However he was described at the time as being very short and squat with a large lump of flesh on his back, and a strange wild manner. He dressed in a tattered old blue coat, white knee breeches, a head tie and a small round hat. His gun was an old Spanish musket with powder and shot, and he carried a machete worn in a leather holster.

 

Genealogy, Jamaican Life

What’s in a name? – Searching Jamaican Parish Registers

9 Comments

A rose by any other name…

Old parish registers (OPR for short) are an invaluable source of genealogical information, but sadly are often only as good as the parish clerk or vicar who wrote in them. Some are written in beautiful script and contain additional information about the father’s occupation or the street in which the family lived, others are terse to the point of being almost useless without supporting information from another source.

If you have access to Ancestry, take a look at the registers for London where you can view the images of the actual pages. For example the early eighteenth century marriage records for St Lawrence Jewry in the City of London are clearly written and give the parish of both partners, but the later records in the same volume for baptisms and burials are untidy and hastily written although they do give the date of both birth and baptism, and the location of the burial.

Accuracy can be a problem and the record of the baptism of Robert Cooper Lee, whose parcel of ribbons gave this website its title, is doubly inaccurate – for the clerk of St Michael Bassishaw wrote his mother’s name as Sarah instead of Frances and his date of birth as the 4th of September when I know from a letter of his daughter Frances that it was the 15th. These problems can be much worse when dealing with the early Jamaican registers.

You can view the images of the early Jamaican parish registers on the Family Search site, which is free. These images are also available on microfilm through local LDS family history centres, although you may have to order them in for your local centre and pay the postage.

The coverage for different parishes varies a lot, with some of the earliest records in St Andrew (from 1664), St Catherine (from 1668) and Vere (from 1694) whereas Kingston only starts in 1721. Time, mould, insect attack, hurricane and fire took their toll on the records and they were sometimes copied to preserve them, not always with a hundred percent accuracy.

Until the Family Search site completes the computerised indexing of the records, you are dependent on either paging through a particular parish and time period, or using the hand compiled indexes whose images are also available. These are not in fully alphabetical order, but are organised by letter of the alphabet with blocks of records covering a period of years. If you are lucky the one you are looking at will have an annotation in the margin telling you what period it relates to, but not always. The index will give you a volume and folio reference in the form 1/23. Because the images cover two pages of the register an entry at 1/23 might be on image 12 or somewhere either side of it. Be aware that not all records are indexed, that marriages are only indexed by the name of the man and that a child’s baptism may be indexed under the mother’s name if it is illegitimate even if it later took its father’s name.

To have a good chance of finding the records you are interested in, it helps to understand family naming conventions in the eighteenth century which often followed a quite regular pattern. Where a couple were married and their children were legitimate, the eldest son was usually named after his father or one of his grandfathers, and the eldest daughter after her mother or grandmothers. It was also common for a surname to be used as a first name and the surname of a grandparent to be used as a middle name. For example Thomas Beckford married Mary Ballard in 1703 in St Catherine, Jamaica, and their eldest son was called Ballard Beckford, as was his son. The second Ballard Beckford’s daughter was named Mary Ballard Beckford.

Don’t be surprised if you find that a couple use the same name repeatedly – high infant mortality often meant that a father would make several attempts to carry on his name – if you see the same name repeated, look for a corresponding infant burial between the two baptisms. Robert Cooper Lee’s father Joseph had two attempts at a namesake before his youngest son survived.

After the eldest son and daughter, children were then named for the siblings of their parents, or after an aunt or uncle or their godparents. Sometimes they were named in honour of a family friend. Robert Cooper Lee, whose eldest son named after his brother John died young, named one son after himself; one after his friend Richard Welch; Matthew Allen Lee after his friend John Allen and Scudamore Cooper Lee after his friend Scudamore Winde. In turn John Allen named his first son John Lee Allen. Name patterns like this can often be helpful in tracing patterns of friendship especially if backed up by bequests in Wills.

In Jamaica the records are complicated by the number of illegitimate children, many born to white fathers and slave or mixed race mothers. In the early history of Jamaica slaves were not usually baptised or married in church as it was feared that if they became Christian they might acquire the rights of Christians. However from the earliest days there were free blacks and free people of mixed race – often the product of liaisons between white planters and merchants and their slaves or housekeepers. The latter were often free women of mixed race who moved between communities having some of the privileges of the white world, and as described in the article about Mary Johnston Rose, sometimes acquiring the status of being legally white.

