Fact File: MARY URSEAL ALLAN  

Claim Number:                                   182                                

Compensation:                                   £20 12S 10D                 

Number of Enslaved in Claim:           1           

Parish:                                                 St George                             

Parliamentary Papers:                        P. 95                

Family 

Little is known about where she was from or even her ethnicity. However, she may have been the Mary Allan who married William Wellington in St George in 1827.  A notice of the wedding was posted in the St Georges Chronicle And Grenada Gazette 26 May 1827.

This public notice of her marriage is significant as it strongly suggests that Mary Allan was socially recognised within the white colonial community. Newspapers of this kind routinely reported marriages of white  and elite “free coloured” residents, but interracial marriages were exceptional, and likely framed with explicit racial descriptors. The absence of any qualifying language in the notice points to a marriage considered socially unremarkable, most consistent with both parties being white.

Business Interests 

Mary Urseal Allan emerges from the records as a modest but telling figure within the domestic landscape of slavery in urban Grenada, her life illustrating how enslavement permeated even small households beyond the great plantation estates. 

She lived in the parish of St George, where she was recorded as the owner of a single enslaved woman, Catherine. Catherine had been born enslaved in Grenada in 1787 and appears consistently in the island’s slave registers up to 1834. By the final register, Catherine was 47 years old, suggesting a lifetime spent in bondage. Given the scale of Mary Allan’s household, Catherine was almost certainly employed as a domestic worker, responsible for the daily labour that sustained Mary’s domestic life rather than plantation production.

Mary would have grown to be very reliant on Catherine’s services.

Compensation claim 

Mary Allan’s claim for compensation following the abolition of slavery reflects this small-scale ownership. Under claim number 182, she received £20 12s 10d for the loss of Catherine’s labour. Though a relatively small sum compared to major estate awards, it nonetheless places Mary firmly within the compensation system that prioritised enslavers’ financial interests while offering nothing to the formerly enslaved themselves.

Death 

There are no conclusive records of her civil record, however, she may be the Mary Allan recorded as having died on 7 February 1884 in Upper Monserrat (now Upper Lucas Street), St George’s, aged 82. If so, she lived through the profound transformation of Grenadian society from slavery, through apprenticeship, to full emancipation and beyond.

The cause of death was given as senile debility. At this time, senile debility was a catch-all medical diagnosis used by doctors and registrars to describe death resulting from old age and gradual physical decline, rather than from a single identifiable disease. It literally meant a weakening (debility) associated with advanced age (senile), and it was commonly applied to elderly people whose bodies had slowly failed.  It was often used where someone had lived to what was considered a respectable old age and had declined gradually. In Mary’s case, dying at around 82 years old in Grenada would have been regarded as exceptional longevity for the period, particularly in a tropical climate.

The Enslaved 

Record from Slave Registers

Key P=Present

Catherine was the only enslaved person registered by Mary who, by signing her name with an “x”, indicated that she was illiterate. Catherine was born enslaved in Grenada and appears on the Slave Registers from 1819 to 1834 when she likely was retained during the apprenticeship period and finally released in 1838 age 51 years old.  

Catherine would have emerged from enslavement as a woman of considerable experience and resilience. By the time she was finally released in 1838, at around 51 years old, she had survived childhood enslavement, decades of domestic labour, and the upheaval of the apprenticeship system. Women like Catherine carried with them highly valued skills: cooking, laundering, childcare, household management, and intimate knowledge of urban life in the Town of St George. This expertise would translate directly into paid work after emancipation. 

It is very likely that Catherine continued working as a domestic labourer, either for wages or in exchange for housing, food, or other support. Many formerly enslaved women remained in the same households where they had worked previously, but now as paid servants, negotiating terms that gave them far greater autonomy than before. So, it is possible that Catherine chose to stay with Mary. Others moved between households, offering their services independently and choosing employers who treated them with respect or who were connected through church or community networks. 

Catherine may also have become part of Grenada’s emerging free Black community, building relationships beyond her Mary’s household. Churches played a crucial role at this time, (Catholic predominantly, but  for Free Coloureds and Black people this was especially the Methodist church), which provided spiritual support, social networks, and sometimes schooling for children and adults alike. Women of her generation were often central figures within these networks. 

At her age, Catherine may also have taken on a mentoring or caregiving role, looking after younger women or children, passing on skills and knowledge shaped by lived experience. In many post-emancipation households, older women became anchors of stability and widely respected figures. 

Most importantly, Catherine lived her final years as a legally free woman. She could choose where to live, whom to work for, how to spend her time, and with whom to form family or community bonds. Even if material conditions remained hard, this freedom represented a profound and meaningful transformation. 

Catherine’s life, traced across the registers from 1819 to 1834, is therefore a record of survival and a quiet testimony to endurance, skill, and dignity in freedom. Like many women of her generation in Grenada, she helped to lay the foundations of post-emancipation society.

Acknowledgements

 We are grateful to Dr. John Angus Martin of the Grenada Genealogical and Historical Society  Facebook group for his editorial support.

Fact File

Sir William ALEXANDER (1755-1842)
The Right Honourable Sir William Alexander was a distinguished Scottish jurist whose long career placed him among the most respected legal figures of late Georgian and early Victorian Britain. Born in Edinburgh on 18 May 1755, he was the eldest son of William Alexander (1729–1819) and Christine Aitchison, and heir to a family deeply embedded in Scotland’s civic and political life. 

