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General => The Common Room => Topic started by: GoldRimmedLamp on Friday 26 March 21 22:37 GMT (UK)
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Hello,
Would anyone be kind enough to help me? I'm an A-Level student and I'm working on a project for Citizenship Studies about Britain's role in slavery.
I recently discovered that my own family had links to slavery, which is why I've chosen this subject. I really want to speak to other people whose families were involved in slavery as slave-owners/slave-traders, to discuss their feelings towards their ancestors and their sense of identity today.
OBVIOUSLY, I won't use any names in my project or anything like that -- everything would be totally anonymous.
I'd be really grateful if anyone would be willing to talk about their family history, and tell me a little about their thoughts and feelings.
I hope it's okay to post this here. This project means a lot to me, and I think genealogy forums are probably the only place I'll be able to find anyone who knows if their ancestors were involved in slavery.
Thank you very much!!
(*) Moderator Comment: e-mail removed in accordance with RootsChat policy,
to avoid spamming and other abuses.
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Are you looking at it from a certain angle ?
Are you including modern day slavery that is still very much going on ?
Sarah
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Are you going to include the thousands of black lives saved by slavers or just going to jump on the woke bandwagon of slavery is wrong.
Given the choice of having their head hacked off over possibly half an hour by a child hardly old enough to wield the hatchet, slavery was a good option, but then most history books hide the real facts about early slavery
Cheers
Guy
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Guy: It doesn't strike me as though this young person is jumping on any bandwagon, which you seem to imply (if you did not, I apologise). I believe they are genuinely looking for whatever truths they can uncover if the second paragraph is anything to go by. Any discussion, rationally based, can be so educational going forwards.
GRL: I wish you luck with the project, I am sure you will try and understand it from all sides and discuss it sensibly. And Sarah has a point: perhaps, once you have found all the information you can, a contrast/comparison exercise can be included regarding today's problems.
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"black lives saved by slavers"
Yikes.
No cheers.
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Sorry can't help you in so far as my own ancestry they were all ordinary hard working trades/agr workers.
However worth looking at the International Slave Museum in Liverpool if you haven't already done so https://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/international-slavery-museum
I used to travel a dozen or more times a year from Liverpool to Ireland and Liverpool was a main port for the ancient slave trade, many of its buildings bear its history as do the docks so very well worth a visit for research to see it for yourself as they also do tours of the city/docks which are very enlightening showing things you would normally miss /not see ( depends on covid travel restrictions)
Good luck with your A levels
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Are you going to include the thousands of black lives saved by slavers or just going to jump on the woke bandwagon of slavery is wrong.
Given the choice of having their head hacked off over possibly half an hour by a child hardly old enough to wield the hatchet, slavery was a good option, but then most history books hide the real facts about early slavery
Cheers
Guy
Did you have to Guy, This is a new poster asking for honest opinions on peoples' thoughts on their backgrounds connected to the slave trade.
I would hate the poster to be put off :-\
Carol
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"Did you have to"
Yeah, he had to. He ain't Mr enlightenment, you know.
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You might want to make some enquiries here, although they are closed at the moment. It's an amazing Museum, and was refurbished with new artefacts a few years ago:
http://humbermuseums.com/museum-hull/wilberforce-house-museum/
http://wilberforcemonumentfund.blogspot.com/p/the-monument.html
Carol
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"Did you have to"
Yeah, he had to. He ain't Mr enlightenment, you know.
Quite. No Mr empathy either.
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I believe my 4x great/grand uncle must have been involved. I found him on the 1820 census in New York City recorded as having a number of slaves. I tried to investigate further but have not found very much apart from his being involved in trading various products (sugar, tobacco, etc. ) from Philadelphia to NYC.
I'd be happy to help you.
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Are you going to include the thousands of black lives saved by slavers or just going to jump on the woke bandwagon of slavery is wrong.
Given the choice of having their head hacked off over possibly half an hour by a child hardly old enough to wield the hatchet, slavery was a good option, but then most history books hide the real facts about early slavery
Cheers
Guy
Did you have to Guy, This is a new poster asking for honest opinions on peoples' thoughts on their backgrounds connected to the slave trade.
I would hate the poster to be put off :-\
Carol
Guy often replies with his psychological reply to opinions, and goes into unnecessary details that is not really relevant.
