The Mystery of the Mysterious Grandmother

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