His paternal grandfather, also William Alexander, had served with distinction as Lord Provost of Edinburgh between 1752 and 1754 and later represented the city in Parliament from 1755 to 1761. This lineage situated Sir William within a tradition of public service that shaped both his ambitions and his sense of duty.

He was raised in a large family that included numerous brothers and sisters including: Charles, James, Apolline, Bethia, Marianne, Christine, Jane, Robert, Isabella, Joanna, Andrew, and John Regis Alexander. 

Sir William benefited from the intellectual and social advantages of Edinburgh during the Scottish Enlightenment. He was educated with a view to the law and, at an early age, committed himself to a legal career in England.

On 3 May 1771 he was admitted to the Middle Temple, one of the Inns of Court, and after a prolonged period of study and preparation he was called to the English Bar on 22 November 1782. 

He quickly established himself in the Court of Chancery, where he practised for nearly two decades. He developed a reputation as a careful and authoritative lawyer, particularly skilled in matters of equity and real property law which were fields that demanded both technical mastery and sound judgment. 

His abilities and professional standing were recognised in 1800 when he was appointed King’s (then Queen’s) Counsel, marking him out as one of the leading advocates of his generation. In 1809 his career advanced further with his appointment as one of the Masters in Chancery, a senior judicial office involving oversight of complex legal and financial matters within the equity courts.

The culmination of Sir William Alexander’s judicial career came on 9 January 1824, when he was appointed Chief Baron of the Exchequer, one of the highest judicial offices in England. Upon assuming this role, he was knighted and sworn in as a member of the Privy Council of the United Kingdom, reflecting both his eminence within the legal profession and his trusted position within the constitutional framework of the state. As Chief Baron, he presided over cases concerning revenue and finance at a time when Britain was navigating the economic and administrative challenges of the post-Napoleonic era. 

After six years in this demanding office, Sir William resigned in December 1830, making way for Lord Lyndhurst to succeed him as Lord Chief Baron. Retirement allowed him to withdraw from public life and return to Scotland, where he lived at his estate in Airdrie, Lanarkshire. 

In 1837 he further augmented his landed position by inheriting the estate of Cloverhill in Dunbartonshire, consolidating his status as a Scottish gentleman of means and standing.

Sir William Alexander died in London on 29 June 1842, at the age of eighty-seven. In accordance with his Scottish roots and family connections, he was buried at the small burial ground attached to Roslin (Roslyn) Chapel, south of Edinburgh, a site long associated with notable Scottish families and historical memory. There is a memorial plaque in his name at the Chapel.  His estate was worth £140,000 when he died. 

Remembered for his integrity, learning, and long service to the law, Sir William Alexander exemplified the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century ideal of the professional jurist: a man whose authority rested not on political ambition but on legal expertise, public trust, and a strong sense of inherited responsibility. His career bridged Scotland and England, Enlightenment-era training and Victorian institutions, leaving a quiet but enduring mark on the British legal system.

Compensation Claims 

Sir William Alexander was among the British elite who benefited materially from the system of slave compensation that followed the abolition of slavery in the British Empire. Although he is best known as a senior judge and former Chief Baron of the Exchequer, the compensation records reveal that he was also a substantial absentee claimant with extensive financial interests in enslaved labour on Grenadian plantations. Through a series of awards made in the mid-1830s, Sir William received compensation for enslaved people held on multiple estates across the island, reflecting both the scale and diversity of his colonial investments. 

Tempe Estate

Sir William Alexander’s involvement on this estate, claim no. 445, places him firmly within the network of British elites who held substantial financial interests in plantation slavery at the moment of its abolition. The claim, settled on 26 October 1835, related to 168 enslaved men, women, and children and resulted in a total compensation award of £4,499 16s 1d. Although John Alexander Hankey was listed as the first claimant and acted as proprietor and attorney for the estate, Sir William Alexander appeared among the third claimants, alongside members of the Trevelyan family and other prominent figures. This structure indicates that Tempe Estate was held under a complex web of ownership, trusts, and financial obligations rather than by a single individual. Sir William’s position as a third claimant strongly suggests that he held a legally recognised interest in the enslaved people on the estate. The administration of the claim was carried out by Hankey and his attorneys, reflecting the common practice of absentee ownership. Sir William, by this point retired from high judicial office, did not manage Tempe Estate directly and would not have resided in Grenada. Nevertheless, his entitlement to a share of the compensation demonstrates that he benefited materially from the labour of the 168 enslaved individuals whose lives were monetised at emancipation. Their coerced work over many years underpinned the estate’s value and, ultimately, the compensation paid out by the British Treasury. Tempe Estate was one of Sir William Alexander’s most significant Grenadian interests, both in terms of the number of enslaved people involved and the scale of the award. The size of the compensation places the estate among the larger holdings on the island. This claim also highlights the close interconnection between legal authority and slave ownership in Britain. As a former Chief Baron of the Exchequer and Privy Councillor, Sir William stood at the apex of the British legal system, yet he simultaneously held financial interests in enslaved people treated as property under colonial law. 