The OP was just asking for advice and opinions. I cannot find any known ancestors who worked in the slave trade but found a slave owner in the US or Jamaica with a rare French surname once which is a surname in my French Huguenot tree, but whether there is a connection is unknown.
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None in my family except one first cousin four times removed who almost certainly was involved. At the very least, he fought in the Confederate Army - the only person in my tree who did so. Why he moved from Maine to Alabama in about 1855 is a mystery. On the English side, I know of no direct involvement; no one was connected in any way to shipping, ship building, banking or cotton weaving. But, let's face it, a lot of people benefited indirectly in the United States, in Britain and elsewhere.
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GRL, you have asked specifically for British examples. i would take a punt that most British people of the times either didn't have a clue about it, or were very pleased to sign the many petitions which helped the campaign to abolish it - which we British were the first to do, and enforce. I.m thankful we did that, and saved many lives in the end.
However, that point wont get a pass on this project; nor will an examination of the primary sources of slaves, the many Irish slaves sent to the Caribbean, the Cornish slaves captured by the Barbary pirates and even the workhouse children who were literally sold into slavery to work in the mills up North. I know that you have to slant your findings one way only. So do it, in order to get those grades. But might I very respectfully ask, that when you've done that you will keep an open mind and look carefully at all angles of this huge subject?
Good luck with your studies, and I hope that you will return here, not be put off by what some of us have written on this rather sticky subject, as all of us should be allowed to put our point of view freely.
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Are you going to include the thousands of black lives saved by slavers or just going to jump on the woke bandwagon of slavery is wrong.
Given the choice of having their head hacked off over possibly half an hour by a child hardly old enough to wield the hatchet, slavery was a good option, but then most history books hide the real facts about early slavery
Cheers
Guy
Did you have to Guy, This is a new poster asking for honest opinions on peoples' thoughts on their backgrounds connected to the slave trade.
I would hate the poster to be put off :-\
Carol
Many have asked "Did I have to?"
The answer is yes!
The reason is very very simple, there is much said about slavery and how disgusting the trade was, which on the face of it I am sure we all agree, but when you dig deeper into the history of slavery and African slavery in particular you will understand that life in slavery was actually a good outcome for those early slaves.
In addition you might want to look into the Slavery also existed among Native Americans of both Meso-America and South America and how laws protecting native Americans led to the use of Africans as slaves.
Slavery was not an European invention it was rife worldwide, but many, ignorant of the truth behind the slave trade, seem to think it was mainly to service the cotton fields and the tobacco trade, while that was true there were also other considerations.
To learn about Britain's role in slavery, I would suggest GoldRimmedlamp needs to understand how the slave trade existed at the time and how Britain's slave traders took advantage of situations that existed at the time. That included giving prisoners of wars a value other than being sacrifices to the gods.
Cheers
Guy
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GRL, you have asked specifically for British examples. i would take a punt that most British people of the times either didn't have a clue about it, or were very pleased to sign the many petitions which helped the campaign to abolish it - which we British were the first to do, and enforce. I.m thankful we did that, and saved many lives in the end.
However, that point wont get a pass on this project; nor will an examination of the primary sources of slaves, the many Irish slaves sent to the Caribbean, the Cornish slaves captured by the Barbary pirates and even the workhouse children who were literally sold into slavery to work in the mills up North. I know that you have to slant your findings one way only. So do it, in order to get those grades. But might I very respectfully ask, that when you've done that you will keep an open mind and look carefully at all angles of this huge subject?
Good luck with your studies, and I hope that you will return here, not be put off by what some of us have written on this rather sticky subject, as all of us should be allowed to put our point of view freely.
Sorry but you are simply wrong.
The Spanish protected native Americans long long before Britain even thought about abolishing the slave trade.
Cheers
Guy
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"which we British were the first to do"
The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 was hardly the first effort to outlaw slavery. Slavery was abolished in all of the northern states many years earlier: Vermont [1777], Pennsylvania [1780], New Hampshire and Massachusetts [1783], Connecticut and Rhode Island [1784], New York [1799] and New Jersey [1804].
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My English 4xgreat grandfather was in America from 1775 to 1782 fighting in the American Revolutionary War, not sure if the war had any effect on slavery. He returned to England in 1784 after a time in the Caribbean, and returned to Northern England and wed in 1786.
