My Black Ancestry

A recent ancestry.com email brought news of an update in ethnicity from my DNA test. In the main it was pretty much as expected but showed that 1% of my DNA was of Senegal origin. Having an African ancestor was not a complete surprise being more like confirmation of my genealogical research where records show that my 3x great grandmother Eliza Thomasina (Walsh) Briscoe was born in the West Indies, and specifically Jamaica.

My Ancestry Ethnicity

Jamaica

As I have told in earlier posts: Eliza Thomasina (Walsh) Briscoe (1808-1875) on 11 July 2021; Thomas Walsh (1777-1810) on 28 Aug 2017; and Ann Eloisa French (1787-1835) on 13 Oct 2017, Jamaican church records show that Eliza Thomasina was born in Kingston, Jamaica, the daughter of one A.E. French. Subsequently, a local professional genealogist confidently declared that A.E. French had African slave origins rather than European. Other researchers have suggested that she was most likely Ann Eloisa (or Ann Eliza) French who was a quadroon, a person of one-quarter Black ancestry, however no documentary evidence has yet been discovered.

Ann Eloisa’s mother was Jane Charlotte Beckford a free mulatto (which is a person with one white and one black parent) who was born in about 1762. Jane Charlotte was an interesting figure. In 1782 George French, an Assistant Judge in the Jamaica High Court and a Solicitor for the Crown and Clerk of the Peace in Spanish Town (The Ffrench Connection website), petitioned the House of Assembly on behalf of Jane Charlotte Beckford for the granting of rights and privileges of white people. Subsequently in 1784 the Jamaica House of Assembly passed an Act to entitle Jane Charlotte Beckford of Saint Catherine a free mulatto, and George French and Edward French free quadroons the children of the said Jane Charlotte Beckford, to the same Rights and Privileges with English subjects born of White Parents under certain Restrictions.

Jane Charlotte is believed to be the illegitimate daughter of Ballard Beckford and Sarah (or Mary) Smith. Because Jane Charlotte was a mulatto, Sarah Smith or her ancestor would have been my slave ancestor transported from Senegal.

This has led me to have closer look at the slave trade to Jamaica and in particular those slaves who were from Senegal.

The Slave Trade

Historical accounts show that slavery existed in West Africa for hundreds of years before European occupation. African kingdoms engaged in slave trading and African elites held slaves. During the Middle Ages, slaves were transported by Arab camel caravans along hazardous land routes extending northward through the Sahara. Most slaves were prisoners taken during battles between warring tribes or those who had become financial debtors who worked to gain their freedom.

The first African slaves were transported to the New World from about 1517 and the trade continued until the mid-1800s. In total, it is estimated that over 12.5 million African men women and children arrived in the United States, the Caribbean islands and South America. Many nations and merchants being involved, including: Portuguese/Brazil, Spanish, English, French, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, German and American.

Jamaica

Europeans first reached Jamaica through Christopher Columbus in 1494, and the island stayed in Spanish hands until England took possession in 1655. During that period slave transportation was at a low level but under the British rule the demand for slave labour increased as the sugar industry expanded. The slave trade to Jamaica peaked in the last quarter of the 18th century and by the time it was abolished in 1809 almost one million slaves had been imported to Jamaica.

What is the story of the slave trade from Senegal to Jamaica?

Senegal

Senegal, and particularly Goree Island, together with James Island in the Gambia River, were important historical sites in the West African slave trade. For more than three centuries Goree Island was a major slave market that supplied the United States, the Caribbean and Brazil. Strategically, Goree Island offered a safe haven for the anchorage of ships. At its height there were 28 slave houses operating on the island, where kidnapped people from different parts of West Africa were transferred.

Senegambia Region of West Africa

Data source: Slave Voyages Database – Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade – Estimates (Extract)
https://jamaicatimeline.com

The British seized control of Senegal from France in 1758 during the seven years war holding it until 1783 when it again became a French colony. Together with the neighbouring Gambia, this British colony was known as the Senegambia. It is located within a tropical zone bounded by the dry north and wetter forested areas of Guinea to the south.

With the slave trade at its height during this period, the British transported slaves from its many colonies in Africa. The Senegambia region accounted for 3% of the one million slaves imported to Jamaica, as shown in the accompanying table extract.

My African ancestor would have been one of the 27,325 slaves who survived the voyage to Jamaica. Assuming an arrival within one or two generations of when Jane Charlotte Beckford was born in 1762, my ancestor would be included in a smaller group of several thousands. In the absence of detailed historic shipping and slave sales records this will be as close as I will get to identifying my African ancestor.