Claim no 760

Sir William Alexander was one of several secondary claimants with a recognised legal or financial interest in a small group of enslaved people. The claim, settled on 16 November 1835, related to 14 enslaved individuals and resulted in a total award of £356 1s 3d. The first claimant was John Alexander Hankey, who was the principal party entitled to compensation and likely held the direct proprietary interest in the enslaved people concerned. Sir William Alexander appears among a larger group listed as third claimants, alongside members of the Trevelyan family, Thomson Hankey, and Sir Robert Heron, some of whom were acting as executors. This configuration strongly suggests that the enslaved people formed part of a complex estate, trust, or mortgage arrangement rather than a single, straightforward plantation ownership. Sir William’s presence as a third claimant is particularly revealing because it shows Sir William operating in his professional capacity as well as his personal one. As a senior lawyer and judge, he was well positioned to act as trustee or executor in complex estates that included enslaved people as assets whose value could be divided among multiple parties with legal claims. His role did not require him to manage enslaved labour directly.  Slavery was embedded within British legal and financial structures extending far beyond plantation ownership alone. This smaller claim demonstrates how elite networks bound senior British figures into slavery’s profits, even when their connection to enslaved people was mediated through legal instruments rather than plantation management. 

Simon Estate

A much larger award followed under Grenada claim no. 771. Sir William received a share of £4,195 6s 10d for 143 enslaved people. This reinforced his position as a major beneficiary of the compensation scheme and suggests a continuing pattern of investment in plantation slavery. Simon Estate, like many Grenadian plantations, relied on the coerced labour of enslaved men, women, and children whose forced productivity underpinned both colonial wealth and metropolitan careers. 

Requin Estate
His compensation portfolio expanded further with Grenada claim no. 857, which yielded £5,552 10s 4d for 208 enslaved people. This was one of Sir William’s largest payments and points to substantial enslaved holdings whose monetary value was transferred directly from the British Treasury to him at emancipation.

 Sagesse Estate
Another major award was made under Grenada claim no. 860 for Sagesse Estate, amounting to £5,844 18s 8d for 231 enslaved people. Sagesse was one of Grenada’s better-known plantations, and compensation at this level indicates ownership or control over a very large enslaved population. Taken together with his other claims, this award shows that Sir William’s wealth was significantly bolstered by the final act of state-sanctioned compensation to slaveholders. 

Beausejour Estate

Finally, Sir William received a share of £6,543 5s 11d under Grenada claim no. 435 for 240 enslaved people. This was his largest single award and placed him firmly among the most heavily compensated Grenadian claimants.

Note: Sir William was one of a number of claimants for all of these estates. Each estate was awarded a single compensation sum, which was then divided among claimants according to legally defined interests. The order of claimant indicates legal standing (principal claimant, executor, or beneficiary), not equal entitlement.  

In the slave compensation records, the first claimant was the principal claimant, usually the collecting proprietor or the person with authority to lodge and receive the award on behalf of the estate. 

The second claimant was typically an executor or trustee, recognised because of a formal legal responsibility arising from a will, settlement, or trust. 

Third claimants were those with additional legally defined interests in the enslaved people or the estate, such as beneficiaries, co-owners, mortgage holders, or parties named in trust arrangements. 

The order in which claimants are listed does not indicate that the compensation was divided equally; it reflects legal standing and the nature of each person’s interest, not the size of the payment they ultimately received.

Viewed collectively, Sir William Alexander’s compensation claims as a 3^rd claimant reveal the deep entanglement between Britain’s legal, political, and judicial elite and the economics of slavery. While he occupied one of the highest judicial offices in the land and sat on the Privy Council, he was simultaneously a beneficiary of a system that treated enslaved people as financial assets. His compensation awards illustrate how abolition reinforced elite wealth derived from slavery converting human lives into state-backed monetary payments that flowed directly into the hands of men like Sir William Alexander.

Sir William Alexander and the Slave Registers 

Sir William does not appear as a named owner in the Grenada slave registers, despite being a major beneficiary of enslaved labour on the island. This absence reflects the way slave ownership was structured rather than a lack of involvement. As a senior British judge, Privy Councillor, and absentee investor, Sir William’s interests in Grenadian estates were held through trusts, mortgages, executorships, and shared ownership arrangements. Day-to-day control of enslaved people was exercised by local proprietors, attorneys, or estate managers, whose names were recorded in the registers instead. 

The slave registers were designed to track the movement, numbers, and legal status of enslaved people, not to expose the full chain of financial or beneficial ownership. As a result, figures such as Sir William remain largely invisible in these records. 

His presence emerges only when the system ended, in the compensation claims, where his legal entitlement to enslaved people was formally acknowledged and converted into cash. His absence from the registers therefore highlights a structural feature of British slavery: elite beneficiaries were often shielded from direct identification with the enslaved people who sustained their wealth.

Isabella Hankey nee Alexander

 Isabella HANKEY was Sir William’s sister.  She married the London West India merchant John Peter HANKEY (1770-1807) and was the mother of John Alexander HANKEY.  She passed away in 1851, leaving a personal estate valued at £120,000. Although not listed in the compensation awards, she inherited estates and enslaved people in Grenada, actively managing her inheritance as an absentee owner. 

Her will, proved on January 31, 1851, detailed her bequests. She left the manor of Essendine in Rutland to her eldest son, John Alexander HANKEY, and stipulated that her son Henry Aitchison HANKEY would not benefit unless he renounced an annuity she had charged on her real estate. 

Her husband had left his Grenada estates, including sugar works and enslaved people, in trust. Two-thirds of these estates were for Isabella’s lifetime, with one-third to be disposed of by her.

