Irish Families With Thr Last Name Longs Eho Ownef Slaves in Va
The first affair that stands out as you travel through the Granite City, every bit Aberdeen is known, are the buildings. Grayness and glistening in rare patches of sunlight, Aberdeen's skyline is daubed with cold, shining reminders of the metropolis's reliance on the durable stone at the industry'south 19th-century pinnacle.
Since the 70s, the granite industry has diminished significantly. The North Bounding main oil industry, likewise, has taken like hits since its inception in the metropolis in the late 20th century.
Although oil-rig workers still populate the urban center, with hotels ofttimes occupied past men fresh from long shifts at sea, Aberdeen'southward petroleum-rich heyday is long gone.
But at that place's another trade that, hundreds of years ago, too once brought wealth into the urban center and beyond and is not and so often discussed – the transatlantic slave merchandise.
Although it may not have been specific to Aberdeen, numerous merchants in the metropolis jumped at the chance to accept advantage of slavery in the 17th century, travelling thousands of miles to do so, and bringing the profits back dwelling to Scottish shores.
When I first heard of a possible connectedness between my own heritage and Scotland, my first instinct was to dismiss information technology entirely. I grew up in London and my family unit's origins are Caribbean area.
"Shand is an erstwhile Scottish name, Kuba," my mother told me after I'd asked nearly the roots of her father's surname in my late teens (my surname is formed from my parents' 2 surnames). "There might even exist a purple connectedness too," she'd said.
"Yeah right," I thought, utterly unconvinced. A quick Google search some years subsequently and I found that she was right on both counts: our surname was indeed Scottish, and a member of the Royal Family, the Duchess of Cornwall, was born Camilla Rosemary Shand. But what is at present apparent is that the wealth of information that could potentially tell me most my ancestors has been on my doorstep – well, near – since well before I was born.
I don't say that out of naivety. Uk'southward involvement in the transatlantic slave merchandise – the financial "perks" of which extend across slavery's abolitionism (the Regime only finished paying off its debts to beneficiaries of slavery in 2015) – has been credible to me ever since I was a young child.
I don't retrieve being nether whatsoever illusions about the reason that both sides of my family had ended up in the Caribbean, despite their ethnicity betraying clear ties to countries on the African continent.
I don't particularly remember being in the nighttime about Scotland's role in slavery either. Although, given how little it'south mentioned in discussions about the trade, I may have disregarded it.
That sense of cultural amnesia is something that numerous Scots roughshod prey to post-obit United kingdom's abolition of slavery in 1834.
Matthew Lee, a Glaswegian PhD researcher from the University of Aberdeen who has been looking into Scottish figures who were involved in the slave trade, said: "Various scholars have talked about this idea of popular amnesia that Scots can have.
"When it was raised it would exist: 'Oh aye, merely nosotros were all abolitionists,' and I call up that was how the retentiveness of slavery was crystallised in Scotland for a long time. Over the last couple of decades […] people in Scotland accept definitely started to get more than aware about Scotland'due south connections to slavery in the Caribbean."
When I finally woke up to the legitimacy of my mother's inklings about our family name and its ties to Scotland, and Aberdeen in particular, it was largely downwardly to watching the historian David Olusoga'due south BBC series Black and British: A Forgotten History in 2016. It was the first time I would hear of UCL'southward Legacies of British Slavery database, launched that aforementioned year, and the first key I had to easily looking upwardly the murky details behind my last name.
I started with Shand considering my father's surname, Baptiste, is very common, an issue many Caribbean people come against when trying to pin down their roots, in many cases because enslaved people were often given the final names of the people who owned them.
At the click of a button, there my potential slave-owning ancestors were: John Shand, William Shand and Robert Shand, the just Shands on the list who had enslaved people in Jamaica. I felt as if I had struck claret-stained gold.
Caribbean area family research
About families with Caribbean origins are likely to have had ancestors who were enslaved. Many may also be descended from slave owners.
Caribbean slave registers were only established in 1813, and slavery was abolished in 1834 – effectually vii generations agone. These can be searched on Ancestry.co.uk.
Slave owners' private papers are another source. Just family trees can exist hard to follow considering many slaves were not given surnames, and might carry slave names (the name of a slaver) or their mother's or father's surname – which might itself be a slave name.
Getting to the bottom of your roots is difficult for those with Caribbean heritage. Official names and records have largely been lost. Older generations tin can be reluctant to delve into the often painful details of their past. Oral histories die out as families spread out around the world.
My grandfather, David Shand, died in the UK when my mother was a kid in Jamaica, around a year before he was due to return to the island for good. She never met him. He was always described as a warm human being. A dapper human. Someone who cared deeply about family. But to me, he was a spectre, his memory preserved by 2 sole portraits we had of him in the corner of our living room.
But I wanted to know more. And with these tools at my disposal, I decided to delve deeper.
Which one of these Shands had imposed this title on my family? And how did the suffering of the hundreds of slaves they endemic between them over numerous decades contribute to the luxuries they enjoyed back dwelling? Were their white descendants still enjoying them today?
After further research, I found out that the potential slavers of my ancestors were most likely John and William Shand, brothers from Fettercairn, Aberdeen, who had owned estates in Jamaica very close to where my grandfather's family are withal based today. Between them, they owned around 2,000 slaves across Jamaica.
