The Mystery of the Mysterious Grandmother

In the 1817 slave register for John Tharp's Good Hope estate, there is a five year old girl called Dorinda (b. 1812), whose mother's name was Polly.   There were three women called Polly on the estate who could have given birth to her. The older was born in about 1768 to a mother called Rachael. Allowing for the usual levels of imprecision in age estimates, it seems likely that she was the woman called Rachael who was born in Jamaica in about 1755 and died in 1821. This Polly would have been about 44 when Dorinda was born. The second oldest woman called Polly was born in Africa in about 1778, and would have been about 34 when Dorinda was born. The youngest Polly was born in Jamaica in about 1794, and would have been about 18 when Dorinda was born. Any one of these women could therefore have been Dorinda's mother. More about Good Hope More about sources What are the limitations of the evidence? Isn't this too neat to be convincing? A note about the identity of fathers A

Two individuals on the Good Hope estate are listed with a mother called Phoebe in the 1817 slave register: Chloe (b. 1789) and Clarke (b. 1790).  There were three women called Phoebe on the estate. The oldest was born in Africa in 1761, the second in Jamaica in 1765 and the third in Africa in 1777. The youngest Phoebe died in 1832 but the deaths of the other two were not recorded in the slave lists. Chloe was named as the mother of five children on the estate: Jane Brebner (b. 1807), Ben (b. 1813), Eleanor (b. 1817), Susannah (b. and d. 1823) and Thomas (b. 1824). Jane Brebner was described as Mulatto, and the 1826 slave list records that she gained her freedom in exchange for a woman called Mary Johnston. Under the entry for Mary Johnston, it is recorded that a man called John Reuben provided Mary for the exchange, and that Mary was born in Jamaica in about 1804. Presumably the similarity in age between Mary and Jane was necessary for the exchange to be acceptable to the trustees of t

The 1817 slave register for John Tharp's Good Hope plantation lists a woman called Plaything who was born in Africa in about 1771. The name cannot have been the one she was born with, and would have been imposed upon her by a man on board ship or by one of the men who sold or bought her. She had at least six children, who were all daughters: Jenny Menzies (b. 1791), who was described as Mulatto, Molly (b. 1801), Eve (1802-1823), Mary (b. 1806), Charlotte (b. 1816) and Ruthy (b. 26th of April 1819).* Plaything's eldest daughter, Jenny Menzies, was named as the mother of five children: Eliza Menzies (b. 1810), Jane Menzies (b. 1813), Robert (b. 1816), Alexander Menzies (b. 25th of December 1818)* and Georgina (b. 1824). Eliza, Jane, Robert and Alexander were all described as Quadroon and Georgina as Mustee, which suggests that the labels were sometimes used impressionistically. Menzies could have been the last name of the children's father, though Jenny is also listed with th

The 1817 slave register for John Tharp's Good Hope estate lists a 23-year-old man called Donow (b. 1794) whose mother was called Balinda [sic] and one-year-old Margaret Walker, who was described as Mulatto, and whose mother was called Belinda. The 1820 return of 'increases' and 'decreases', the only one that provides dates, records the short life of Belinda's son, who was also described as Mulatto. James Walker was born on the 25th of June 1819 and died eleven days later, on the 6th of July. The 1826 return recorded the death of an eighteenth-month-old girl called Francis [sic], and also listed a living eighteenth-month-old called Bessy. Both girls had a mother called Belinda, and both were described as Negro. The register includes three women called Balinda: 65-year-old Balinda (b. 1752), born in Africa 50-year-old Balinda (b. 1767), born in Africa. Her death at the age of 56 was recorded in the 1826 return, where her name was spelt Belinda. 20-year-old Balinda

The 1817 slave register for John Tharp's Good Hope estate includes three children with a mother who is designated as Bess E or Bess Ebo, indicating that she was from the Igbo people of Nigeria. They are: Balinda (b. 1797), Berwick (b. 1809) and Castile (b. 1812). Another two children on the estate were listed with a mother called Bess: Day (m) (b. 1800) and Ophelia (b. 1802). There were two adult woman called Bess on the estate, and they were both born in Africa: Bess (1751-18th of January 1820) and Bess (b. 1770).  The older Bess would have been 61 when Castile was born and  therefore cannot have been the woman designated as Bess Ebo. It must therefore have been Bess (b. 1770) who was the mother of Balinda, Berwick and Castile. The older Bess could theoretically have given birth to Day at the age of 49 and Ophelia at 51, but it's also possible that Bess (b. 1770) was the mother of all five. Going down a generation, the register also lists a one-year-old girl described as Mulat

Furness   notes that John Tharp sold the land he'd inherited from his father (including Batchelor's Hall in Hanover) and the land he'd acquired through marriage (Potosi in St James), to consolidate his holdings in that part of St James which was later separated as Trelawny parish, where he bought the adjoining plantations of Good Hope, Wales and Lansquinet from their previous owner, Thomas Williams, in 1769. Furness suggests that he probably also had to borrow to fund the purchase, but no evidence of a loan survives. Together, the three estates were 3000 acres and Tharp acquired 473 enslaved people with his purchase. During Tharp's ownership, a watermill and hospital were constructed on the estate. In 1773, Williams sold Potosi in St James to his brother-in-law, Samuel Horlock, who got himself into debt with William Miles, Tharp's business partner, and with John Wedderburn.  Miles lent Tharp the money to buy Wedderburn's claim to the estate. To satisfy this cl

John Tharp exploited men, women and children in Jamaica to generate his fortune and funded expeditions to Africa to kidnap and enslave more. There's no question that this was evil, b  ut there are two strands to his story which suggest he had a softer side.  When Tharp retired to his country estate in Cambridgeshire in the late 1790s, he brought with him his second wife Ann (born Ann Virgo), and her daughter from a previous marriage, Sarah Gallimore. He also brought his own daughter, Mary Hyde Tharp, and Mary's mother was an enslaved woman called Harriet Phillips, who lived on the inappropriately named Good Hope plantation.  Slave-owners and the men they employed routinely subjected enslaved women to rape and sexual exploitation -- about a tenth of all babies born on Tharp's plantations had a white father, and that figure was pretty consistent across the island. Most of them lived out their days in slavery. But Tharp appears to have cared what happened to his mixed-ra

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