Isabella also purchased additional property in Grenada, which she left in trust to her sons John Alexander HANKEY and Thomson HANKEY junior, to be divided among her four children: Julia Bathurst, John Alexander, Henry Aitchison, and William. Julia received portraits and other effects, while each son was initially bequeathed £20,000. 

A codicil in 1848 revoked some bequests, dividing her estate three ways among her sons and leaving the Grosvenor Square house to Julia. 

Another codicil in 1850 addressed potential compulsory purchases by the Great Northern Railway, directing proceeds to John Alexander Hankey. 

John Peter HANKEY’S will, proved in 1807, specified that his estates in Grenada would be divided among his children after Isabella’s death. Isabella’s daughter, Julia, died in 1877, also leaving £120,000.

Grand Bras Estate, St Andrew
Isabella played a significant and long-lasting role in the ownership and control of Grand Bras Estate 

After the death of her husband, John Peter Hankey, in 1807, Isabella’s relationship to Grand Bras shifted from that of a spouse within a mercantile-plantation family to an active property holder in her own right. 

Her will records that she purchased a one-eighth share in Grand Bras Estate from Sir Morris Ximenes, thereby consolidating her proprietary interest. This purchase is important as it demonstrates deliberate investment and agency in a Grenadian slave estate.

From 1807 until 1851, Isabella held Grand Bras as a tenant-for-life, meaning she was entitled to the income and benefits of the estate for the duration of her life, even though the underlying capital interest may ultimately have passed to heirs or trustees. During this period, she was recognised as a joint owner, sharing legal and financial interests with other members of the Hankey family, notably Thomson Hankey, who is recorded as a joint owner from 1817 to 1832. 

Isabella’s ownership sat within a much older and complex structure of shared proprietorship. Grand Bras had long been divided into fractional interests held by elite British figures, including Sir Thomas Charles Bunbury, Lauchlin Macleane, and Clotworthy Upton, many of whom had earlier delegated management to London merchants such as Simond & Hankey. 

The estate was also heavily financialised. In 1775 it was mortgaged, along with the enslaved people attached to it, to David Garrick. This illustrates how enslaved labourers were treated as collateral within metropolitan credit networks that Isabella later inherited into.

Although she did not reside in Grenada, her interests were exercised through attorneys and agents, including Bridgeman Hewitson and John Stokes, who managed the estate, its enslaved workforce, and its commercial operations on behalf of the owners. 

Finally, we can state that Isabella Hankey’s involvement in Grand Bras Estate was active, sustained, and financially consequential. She expanded her stake through purchase, held legal rights to the estate’s income for over four decades, and participated, through agents, in the plantation economy that depended on enslaved labour. Her role illustrates how elite British women could be embedded participants in Caribbean slavery, exercising ownership and control through legal instruments even while remaining geographically distant from the plantation itself.   

Isabella Hankey and the Slave Registers 

Despite being a joint owner and tenant-for-life of Grand Bras Estate from 1807 to 1851, Isabella does not appear by name in the Grenada slave registers. Her interests were represented through attorneys, agents, or co-owners who acted on her behalf in Grenada. Enslaved people on Grand Bras were therefore registered under the estate name or under the names of local managers rather than under Isabella’s own.

This absence should not be mistaken for a lack of ownership or agency. Isabella’s will records her purchase of a one-eighth share in Grand Bras following her husband’s death, demonstrating an active decision to invest in and consolidate her stake in the estate. For more than four decades, she was legally entitled to the income generated by enslaved labour there. The registers obscure this reality because they privileged operational control over beneficial ownership and because women’s property rights were commonly mediated through legal instruments rather than personal registration. 

Isabella Hankey’s case shows how enslaved people could be owned by women whose names were largely absent from colonial administrative records, even while their financial rights were firmly protected. Her involvement at Grand Bras illustrates how slavery was sustained by absentee families, widows, and investors whose authority operated through law, inheritance, and credit rather than physical presence.

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Acknowledgements

 We are grateful to Dr. John Angus Martin of the Grenada Genealogical and Historical Society Facebook group for his editorial support.

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References

William Alexander (judge) - Wikipedia 

Rt. Hon. Sir William Alexander  - www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/45714 

A catalogue of notable Middle Templars, with brief biographical notices/Alexander, Sir William - Wikisource, the free online library 

Isabella Hankey (nee Alexander) https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/2146634544 

Grand Bras Estate https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/estate/view/1303

Fact File: Boyd and William Alexander 

 Claim Number: 995 

Compensation:  £3679 6S 5D

Number of Enslaved in Claim: 153

Parish: Union Estate, Carriacou

Parliamentary Papers: p. 312 

Boyd Life Dates: 1796-1861

William Life Dates: 1790-1853

We pick up their story in Paisley, Scotland in 1413, when Richard Alexander appears in the records as a lawyer and the feu superior of Paisley Abbey. His legal training and authority placed him among the notable men of his time, and the family’s role as feu superiors continued for centuries. The Alexanders held this position until the mid-1700s, when shifting fortunes and opportunities drew them away from Paisley towards the lands of Southbar at Erskine. These early centuries formed the bedrock of a family that would later leave its mark on Scotland, India, and even the literary history of Robert Burns.

It was Claud Alexander of Southbar, however, who propelled the family into a new era. Entering the service of the East India Company, he rose to become Paymaster General, a post of significant responsibility. The wealth he accumulated in India enabled him, on his return home, to purchase the Ballochmyle House and Estate in 1776. At that time Ballochmyle was considerably larger than today, and although the house had not yet grown to its later Victorian scale, it was a handsome and admired residence.