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One thread, and already the two biggest bits of nonsense ever spouted about slavery are being aired. You see these two tropes being repeated ad nauseum on extremist pages, so it's sad to see them here on Rootschat.
1. No, slavery was never a good outcome for Africans. Guy talks about the fact that many slaves were prisoners of war, captured by rival tribes and sold on (somehow "sparing their lives"). What he didn't mention was that these wars were a direct result of the slave trade itself, with Europeans bringing firearms to the continent, arming favoured tribes and ensuring a regular supply of prisoners.
2. "But what about all the Cornish people enslaved by the Barbary pirates". Sure, this happened, and must have been awful for those individuals. Trying to draw a parallel with the industrial enslavement of millions of Africans, shipping them off to the other side of the world and, in the process, wrecking the economy of an entire continent and creating an underclass in another continent is plain silly. Can anyone point to any lasting effects of enslavement of these famously unlucky Cornish fishermen that persists to this day? I doubt it. It still gets trotted out in any discussion of African enslavement though.
Mike
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I really want to speak to other people whose families were involved in slavery as slave-owners/slave-traders, to discuss their feelings towards their ancestors and their sense of identity today...
I'd be really grateful if anyone would be willing to talk about their family history, and tell me a little about their thoughts and feelings.
I haven't found any relatives who had slaves, so I can't help you, but this sounds like an interesting project and I wish you success. I've seen genealogy programs in which people have been made aware of an ancestor or some other distant relative who had slaves, and it seems like it can be a lot to take in, especially if there have been no hints about it in family stories.
Even so, I hope that such a revelation wouldn't harm a person's sense of identity, because we can only be responsible for our own actions.
Regards,
Josephine
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I read a lot of threads on rootschat, but don’t recall any which mention ancestors involved in the slave trade. (That doesn’t mean there’s aren’t any of course :) )
If you are looking for general information rather than specific personal examples from rootschatters, there is a lot to be found on the internet. I think most relate to American’s experiences, and include recollections of descendants of slave owners meeting with descendants of slaves. I know you are looking for British examples, but there may be some in amongst the American ones. :)
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No personal involvement, sorry GRL, but 3 things to ponder.....
1) There is a fascinating book I have read:
"BARRACOON - The story of the last slave."
By Zora Neale Hurston.
ISBN: 978-0-00-829766-4
It doesn't seem to me that it was necessarily a better life Mr E.
2) History shows an extensive white slave trade, with Europeans kidnapped and carted of to Africa, of which many people know nothing. I suggest it deserves a mention in the project.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_slave_trade
The book by Sally Magnusson : "The Sealwoman's Gift" offers an interesting perspective, from Iceland to Algiers.
3) Lastly, Iluleah made a comment about the vast wealth accumulated via slavery in ports such as Liverpool, which reminded me of a photo I took during a brief stay there a couple of years ago.
See here:
https://www.google.com/search?q=slavery+%2B+Liverpool+bank&client=firefox-b-d&sxsrf=ALeKk03dYaMUdZF4CCoQGmMWwAqDRxkTcw:1616929084421&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjwn9Cd6tLvAhWOilwKHZbGCmAQ_AUoAnoECAEQBA&biw=1366&bih=626#imgrc=gInx455fiXxnSM
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I read a lot of threads on rootschat, but don’t recall any which mention ancestors involved in the slave trade. (That doesn’t mean there’s aren’t any of course :) )
Ruskie, I discovered during first lockdown that my 5g grandfather was captain of a slave ship. He only did two runs before his ship must have gone down, as I have my 5g grandmother proving his Will in Nov 1775, and no burial, although he must have been on previous voyages as crew.
He captained a ship called the Nancy, registered in Liverpool, whose owners included Bryan Blundell, the founder of the Liverpool Bluecoat School. He did one trip to Nigeria and Jamaica in 1772 - 1773, and another trip Nigeria - Dominica 1774 - 1775. In total he shipped over 700 slaves in those two voyages.
Not sure what I feel about it. He was trying to feed his own wife and three children. Judging from the lists of ship owners, slavery was embedded in Liverpool, at all levels of society. They clearly saw nothing wrong with it, however shocking that is to us today. So it depends whether we look at this with 21st century eyes, or 18th century. When I put it alongside the privations my coal miner ancestors will have endured down the mines from a very young age, that again depends on what eyes we view it with. Both were shocking, both were wrong as we see it today. Both exploited human beings to the max.
