Black Voices Matter

In recent weeks the Black Lives Matter movement has shone a spotlight on the importance of making sure that history reflects the lives of all people and we have found stories of black people in the records from our archive that may surprise you. 

It is easy to think that in a predominantly white rural county such as Dorset there are few stories to discover, but we were able to find more than 20 baptism records for people identified as black dating from 1729 to 1814 and there may have been many more whose ethnicity was not recorded. These were some of the thousands of black people who lived in Georgian Britain. It is impossible to say how many of these people resided in Dorset on a permanent basis however. Many of these records come from ports, most commonly Poole, and it is possible that some were just passing through.  

One of the records we found was the baptism of ‘Robert Williams, a black’ baptised 6th April 1806 in Kinson. We weren’t hopeful of finding out more about Robert. In many cases we have been able to discover little beyond a name. This is not unusual when trying to research the records of people from the late 18th and early 19th century, as anyone who has tried to trace their family tree beyond the mid 1800’s will know! It can be very hard to separate individuals who share a name or track people as they move around the country or beyond. Robert’s name was fairly common and, as a lot of individuals were adults when they were baptised, we didn’t even know his age. 

However, we were lucky. It emerged that Robert didn’t move very far, spending the rest of his life around Canford Magna, Longfleet and Kinson. Robert married Sarah Mingo on 9th December  1813 in Kinson. Robert signs his name in the register, which shows that he was literate. The couple had six children who were baptised in Canford Magna or Hampreston. We know little more about Sarah, other than that she was baptised in Kinson, and her parents were from the area too.

We can be sure that this is the same Robert Williams who appears in the baptism register because the family appears in the 1841 and 1851 censuses. In 1841 the family were living at Kennel Cottage, Canford Heath. Robert’s occupation was given as M.S., an abbreviation for ‘male servant’. His son John was an apprentice shoemaker and his daughter Elizabeth a dress maker. Robert was recorded as being born in foreign lands. 

By the 1851 census the family Robert, Sarah and their son Charles were living in West Howe in the parish of Kinson. Robert was a labourer and Charles a servant. This census recorded that Robert Williams was born in Jamaica and his age as 65, meaning he must have been born there around 1786. We can see that Robert died in 1856 and was buried in Canford Magna. Some of his descendants are still living in Dorset in the 1911 census and it seems quite likely that some may still be living in the county today. We wonder if they know they are descended from a man from Jamaica? 

We have been able to build up a picture of Robert Williams’ life, however we know a lot less about the women mentioned in our next records, but what we do know is intriguing. The registers from Poole record the baptism of ‘a negro woman purchased by Mr Thomas Olive’ on the 27th April 1755 and the baptism of ‘Jane and Susanna, daughters of Thomas Olive and a negro woman’ on 30th April in the same year. 

We wanted to try and find out more about these women and soon came across the will of Thomas Olive, Merchant of Poole. Thomas Olive died in January 1755 and was buried in Poole. In his will he leaves £900, the equivalent of over £100,000 in modern money, for the support of…

…my negro woman called Judith, now in South Carolina and my two children born of her and known by the names of Jane and Susannah…  

Later in the will Thomas requests that his trustees arrange for Judith and her children to be brought over to England, ‘there to be tutored in the fear of the Lord and might become true Christians’. 

This will explains how these three women came to be baptised in Poole, but there are many questions left unanswered. How did they feel about travelling to England, and how were they treated when they got here? If the woman baptised on 27th April 1755 is Judith, the fact that she is not even named in the record makes her status very unclear. Describing her as ‘a woman purchased by Thomas Olive’ suggests that she was viewed as little better than a slave. 

Jane and Susanna are acknowledged as the daughters of Thomas Olive and have been bequeathed a large sum of money, but you wonder how they settled into this strange new country and how Thomas Olive’s kinsmen reacted to their arrival.  

We have not been able to find any documents that tell us what happened to these women. There is a record of a burial of a Jane Ollive in Poole in 1770, but as Thomas had several kinsmen in Poole we cannot be sure that this is the same woman. 

It is frustrating that we can get no more than a glimpse into these lives and it is an important reminder that we need to work hard to make sure that all voices are represented in our records. At the Dorset History Centre we aim to address this by working in partnerships and reviewing our outreach priorities to include work with marginalised communities. In this way that we hope that generations to come will be able to discover what life was like for all the different communities that exist in Dorset, because everyone’s story matters. 

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