Ballochmyle House before 1887, when the building was completely redesigned. Photo taken from https://www.ayrshirehistory.com/mauchline_ballochmyle_old_house.html

The estate had previously belonged to the Whiteford family, who had been financially ruined by the catastrophic collapse of the Ayr Bank. Their misfortune coincided with a poignant literary episode: Robert Burns had penned “The Bonny Lass of Ballochmyle” for Miss Whiteford but was unable to deliver it before she left the estate. When Claud became laird, Burns redirected the poem and a letter to Wilhelmina Alexander, Claud’s sister. Wilhelmina was charmed, though Claud himself was far from pleased. Wilhelmina eventually moved to London, faded from local memory, and died there; her burial place remains unknown. 

Claud, the first Alexander laird of Ballochmyle, had three sons with Helenora nee Maxwell: Claud, William Maxwell and Boyd.

Claud Alexander (1789–1845),

 Claud Junior inherited aspects of his father’s entrepreneurial and administrative spirit. He was involved in the family's business and mercantile ventures. See digital image.  

William Maxwell Alexander (1790–1853)

William trained as an architect, became laird of Ballochmyle at a moment of major infrastructural change. When the Glasgow Dumfries and South West Railway Company sought to cut a line through Mauchline, William Maxwell resisted until he personally approved the design of what became the striking Ballochmyle Viaduct. Preliminary work began in 1846. William Maxwell also inherited his father’s social reforming instinct: together with the pioneering industrialist David Dale, he helped build the village of Catrine, conceived as a model industrial community.

Boyd ALEXANDER (1796-1861)

 Boyd was part of a prominent family with notable ties to both commerce and British colonial interests. He was a London-based merchant involved in the West India trade during the early 19th century. He was a partner in the firm Hon. William Fraser, Alexander & Co., together with his brother William which played a significant role as mortgagees of "slave-property." This indicates that the firm held financial stakes in estates or assets tied to slavery, a common practice in that era, especially for firms involved in the Caribbean, where enslaved labour was integral to plantation economies.

Through the partnership, Boyd had substantial interests in the slave trade outside of Grenada. He also owned estates and claimed compensation for estates in Antigua, St Vincent and Trinidad & Tobago. The partnership was ranked fourteenth among the merchant houses receiving compensation in 1834.

Boyd was also a proprietor of the American Land Company in 1835, indicating his investments extended beyond the West Indies into American property. This company appears to have been related to land speculation in the United States, another common pursuit for wealthy British merchants at the time.

Family 
In terms of his personal life, Boyd married Sophia Elizabeth Hobhouse, the daughter of Sir Benjamin Hobhouse, 1st Baronet, in 1828. They had six children between 1831 and 1839, and in the 1840s, the family was living in Hanover Terrace, Westminster, London. 

Boyd’s family continued to have an aristocratic lineage, with his son, Major-General Sir Claud Alexander, becoming the 1st Baronet, and his grandson Sir Claud Alexander, 2nd Baronet, continuing the line. The family's influence persisted well into the 20th century.

Boyd’s Descendants Major-General Sir Claud Alexander
Claud, son of Boyd Alexander, embarked on a distinguished military career. He fought in the Crimean War, later rising to become a Major General in the Grenadier Guards. Beyond his military standing, he entered public life and served for ten years as Member of Parliament for South Ayrshire. His wife had a vision for Ballochmyle that exceeded even the elegance of the original house. Finding it too small for their growing family and social obligations, she commissioned a major expansion. The transformation culminated in 1887, producing the grand Victorian house known until recent decades. 

Sir Claud Alexander, 2nd Baronet (-1947)
Claud moved away from Ballochmyle House around 1900 and carved an unusual and respected path as a zoologist. His passion for animals led him to keep an extensive collection, even a small zoo of his own.  Ballochmyle House, no longer the family’s main residence, was rented out until 1938, when it was sold to the Scottish Home and Health Department and became Ballochmyle Hospital. 

Wilfred Alexander
Wilfred entered the diplomatic service and became British Consul in Beijing. It was there, inside the British Embassy, that his son,later Sir Claud Hagart-Alexander was born. Tragedy struck early: Wilfred died from an unidentified "Oriental fever" while serving in Beijing. Widowed and with three young children, Sir Claud’s mother brought the family back to Britain during his infancy. 

Sir Claud Hagart-Alexander 
When Sir Claud Alexander, 2nd Baronet died in 1947, the title of Laird of Ballochmyle passed to Sir Claud Hagart-Alexander, though the estate itself had by then long left the family’s possession. His life became both a custodian’s memory of a great heritage and the continuation of a lineage that had travelled from medieval Paisley to imperial India, from Burns country to Beijing.

Boyd and William’s interest in Grenada 
Boyd Alexander and William Maxwell Alexander became involved in Grenada Claim No. 955 not as enslavers or estate owners, but as creditors of the estate’s proprietor, Rev. Peter William Pegus. Their role arose entirely from a financial relationship rather than any direct connection to the management of Union Estate in Carriacou or to the people who were enslaved there. They do not appear in the slave registers.

