The Mystery of the Mysterious Grandmother

Some of these family trees aren't neat, and I'm always including the uncertainties rather than pretending the evidence is clearer than it is. This is one example where it isn't possible to determine relationships with any degree of confidence. The 1817 slave register for John Tharp's Chippenham Park Pen lists five children with a mother called Mary: Agnes (1808-1832), Abram (b. 1811), Titus (b. 1812), Warwick (b. 1815) and Camilla (b. 1817). The 1832 return of 'increases' and 'decreases' adds a sixth child: Charles,  who was born to Mary Scarlett in 1832. The 1817 register lists two women called Mary: Mary C and Mary M, who were both estimated to be 36 years old (b. 1781), and were both born in Africa. C and M may have been abbreviations for the women's last names or ethnicity, but they weren't used in listing the children's mothers, so it isn't possible to know which child belonged to which mother.  The 1817 register doesn't include

Warning: dated and offensive tosh Theodore Augustus Tharp (1844-1915) was the son of Augustus James Tharp (1805-1877) and Juliet Bond (1817-1892). I've talked about his life elsewhere, but this post is about his first novel, The Sword of Damocles , published in 1880 . You'll notice some marked similarities if you compare between his life and his fiction, which reveals a range of imperialist, sexist and classist attitudes that were very probably Theodore's own.  The novel concerns the Grayle family, who live on their country estate, Barringtree Park, in Suffolk. The current holder of the estate is Percy Grayle, whose twin brother Andrew lives in a small house in the grounds where he nurtures his resentment of Percy's good fortune in being born an hour earlier. Andrew seems suspiciously close to his devoted housekeeper, but perhaps I'm reading between the lines. Andrew's last hopes of inheriting have been dashed by the birth of Percy's son (George), and then h

Furness   notes that John Tharp acquired the cattle run he named Chippenham Park Pen, after his Cambridgeshire estate, shortly before 1795. It is unusual among his Jamaican possessions in being in the parish of St Ann rather than Trelawny. I haven't been able to determine its precise location, but I'd expect it to have been towards the western edge of St Ann, near to the boundary with Trelawny.  The parishes of Jamaica from www.my-island-jamaica.com Shortly before his death, Tharp was planning to sell Chippenham Park Pen and establish a cattle pen nearer to his Windsor lands in Trelawny ( Furness, p. 21 ), and he included in his will an instruction that the sale should be made. It wasn't. After Tharp's death,  all of his Jamaican estates were overseen by attorneys . These were originally William Green and Simon Taylor, and Furness (pp. 31-2) suggests that: It was a welcome relief for the white employees to go up to this pen in the hills of the next parish for a chang

Content warning: violence, sexual violence, exploitation My x6 great grandfather, John Tharp owned ten sugar plantations in Jamaica, called Good Hope, Covey, Lansquinet, Wales, Potosi, Pantrepant, Windsor Pen, Merry Wood, Chippenham Park Pen and Top Hill Pen. He died before slavery was abolished, but in 1837 claims were made on behalf of his heir for  compensation for the value of 2319 individuals who'd been freed . There are various surviving lists of the people who John Tharp enslaved, dating from 1795 to 1832 and these name 4039 individuals, of whom about a quarter died before abolition. I do discuss these people as individuals elsewhere, but in this post I'm mostly analysing the stats based on the slave lists . I hope it doesn't come across as impersonal, but it helped me to grasp the brutality of the institution of slavery. For 814 individuals, the place of birth is given as Africa. Making allowance for a death rate of about 14% on the voyage across the Atlantic , they

There is a mystery at the heart of my own family tree. My mum's grandmother was adopted and didn't know her birth parents  and I used DNA matches to identify her ancestors ( accessible overview ;  impenetrable detail ) to discover that her three times great grandfather was John Tharp, a major slave owner in the Jamaican parish of Trelawny. Finding out that my ancestors were slave-owners was horrifying. Of course transatlantic slavery was a shameful and terrible period in European and American history, but I'd always thought it had nothing to do with me. My ancestors were agricultural labourers and factory workers, not landowners and sugar barons, so I felt confident that they hadn't benefitted directly from slavery.  This was short-sighted, I now understand, because money from slavery made the Industrial Revolution possible and improved ordinary people's lives in Britain in numerous ways. Money generated by forced labour was spent, directly or indirectly, on better

Lists of slaves drawn up in the period after the abolition of the slave trade can be mined for genealogical information,  but using these lists as historical evidence depends on understanding the ways in which their contents are unstable. They are useful sources of information about communities of enslaved people, but conclusions about individuals have to take into account the following limitations: About 9% of individuals were listed with two different names Other individuals may also have had additional names that weren't listed Relationships may be obscured and correlation between entries will be impossible if an individual is listed under different names in different places Estimates of ages are unreliable, particularly for older people, sometimes varying by ten or fifteen years Places of birth are not 100% reliable. Book-keepers recording the death of an enslaved person may not have known about their origins or cared about accuracy, and some individuals who were born in Africa

My x6 great grandfather, John Tharp, was born in Hanover parish in Jamaica in about 1744. His father owned a few small sugar plantations that were worked by enslaved people, and John Tharp built on this inheritance by acquiring neighbouring plantations, harnessing water power to drive his sugar mills, and building his own quay in Falmouth to control the shipping as well as the production of his sugar .  Many of his investments were funded by his business partner,  William Miles , who one of the leading sugar importers in Bristol.  Letters between them are preserved in the Cambridgeshire County Archives and excepts are available here . Tharp enslaved over 3000 people at a time on his ten plantations, though there were fewer by the time compensation was claimed . In addition to five legitimate children born of his first marriage, he fathered at least two children on enslaved women.  He also financed slave-trading expeditions to Africa and became wealthy beyond imagining from the misery a

Though I'm sure it wasn't amusing to his creditors, who ended up seriously out of pocket, I copyright National Portrait Gallery, London found the story of  Alfred Bond's bankruptcy  weirdly endearing. I was pleased that he found another wealthy wife and lived out his days in luxury.   Alfred's first wife, Georgianna Eliza Tharp, had the good sense to die shortly before his financial woes caught up with him. He'd been fortunate in that marriage too, because her family were very wealthy indeed. They lived on an estate called  Chippenham Park , near Newmarket. Unlike my other ancestors, who are sometimes only recorded in church records of their baptisms, marriages and burials, the Tharps are exceedingly well documented, and there are two reasons for this. One is that they were stinking rich -- they married into other wealthy families and made frequent appearances in the news and society pages of the papers. The second is that they were exceedingly litigious, and recor