Hi Trixie
My Billy Blue was tried at Kent Assizes for stealing sugar from a ship he was unloading.
we don't know where in Britain he was living, but interestingly he called his farm in Sydney "Northampton" - there is a Northampton in Jamaica (I've been there and the area looked very like the kind of scrubby bush his Sydney farm must have looked like!) and I know of at least one person by the surname Blue who is buried in Northampton, England. So maybe he lived there.
He was maybe born around 1734/5. His burial certificate says he was 99 when he died in 1834. He claimed to have fought with Gen. Wolfe at Quebec in 1759, and to have been a Marine in King George III coronation. We have been unable to prove or disprove this as there are no records existing of who 'in the ranks' was with Wolfe, or in George III's coronation guard of honour.
With regard to skin colour telling much - I'm fair with fair complexion. Some of my cousins are dark and some are fair. I used to know a family where the father was native Burmese and the mother English - they had 4 children, the first and last were quite dusky and the two in the middle had fair skin and red hair! (I know Burmese isn't African, but just an example.)
Sometimes you can tell from a blood test. One of my Blue cousins in Canada had his DNA tested a few years back and was told he had 'deep West African roots'. So apparently there is even a difference depending on what part of Africa a person originates from.
Intriguing, isn't ir?
Dawn M