Many Shands take ties to Aberdeen, including the Duchess of Cornwall'southward ancestors – but the closest I came to firming upward whatsoever kind of "imperial connection" was a book about the proper noun in the National Library of Scotland dating from 1877, suggesting they may have once been linked.
There were other fascinating details virtually their lives. I discovered that Frances Derailed Shand was the daughter of John Shand and a Jamaican "free woman of colour" called Frances Brownish, whom he referred to as his "housekeeper" in letters.
Although nosotros don't know when the elder Frances would have been enslaved, it's probable that there was an imbalance in the power dynamic betwixt her and John.
The pair had seven children together, all built-in in St Catherine, Jamaica, and all brought back to Scotland by John, without their mother, to an manor that he owned called the Burn in Brechin, Angus, in 1816. Of all of the children, Frances became the most successful. She went on to found the Cardiff Plant for the Blind in 1865.
That same manor exists today. Although the Shands somewhen lost it – it was sold by William after John died – there are clues to their lives there that betray an awful lot well-nigh how commonplace it was for Scottish merchants to exit for so-chosen concern opportunities overseas.
Messages Lee shared with i betray some of the brutal realities of working on 1 of the Shand estates. He told me "there are records of financial payments to doctors on some of the Shand estates and [they] really list the blazon of medical treatment that the medico is undertaking, including, you lot know, cleaved ribs, broken arms, bone abscesses. And that suggests physically demanding labour. Non really a civilization of intendance.
"There's as well mention in William's papers of resistance to slavery. He talks about Belmont estate [in Jamaica] and he uses the word evil, the kind of 'evil mindfulness' of the enslaved people. And he reminds the people who are working for him over there that strict discipline is required to make sure that these enslaved people don't stray out of line."
I travelled to the Burn, now an bookish retreat owned past Goodenough College, an educational clemency (which bought it from a dissimilar family), to seek more than clues well-nigh the Shands and Scotland's slavery connection.
On arrival, I had mixed feelings. It was difficult not to accept in the expansive footing without wondering whether enslaved people had contributed to its beauty. Just I too felt detached from it entirely.
If my ancestors had contributed to The Burn's maintenance, at that place was no sign of that anywhere. No reminders of the brutality they endured. Just a long, winding road, lofty trees, the big firm, and the faint sound of the River Due north Esk. It was eerily idyllic, given the connexion I had establish.
The house as it stands today, with its 190 acres of woodlands, isn't the same structure the Shands would accept known, in fact, it's "double if not fifty-fifty more in size today that it originally was", David Turner, Bursar of the Burn, says. But beingness there is centre opening all the same.
The electric current conversation almost Britain's slave-owning past comes after centuries of reticence well-nigh this part of our national history, and institutions have faced controversy as they delve into their past.
Last month, the National Trust had to repeatedly outcome warnings nearly the threats against it by correct-leaning "anti-woke" groups, who don't want it, or charities like it, to be governed by anyone who agrees with efforts to explore its properties' links to slavery and colonialism.
English Heritage, too, has see similar issues, nigh recently finding the n-word scrawled over a portrait of a black model in an exhibition on "Englishness" in Bedfordshire.
I had one-half imagined a similar scenario prior to speaking to Turner. Would only asking nigh the Burn down'southward historic links to slavery go his back up? Obviously not. Turner was enthusiastic about acknowledging the lives of all those who made the Shands' ownership of the estate possible.
"The coin that this house was congenital with was on the backs of slavery and it was incorrect in every aspect," he says.
"I'grand all for doing something that says this house has a by that touches slavery. And if that means planting a tree as a symbol, that, you lot know, we'll never become there again, allow'southward talk well-nigh how nosotros can remember all those people that went before.
"As a armed services man, every xi November, we stand silent remembering warriors that have fallen, soldiers that accept been killed in conflict, soldiers that died so that others could live in a way that isn't oppressive. Mayhap we should be doing something very like and remembering those who were enslaved? Nosotros always say in the military – lest we forget."
Lee shares Turner's sentiments. "It's important to recognise that the university [Aberdeen] does have connections to slavery in the Caribbean area."
He says people in Scotland have get more aware of Britain'due south connections to colonialism and slavery, and Scotland'southward part in it, especially after the Black Lives Thing protests concluding yr.
He adds: "Nosotros organised an bookish briefing just in the summertime gone, and the theme was north-e Scotland and colonialism. We had about 20 people requite papers on different aspects of this region's connections, both to the West Indies and the then-chosen Eastward Indies to South Asia."
Though I started off this journey trying to find more than clues most my roots, I've ended up with cognition that extends far beyond myself. These are the sorts of conversations that tin can teach united states of america not just where nosotros came from equally a lodge, merely where we can strive to exist in the time to come.
Without discussions like these, I wouldn't accept nearly equally much information as I practice now about the Shand proper name and my connection to it. Nor would I have found out that my mother was right all those years ago.
I don't take all of the answers today. I may never truly uncover the truth most how my family came to have a connection with this once-prominent Scottish family.
Were we connected in name merely? Or blood? Information technology's difficult to say. But this, I retrieve, is the best start I could have hoped for. Who knows how far you'll get if you try to uncover your ain roots.
Source: https://inews.co.uk/news/long-reads/search-family-slave-history-links-scotland-highlands-royal-connection-1278457
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