According to the key document T71/880, the Alexanders together with Hon. William Fraser, Claud Neilson and Hugh Hyndman had secured a legal judgment against Rev. Peter William Pegus on 27 April 1835 for the sum of £1,664 7s 6d. They also held a legal claim for a further £1,250 in advances, and had already lodged an earlier counterclaim for £832 3s 9d. These sums together created a total debt of £2,082 3s 9d owed to them by Pegus. When Pegus submitted his claim as the owner in fee of the enslaved people on Union Estate, the creditors counterclaimed for their outstanding debts. Pegus did not dispute the counterclaim and formally admitted that the money was owed, allowing the creditors to receive the portion of the compensation fund that corresponded to their judgment.

Errors in the Parliamentary Papers complicated the picture. The published volume incorrectly inflated the creditors’ award to £3,082 3s 9d and mistakenly merged the names of Boyd Alexander and Hugh Hyndman into a fictitious individual, “Alex. Hugh Hyndman Boyd.” The accurate record, however, is preserved in the original register T71/880, which confirms that the group received £2,082 3s 9d, while Rev. Pegus retained £1,597 2s 8d of the compensation. The enslaved people themselves had been formally registered in 1834 by Lewis Hoyes, acting as Pegus’s agent, as recorded in T71/328.

The Alexanders’ involvement reflects a familiar pattern in the financial structures of British Caribbean slavery. Wealthy Scottish and English families often became entangled in the plantation economy as lenders, mortgage holders and securities creditors, even when they had no direct role in plantation ownership. Their money circulated through London’s commercial networks, which routinely financed estates in the Caribbean. Boyd and William Maxwell Alexander, coming from a well-connected Scottish family with London interests, fit squarely within this wider financial ecosystem. Their presence in the claim demonstrates how deeply slavery’s economic reach extended into British society, drawing in individuals who may never have set foot in the Caribbean but nevertheless profited from the system through the enforcement of debts tied to enslaved people.

Boyd’s Compensation claims 

Boyd Alexander emerged as a significant compensation awardee across the Caribbean. His claims show him operating primarily as a mortgagee and judgment creditor, revealing the breadth of his entanglement in the financial infrastructure of slavery rather than in day-to-day plantation management.

A mortgagee was a lender who had advanced money to an estate owner and taken a mortgage as security. In the Caribbean plantation economy, that security almost always included land, buildings, crops, and enslaved people, who were treated in law as property. If the owner defaulted or became insolvent, the mortgagee had a legal claim on the estate’s value. When the British government paid compensation for the loss of enslaved “property,” mortgagees were recognised as having a prior or shared right to that compensation, because their loans had been secured on enslaved labour. This meant that compensation money could be paid directly to a mortgagee rather than to the resident owner. 

A judgment creditor was someone who had gone further than holding a debt or mortgage and had successfully sued the debtor in court. Once a court issued a judgment confirming that a specific sum was owed, the creditor gained the right to enforce repayment. In the compensation context, this allowed judgment creditors to lodge counterclaims against emancipation awards. If the court judgment pre-dated the compensation decision and was accepted by the Commission, the judgment creditor could intercept part or all of the compensation before it reached the estate owner.

Grenada Compensation Claim 

Boyd was as an awardee and judgment creditor for the Union Estate, Carriacou (Claim No. 955 ). Here, compensation associated with 153 enslaved people, amounting in the Parliamentary Papers to £3,679 6s 5d, was subject to a complex division between the estate owner, Rev. Peter William Pegus, and Pegus’s creditors.

Rev. Peter William Pegus appeared before the Compensation Commission as owner-in-fee of 153 enslaved people. Those enslaved people had been formally registered in 1834 by Lewis Hoyes, Pegus’s local agent, which established Pegus’s legal title at the moment of emancipation. On that basis, Pegus submitted the primary compensation claim, assessed at £3,679 6s 5d.

However, Pegus did not have an unfettered right to that money. By the time compensation was being processed, he was already heavily indebted. Boyd Alexander, together with William Maxwell Alexander, Hon. William Fraser, Claud Neilson and Hugh Hyndman, had obtained a court judgment dated 27 April 1835 against Pegus. That judgment confirmed that Pegus owed them £1,664 7s 6d, and in addition they held a charge for further advances of £1,250. When combined with an earlier counterclaim of £832 3s 9d, the total sum legally owed to them amounted to £2,082 3s 9d.

Because this debt was legally established before compensation was finalised, Boyd Alexander and the other creditors were entitled to intervene. They lodged a counterclaim against Pegus’s compensation award, asserting their right to be paid first out of the compensation fund. Crucially, Pegus admitted the counterclaim. There was no dispute over the existence or validity of the debt, which meant the Compensation Commission accepted the creditors’ claim in full.

This is where Boyd Alexander’s role becomes clear. He received compensation because the British state’s payment for enslaved people was treated as an asset that could be seized to satisfy Pegus’s debts. Boyd Alexander’s financial interest in slavery at Union Estate therefore operated through credit and the courts, not through plantation management. This financial power allowed Boyd and his associates to extract value from enslavement without ever owning the estate or residing in Grenada.

The published Parliamentary Papers (p. 312) obscure this reality in two ways. First, they incorrectly state that the creditor group received £3,082 3s 9d, when the original register T71/880 shows that they received only £2,082 3s 9d. Second, they mistakenly collapse Boyd Alexander and Hugh Hyndman into a single individual, “Alex. Hugh Hyndman Boyd,” a clerical error that has caused long-standing confusion. The archival record makes clear that Boyd Alexander and Hugh Hyndman were separate men, each acting as judgment creditors.