When it came to recording the baptisms, marriages and burials of black and mixed race Jamaicans the local vicars varied in what they recorded. Some white fathers happily acknowledged their children and their names appear alongside the name of the mother in the register. However the child’s surname may be indexed as either the father’s or the mother’s.  For example in 1748 John  Lee and Mary Lord had a child baptised as Mary Ann Lord, the name she was buried under soon after.

In the case of the children of Mary Johnston Rose her sons Thomas Wynter and William Fuller took their father’s surnames and she was generally known as Mary Rose, although her mother was Elizabeth Johnston. That she used the name Mary Johnston Rose strongly suggests that she was the acknowledged daughter of a man called Rose, albeit not legitimate. In letters she is referred to as Mrs Rose, but beware of assuming that Mrs means that a woman was married – the title Mistress was used for both married and single women, and Mrs was also sometimes a courtesy title rather like Madame in French was used for an older woman.

The Jamaican registers may or may not tell you something useful about the ethnic origin of the person. The St Catherine’s register has the marriage of Emanuel Angola and Malina Angola in 1671, which only hints at African origin through their names. In 1677 Peter Moore and Black Betty were married as ‘free negroes’, but on the same page the marriage record of a mulatto and a negro does not tell us whether they were free. There was no requirement on parish priests to follow a set form in what they recorded, and as a result the records are fragmentary, inconsistent and sometimes very hard to read!

By the middle of the eighteenth century it is becoming more common to record the status of an individual, and children are baptised using all the various categories of colour discussed in an earlier posting.  Whereas a legitimate child almost always has both parents named, the illegitimate may have none – but almost always its colour is recorded. Watch out for abbreviations such as ‘Mul.’ Or simply ‘M’ for mulatto, a letter Q (which can look like a 2) for a quadroon.  Such is the segregation of people according to their colour that some of the Kingston registers actually had separate sections for Whites and People of Colour.

Civil Registration began in Jamaica on the 1st of April 1878 but some districts did not record until up to five years later. The Family Search site has over one and a half million records for Trelawny Parish Civil Registration Births, 1878-1930, and over 280,000 other indexed records from 1752-1920.

The rejoicing will be great on the part of this user when the fully indexed records are finally available online.

So good luck with your searches, and good hunting!

 

 

Biographies, Jamaican Life

Mary Johnston Rose – How to become legally white

1 Comment

Sample of eighteenth century Indian chintz.

The Spanish Town census, featured here recently, listed three people who were described as “free Mulattoes or Descendants from them admitted to the privileges of white people by Acts of the Legislature”.

They included Mary Johnston Rose and her son Thomas Wynter. Mary was a free mulatto, the daughter of Elizabeth Johnston who died in 1753 a free negro. Mary may have been born as early as 1700 when there is the baptism of a Mary Elizabeth daughter of Elizabeth Johnston ‘a negro wench’ on 5th July 1700. If this is the right mother and daughter then Elizabeth was probably a house slave at the time and later freed. It seems probable that Mary’s father was one of the Rose family, possibly Francis Rose (1656-1720), or William Rose (d. about 1724).

There is no record of how Mary acquired her education, but that she did so at a time when most women, whatever their colour, were illiterate suggests that she had a favoured upbringing at the hands of her father.

Mary was said to be related to Rose Fuller (a plantation owner and key player in island politics; Francis Rose was his great-uncle and William Rose his cousin) and she was his housekeeper for about twenty years until he returned to England in the summer of 1755, landing at Portsmouth on the 18th August. The role of housekeeper frequently equated to that of common law wife and there was clearly a strong degree of affection between Mary and her employer who was the acknowledged father of her son William.

After Rose Fuller left Jamaica he sent her various items, including a carpet. In May 1756 she wrote that these were “such marks of your esteem for me as I shall never forget” and she forwarded a list requesting calimancoe[1] shoes, coarse linen (probably for servant or slave clothing), chintz (perhaps Indian chintz such as pictured above), tea and a white beaver hat. She sent him some boxes of sweetmeats “which will serve to remind you that you have left here a person who always thinks of you”. In a further letter in December 1756 she wrote “I most heartily thank you for all your favours which have been very great to me, but notwithstanding them, I have often known the want of your being here, since your departure. May you long enjoy your health is the sincere wish of your most affectionate honourable servant Mary Rose”.

Clearly she missed him, but knew that she would never see him again.

Mary had two sons by different fathers – Thomas Wynter who was probably the son of Dr William Wynter; and William Fuller – born on the 28th of January and baptised on the 18th of April 1735 – who was the son of Dr Rose Fuller. From a letter written by her nephew Robert Kelly to Rose Fuller in 1758 we know that William Fuller was sent to England to be educated at his father’s expense, but as nothing further is heard of him it seems he probably died young. Robert Kelly was the son of Mary’s sister Ann Rose, and his father was one of the five Kelly brothers whose Wills are on this website, most probably John Kelly who died in 1740.