GoldRimmedLamp, I will send you my email address if you want it, but I'm not sure I can tell you any more
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This thread was about slavery! an interesting blog from the National Library of Scotland on.
https://blog.nls.uk/mapping-slavery/
Bests,
Skoosh.
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I can't say definitely, but one ancestor was probably a slaveowner in South America. He was George Pontifex, born in 1808 and lived in Georgetown, Demerara, Guyana, starting in about 1830. He had a sugar plantation there, at a time when most of the population of Demerara were slaves.
On edit: From DonM's database:
George Pontifex in British Guiana
11th Jan 1836 | 1 Enslaved | £68 8s 0d
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This history of Liverpool has plenty of references to the Slave Trade.
Probably easiest to go to the end and study the index to pick your pages.
https://fitthebill.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/historyofliverpo00willuoft.pdf
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And here is the Caribbean 1763-1833.
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs
Don
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One thread, and already the two biggest bits of nonsense ever spouted about slavery are being aired. You see these two tropes being repeated ad nauseum on extremist pages, so it's sad to see them here on Rootschat.
1. No, slavery was never a good outcome for Africans. Guy talks about the fact that many slaves were prisoners of war, captured by rival tribes and sold on (somehow "sparing their lives"). What he didn't mention was that these wars were a direct result of the slave trade itself, with Europeans bringing firearms to the continent, arming favoured tribes and ensuring a regular supply of prisoners.
Mike
I have studied slavery for over 30 years from Roman times to present day slavery, slavery in Africa started many hundreds of years before Europeans set foot in Africa.
The Europeans presented African tribal leaders an incentive not to sacrifice prisoners to their gods and not to blood their children using defenseless prisoners, but hey why spoil a good rant by presenting facts.
Guy
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GRL, you have asked specifically for British examples. i would take a punt that most British people of the times either didn't have a clue about it, or were very pleased to sign the many petitions which helped the campaign to abolish it - which we British were the first to do, and enforce. I.m thankful we did that, and saved many lives in the end.
However, that point wont get a pass on this project; nor will an examination of the primary sources of slaves, the many Irish slaves sent to the Caribbean, the Cornish slaves captured by the Barbary pirates and even the workhouse children who were literally sold into slavery to work in the mills up North. I know that you have to slant your findings one way only. So do it, in order to get those grades. But might I very respectfully ask, that when you've done that you will keep an open mind and look carefully at all angles of this huge subject?
Good luck with your studies, and I hope that you will return here, not be put off by what some of us have written on this rather sticky subject, as all of us should be allowed to put our point of view freely.
Sorry but you are simply wrong.
The Spanish protected native Americans long long before Britain even thought about abolishing the slave trade.
Cheers
Guy
Sorry, Guy, I don't quite understand the connection (being bit thick!), I was keeping to the British theme, as the OP requested. Do you mean Spanish in North, or South America? I've read horrendous things about how the Spanish and Portuguese treated the native peoples in SA, and the extent of their African slave input into those countries far outdid others in the beginning. I know that native Americans kept slaves, (as did black people) but how do you mean 'the Spanish protected them'? I'd like to know a bit more about that aspect.
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I found a record for an ancestor that said she was the daughter of Daniel ______ of Jamaica. I got quite excited thinking I had Jamaican ancestry until the penny dropped and I realised he was probably an English planter and likely a slave owner. I felt rather uncomfortable about that. I can't remember the surname and haven't been able to locate the record - I lost so much data in a computer crash years ago. It was so many generations back I doubt I would have been able to find out any more anyway.
Another ancestor was active in the abolition movement so I feel somewhat exonerated.
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There is also this site which you may already be aware of: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs//
Legacies of British Slave Owners.
Ms_C
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Hi, a very interesting subject and as we can see, still an emotive one.
Lewis Chadwick is my 10 x great grandfather. After the English Civil War, he bought the island of St Lucia. Instantly slavery popped into my head like an alarm activating. I have not found any evidence of a specific connection but he died within a year of the purchase, so, who knows? If his activities are clean, his intentions will probably never be known.
It was an uncomfortable moment, I had no idea until that day, how deeply ingrained my hatred of inhumanity really is.