Once the correction is applied, the financial outcome is straightforward. Of the total compensation for 153 enslaved people, £2,082 3s 9d was diverted to Boyd Alexander and his fellow creditors to satisfy Pegus’s debts, while £1,597 2s 8d was paid to Pegus himself as the residual owner-in-fee.

Compensation claims across the Caribbean 

Boyd’s earliest recorded involvement appears to have been in Antigua, where he was an awardee as mortgagee on Yapton Farm (Claim No. 1045). In this case, compensation of £1,681 4s 1d was paid in respect of 113 enslaved people. 

Boyd’s most extensive involvement was in St Vincent, where he appears repeatedly as an awardee, often explicitly described as mortgagee, across a cluster of estates. At Lot No. 14 Estate (Claim No. 451), he received £8,926 12s 3d in respect of 339 enslaved people, a very substantial claim reflecting heavy financial exposure.

He was similarly compensated as mortgagee for Montrose (Claim No. 574) with £2,993 13s 1d for 107 enslaved people, Golden Grove (Claim No. 599) with £3,101 19s 9d for 106 enslaved people, and Cheltenham on the island of Mustique (Claim No. 745) with £6,525 9s 0d relating to 257 enslaved people.

In addition to these mortgage-backed claims, Boyd Alexander also appears simply as awardee, without the mortgagee designation, on several St Vincent estates. These include Orange Hill (Claim No. 449B) with £3,363 5s 10d for 243 enslaved people, Waterloo Estate (Claim No. 450) with £7,856 11s 7d for 308 enslaved people, and Sion Hill (Claim No. 557) with £3,794 13s 7d for 139 enslaved people. 

These entries suggest either direct financial entitlement or complex layered interests, but in all cases Boyd Alexander was recognised by the Compensation Commission as having a legitimate claim on the value of enslaved labour.

His involvement extended beyond the Eastern Caribbean into Trinidad, where he was an awardee on Clydesdale Cottage (Claims 1838A & B). There, compensation of £1,341 12s 9d was paid in respect of 26 enslaved people, marking a smaller but still significant financial interest in another colony newly absorbed into the British slave system.

Taken together, Boyd Alexander’s claims span Antigua, Grenada, St Vincent, Mustique and Trinidad, and are linked to at least ten estates and more than 1,800 enslaved people. The pattern is consistent: he functioned as a provider of capital, using mortgages, legal charges and court judgments to secure returns from plantation economies across the Caribbean. When slavery was abolished, the British state’s compensation scheme converted those human securities into cash, much of which flowed to absentee financiers like Boyd Alexander rather than resident planters.

Boyd Alexander’s compensation record illustrates with stark clarity how slavery’s profits were distributed through British financial networks. He did not need to own land or reside in the Caribbean to benefit materially from enslavement. Instead, his wealth was embedded in the system through credit, mortgages and legal enforcement, making him a direct beneficiary of emancipation compensation and a clear example of how the legacies of slavery reached deep into Scottish and metropolitan society.

That wealth helped to sustain the economic security and social standing of the Alexander family in Britain. Boyd’s financial success supported a lifestyle that included residence in Hanover Terrace, Westminster, marriage into the Hobhouse family (linking the Alexanders to baronetcies and political elites), and the ability to raise children with elite military, political and professional prospects. His son became Major-General Sir Claud Alexander, an MP and later a baronet. Subsequent generations moved easily into diplomacy, science, and public life. While Ballochmyle itself was originally purchased with East India Company wealth, the family’s continued prosperity in the nineteenth century was reinforced by capital extracted from Caribbean slavery and crystallised through compensation.

In this way, slavery helped the Alexander family consolidate wealth, status and influence across generations even though they were geographically distant from the day-to-day operations of the system. Their story exemplifies how slavery’s legacy extended deep into Scottish and metropolitan society, shaping elite families whose prosperity rested, in part, on the monetisation of enslaved lives.

Acknowledgements

 We are grateful to Dr. John Angus Martin of the Grenada Genealogical and Historical Society Facebook group for his editorial support.

References

The Alexanders of Paisley https://issuu.com/cloudy242/docs/ckdec21/s/14196921 

The Alexander Family of Ballochmyle  
https://www.ayrshirehistory.com/mauchline_alexander_family_of_ballochmyle.html 

Landed families of Britain and Ireland https://landedfamilies.blogspot.com/2013/10/85-alexander-later-hagart-alexander-of.html 

http://thepeerage.com/p42924.htm 

Slaves and Highlanders | Fraser (Ness Castle) (spanglefish.com) 

Grenada 955 (Union Estate) https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/claim/view/10810 

Boyd Alexander. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/44579

                                             Fact File:

Charles Alexander                                John Alexander 

Claim Number: 742                           Claim Number: 743 

Compensation:  £34 8S 0D              Compensation: £34 8S 0D 

Number of Enslaved in Claim: 1       Number of Enslaved in Claim: 1 

Parish: St Patrick                               Parish: St Patrick 

Parliamentary Papers: p. 99             Parliamentary Papers: p.99 

Life dates: 1802-1861                        Life dates: 1798-1840

Charles Alexander

Charles was born on 5^th December 1802 into a long-established Scottish family from the historic county of Banffshire which is now split between Aberdeenshire and Moray council areas.  