Mary also had a sister Sarah Johnson, a niece called Peg whose child she took in when Peg was drowned in a storm, and nephew and niece John Schutz Johnson and Ann Rose – Sarah’s children.

Thomas Wynter, William Fuller and Robert Kelly were all classified by Jamaican society as quadroons and as such did not have the same rights as white people, although having mothers who were free meant they too were free. However in 1745 Mary applied for herself and her sons to be accorded the same rights as whites, and in 1746 the English parliament confirmed an Act of the Jamaican Assembly granting those rights.

“At the Court of St. James 17.12.1746.  Present the King’s Most Excellent Majesty in Council.  Whereas the Governor and Commander-in-Chief of His Majesty’s Island of Jamaica with the Council and Assembly of the said Island did in 1745 pass an Act which hath been transmitted in the words following viz An Act to Intitle Mary Johnston Rose of the Parish of St. Catherines in the said Island, a free mulatto woman and her sons Thomas Wynter and William Fuller begotten by white fathers to the same rights and privileges with English subjects born of white parents.  The Act was confirmed, finally enacted and ratified accordingly.”

This was not a wholly unusual event, there were a handful of such Acts each year from the early eighteenth century onwards, but the proportion of all the mixed race adults and children granted such rights was small and it does indicate that Mary had some influence over her own position, albeit presumably through the fathers of her sons, both of whom were members of the Assembly at the time.

Had her sons been born a few years later their position would have been more difficult, for in December 1761 the Jamaican Assembly, alarmed by the numbers of mixed race illegitimate children of the Plantocracy inheriting from their white fathers, passed an Act to “prevent exorbitant grants and devises to Negroes”.  William Wynter was one of three men to sign a protest against the Bill.

Nevertheless the Act was made law and so in 1783 Mary’s son Thomas was forced to petition for the rights of his own mixed race children William Rose Wynter and Mary Mede.  The baptism record for William Rose Wynter lists him as a mulatto so it is possible his mother was black.

Although Thomas Wynter was listed as a Millwright in the 1754 census, by the time of his death in 1789 he was able to leave £1000 to his daughter Mrs Mead, and an annuity to Mrs Hemming the mother of his two children, and to direct that Hampshire Plantation and Prospect Penn and all his other real estate and slaves in Jamaica should be sold by his Executors for the benefit of his children. His estate was valued at £65,820 and the money from the sale was put in trust invested in securities in England.

After a career in the Army, William Rose Wynter ended his days in England dying in Devon in 1846, and his sister married an English vicar and also left Jamaica for England. The descendants of William Rose Wynter through his son Thomas Rose Wynter can be tracked down through the nineteenth century, also in the Indian Army and later in Cornwall. The descendants of Mary Elizabeth Wynter Mead nee Hemmings can be tracked into the late twentieth century.

When Rose Fuller died in 1777 he left his house in Spanish Town to the lifetime use of Mary Johnson (sic) Rose “to whose care and attention under God I conceive my life has been more than once preserved in several dangerous illnesses I had in Jamaica”. He left her an annuity of £100 Jamaican currency (worth a bit over £70 sterling) annually for her lifetime, which was the continuance of a similar annuity he was already paying her. She was also left the lifetime use of the contents of the house except for what might be needed for the use of his attorneys managing his property from the Grange, and he requested, but did not require, that she might live at the Grange Pen to assist the attorneys when necessary. Mary was also left the use of six female slaves with any children they might have, again for her lifetime; and mention is made of her chaise and horse. Clearly she was left well provided for, but she later supplemented her annuity by letting out lodgings and she was able to buy her house in Spanish Town. She died a relatively wealthy woman.

On the 19th of March 1783 the parish register for St Catherine recorded the burial of “Mary Rose mulatto Old Age”. She had reached the age of over seventy and possibly as much as eighty three, a very good age in Jamaica, after a full life which had seen her and her sons become legally white.

 

If you would like to know more about women and the African Diaspora, and about Mary Rose, you can find it in Gendering the African Diaspora, Indiana University Press 2010, which contains a paper by Linda L. Sturtz entitled Mary Rose: “White” African Jamaican Woman? Race and Gender in Eighteenth Century Jamaica.

The letters written by Mary Rose and others referring to her are in the collection of the Fuller papers held at the East Sussex County Record Office at Lewes, England.


[1] Calimancoe was a dense, and expensive fabric used for shoes, stiffened petticoats and waistcoats. It was a shiny fabric with a striped or chequered pattern made of wool with silk or mohair.