Family history has enabled me to unearth many ancestors of whom I am proud, amazed and inspired by their achievements and the struggles they endured during those earlier times. My African ancestors have embodied another dimension of survival in the face of some of the worst that humans can inflict on one another.

Eliza Thomasina (Walsh) Briscoe (1808-1875)

Among my less recent female ancestors, Eliza is one who stands out in my mind.

It is a fact in history, and particularly genealogy, that we tend to know less about the women in the past than about their fathers, husbands and sons. As a result, much of what we know about Eliza comes to us through the records associated with the men in her life. But when we can discover details about the lives of our female forebears it can be all the more rewarding.

It appears that much or Eliza’s life centered around her own and her extended family although she didn’t have a very auspicious start. Census records show that Eliza was born in the West Indies, a long way from the British Isles where she spent most of her life.

She was the daughter of Lt. Col. Thomas Walsh of the 56th British Regiment. Thomas came from a very distinguished Irish Jacobite emigre family who had made their home in Brittany, France after their association with the Stuart insurrection led to the confiscation of their large estates in Kilkenny. For a number of generation before Thomas, his family had had a close relationship with French royalty as privateers, merchants and particularly slave traders. Thomas had turned his back on that latter “family business” and opted for a career in the military.

While Thomas was stationed in Jamaica with the 56th British Regiment and as Deputy Adjutant to Sir Eyre Coote the Governor of the island, Eliza was born on 8 March 1808, the illegitimate daughter of one A.E. French. All indications from the wording of Eliza’s baptism records are that A.E. French was not only of European but also of African descent, ironically the descendant of a slave. In his will (part of which is below) Thomas not only acknowledged his daughter but also made provision for her future back in Ireland (seemingly illustrating his desire to firmly establish a home there and distance himself from France).

Thomas Walsh part will (dated 1809)

His will indicated Thomas’ desire for Eliza to be returned to Ireland when she was four years old and to be cared for by his friends and relatives Peter and Sarah Walsh of Belline, Kilkenny. We do not know exactly when Eliza did travel to Ireland, but by that time her father would have been dead, killed in an accidental fall from a gig in Surrey, England in 1810. Peter Walsh had converted from Catholicism to become a Protestant but whatever his religious beliefs he was regarded as a complete gentleman with a cultivated taste and appreciation of the arts as well a patron. At Belline Eliza would have had a comfortable upbringing.

Belline, Home of Peter Walsh in Pilltown, Kilkenny

The next record of Eliza is when the Waterford Mail announced that she had married Henry Harrison Briscoe of Cloncunny on 2 June 1830. Both the Walsh family of Belline and the Briscoe family of Cloncunny had close relations with Lord Bessborough in Kilkenny among the Protestant gentry. Eliza was twenty-two years of age and Henry ten years older when they married and the date may have been specially chosen because it was also Henry’s birthday.

Over the next fifteen years the couple had six children. Thomas Anthony was born in 1831 but died shortly after. Then there were five other children: Edward William, Caroline Elizabeth Henrietta, Alfred Philip, Henry Harrison jr. and Thomasina Marian.

As well managing the Cloncunny estate, Henry was a local magistrate and became an Inspector of Poor Laws. It is assumed that the latter role was at least partly to provide additional income as the economic and social changes in Ireland at the time made living off the land less sustainable. It appears that he was an absentee landlord for much of the time and away in the Poor Laws role in County Mayo and County Clare between 1848 and 1852 during the latter part of the Great Famine.

Earlier in 1846, Henry is recorded in the Slater’s Directory (under Nobility, Gentry and Clergy) living in The Crescent, Onchan on the Isle of Man indicating that this could have been the family’s usual residence. Their youngest child Thomasina was christened in Onchan in 1845 and both Eliza and Thomasina were still at The Crescent, mentioned in the 1851 census living with her father-in-law Edward Briscoe at Onchan on the Isle of Man presumably while Henry was in County Clare. It is not known how long Eliza stayed with Edward but it may have been to care for him as he died there in October 1851.

Henry subsequently took up the role of Superintendent of Poor Laws in Scotland from 1857 until his death in 1864 and he was buried in Inverness. The 1861 census for Inverness shows a Marion Briscoe as a scholar, aged 16 years, which if it is our Thomasina Marian suggests that Eliza was with Henry during his years in Scotland.

After Henry’s death, Eliza spent some time in Devonshire with her older daughter Caroline but she was back living in Cloncunny with Thomasina Marian when she died in 1875. Her other four surviving children were spread far and wide with Edward living in Surrey, Caroline in Devonshire, Alfred a sea captain and Henry in outback Australia. Thomasina was still living at Cloncunny when she died in 1881.

One of my own memorable family history experiences was locating Eliza’s grave in Kilkenny. Within the deserted Church of Ireland churchyard at Graigavine the memorial stands proud indicative of the family’s love and the esteem in which Eliza was held.

Grave of Eliza Thomasina (Walsh) Briscoe

Old Graigavine Churchyard, Kilkenny

Sacred To the Memory of Elizabeth Thomasina Relict of the Late Henry Harrison Briscoe Esq. Of Cloncunny Co. Kilkenny And daughter of the Late Lieut. Col. Walsh of H.M. 56th Regt. Died 13th February 1875 in her 66th Year.

and below   Also to the memory of Marion Thomasina Briscoe Youngest Daughter of the Above Who Died at Cloncunny in Her 35th Year Feb. 6th 1881

My great great grandmother, Eliza Thomasina Walsh, will always have a special place in the Briscoe-Walsh branch of our family tree.

Link

Anthony (Antoine) Vincent Walsh

At this day, 22 January, in 1703, my 5th great-grandfather Anthony (Antoine) Vincent Walsh was baptised in the cathedral in Saint Malo, Brittany France. In terms of my own family history he is quite a significant and controversial figure.

The city of Saint Malo, where he was born, is definitely on my list of place I wish to visit. It is situated on the English Channel and on the right bank of the estuary of the Rance River. It is described as having the old walled city standing on a granite islet that is joined to the mainland by an ancient causeway and by an avenue bridging the inner harbour. The city was named for Maclou, or Malo, an Irish monk, born in what is now known as Wales, who fled to Brittany, making his headquarters on the island in the 6th century. Saint Malo Cathedral church is the city’s centrepiece dating from the twelfth century and with its spire still the tallest building in the city.

Saint Malo

Saint Malo was a long way from the traditional Walsh family home in Kilkenny. Anthony’s Jacobite grandfather James had forfeited his estates of Ballynacooly in the Walsh Mountains in about 1665 in the face of protestant William of Orange’s war in Ireland. Anthony’s father Philip, had been a merchant in Waterford, but then established himself in Saint Malo by about 1685 as a shipbuilder. He came to prominence being recorded as having transported the defeated King James II on board his ship from Kinsale, County Cork to France in July 1690 after the Battle of the Boyne and the unsuccessful bid to reclaim the throne of England. This started the family connections to the Stuarts and was Anthony’s heritage.

Antoine served in the French navy before settling in Nantes, which had emerged as France’s chief slaving port and where there was a large close-knit Irish community. In 1741 he married Mary O’Shiell, a French-Irish businesswoman in Nantes.

In 1744 he commissioned a new French privateer the Du Teillay  of 18 guns, in Nantes. She played a central role in the Jacobite rising of 1745, ferrying Charles Edward Stuart (Bonnie Prince Charlie) to Ardmolich with supplies and funds to support his cause.

‘Action on the 9th of July 1745 between the Lion of 60 guns, Captain Percy Brett / and the Elisabeth of 64 guns, the Doutelle [le Du Teillay] in the distance making / her escape with the Pretender on board./ Painted for Admiral Lord Anson’. Inscription by the painter, Samuel Scott(1702-1772)

In recognition of his support and his noble Irish ancestry, in 1745 James III bestowed upon Anthony the title of Earl Walsh.

Much has been recorded and written about Antoine and the life he led as a successful merchant, a major figure in the slave trade and wealthy sugar plantation owner in the Caribbean. He was instrumental in the triangular trade between Europe, Africa and the French West Indies in Martinique, Guadeloupe and Saint-Domingue.

‘Aeneas McDonald describes him in 1745 as “an eminent merchant of Nantz … This Mr. Welch chiefly trades to Martinico. He has 24 merchantmen and provateers” (The Lyon in Mourning, Scot. Hist. Soc., vol. i, p.293)’

In his book Murder, Mutiny & Mayhem: The Blackest-Hearted Villains from Irish History, Joe O’Shea‘s suggests that this exiled Irishman:

“…had personally bought and sold over 12,000 African slaves and launched 40 cross-Atlantic slave voyages. He was the greatest – or worst – of the Irish-Nantes slavers…”

He died at Cap Francais, San Domingo (now Haiti), on 2 March 1763 and his Jacobite peerage passed to his second and only surviving son, Antoine Jean Baptiste Paulin Walsh.

Today it is difficult to reconcile his slave trading with our world. But while not excusing it, those were obviously different times when it seems to have been viewed almost as a legitimate business activity. It is ironic that his grandson Thomas Walsh (see my post of August 28, 2017) would father a daughter with a descendant of an African slave.