He was the eldest son of Charles ALEXANDER  (1761-1845) and grandson of Charles ALEXANDER (1717–1787) who fought alongside Bonnie Prince Charlie during the Jacobite uprising of 1745 and a descendant of the original "Lord of Lochaber", Alexander (or Alastair Carrach) MacAlister who was a member of the Clan Donald and a prominent Highland figure. Alastair’s descendants adopted the surname "Alexander," eventually becoming a distinct branch of Clan Donald. This lineage includes the Alexanders of Inverkeithny.

The Lordship of Lochaber was known for its warrior legacy, including Alastair's reputed invention of the Lochaber axe, a weapon used in Scottish battles during that period.

After the defeat at the Battle of Culloden in 1746, many Highland families, including the Alexanders, experienced significant political and economic upheaval. The Alexanders faced severe financial hardships as a consequence. 

Grenada
As a result of these hardships Charles migrated to Grenada around 1838 with his brothers, Richardson and Hall, in an effort to restore the family's financial stability. Even though this was the year of emancipation,  he had enslaved people previously as an absentee landlord. He had 2 other brothers Thomas and John who both died in Grenada; Thomas on 6^th Mar  1819 (age 18) and John 1840 (age 42).  Their uncle Thomas Thain's involvement with the North West Company of Canada may have influenced their decision to pursue opportunities in the Caribbean. 

Settling in Grenada, Charles became a successful plantation owner but he had arrived at a time after emancipation where workers started to assert their rights and demand better treatment, conditions and pay and this applied to the “liberated Africans” who were brought to Grenada after emancipation. 

Charles organised a substantial militia drawn from the planter community to subdue such protestations from the liberated Africans.  He personally commanded this unit and was credited with restoring stability during what was described as a period of threatened disturbance.

This was a significant development because it marked a clear transition from slavery to post-emancipation control, rather than a break with the past. It reflected deep planter anxiety about maintaining order in a society where formerly coerced labour was no longer legally enslaved but still expected to remain disciplined and compliant. 

The resistance of the “liberated Africans” was perceived by colonial elites as a threat to economic stability and social hierarchy. By organising a militia drawn from the planter class and personally commanding it, Charles Alexander positioned himself as a defender of colonial authority at a moment when the old mechanisms of control had weakened.

In recognition of these services, Queen Victoria granted him a Colonel’s commission, a significant honour for a colonial resident and indicative of his standing within Grenadian society. He shortly afterwards became a member of the Executive Council placing him at the centre of colonial governance during a turbulent era that included the aftermath of emancipation and evolving economic pressures across the Caribbean. It demonstrated how men already embedded in slavery and slave management could reinvent themselves as guardians of peace and governance, preserving their influence and status in the new era.

Charles and his brothers frequently returned to Scotland, keeping close ties to the old home. After their father’s death in 1845, Charles acquired Don Bank Cottage near the mouth of the River Don in Old Aberdeen, where his mother Helen Thain lived until her death in 1858. Their father Charles ALEXANDER died at Auchininna at age 84, ending over 200 years of family residency.

Compensation Claims
Charles made a claim for just one enslaved person with compensation awarded of £34 8s 0d. His brother John was awarded an identical amount for the one person he had enslaved. 

It would appear that Charles later acquired the Montreuil estate as it was left in trust for his son Douglas after he died. They also acquired the neighbouring estate at Springbank.

Montreuil estate was later overseen by family member Arthur Henry Beckles Gall. Over time, ownership of the estate became fragmented among Charles ALEXANDER’s descendants. By the mid-1960s, few family members still lived in Grenada, and ownership was divided among 22 descendants, only six retaining the Alexander surname.

In 1967, the estate was producing cocoa, nutmeg, mace, bananas, and other provisions, yielding an income of EC$49,986, though production and income declined by the early 1970s. Estate land had to be sold to cover operating costs, reducing the estate from about 300 acres in 1970 to 211 acres after selling over 89 acres.

Family
His personal life was equally rooted in networks that tied Scotland and the Caribbean together. On 15 December 1840 he married Margaret Drysdale Douglas, born in 1819, daughter of Andrew Douglas of Jedburgh and Berwick-upon-Tweed. The couple had eleven children; five sons and six daughters. Two of their sons died young, a common tragedy of the era.  These included: 

• Charles Douglas ALEXANDER 1841–1842
• Arthur Harvey ALEXANDER25 Feb 1843–30 Dec 1905;
  • He was a bursar at Aberdeen University
  • He served as the Agent General of Immigration, a Member of the Executive Council, and Colonel commanding the Militia in British Guiana.
  • He married Isabella Bibson on July 25, 1867.
  • They had four sons and three daughters. His sons included Major Arthur Charles Bridgeman Alexander, Captain George Hamilton Alexander, Major D’Arcy Duncan Alexander, and Edward Harvey Alexander. His daughters were Annie Alexander, Helen MacKenzie Alexander, and Margaret Florence Drysdale Alexander.
  • He had a notable military career, with all four of his sons following in his footsteps and serving in the army.
  • After returning to his ancestral country, he settled in Haselwood near Craigellachie. He passed away suddenly on December 30, 1905, at Canfield Place, Hatfield, and was buried in the cemetery of that town.                             
• Helen ALEXANDER1844–1924;
  • Helen was a twin
  • She married Arthur Gall in 1868, who was an officer of Constabulary in Barbados.
  • They had four children:
  • Arthur Henry Beckles Gall: Born in 1870, he became a successful planter and married his cousin, Edith Gall, in 1899.
  • Herbert Frederick Douglas Gall: Born in 1875, he became the Agent and General Manager of the Colonial Bank. He married Aileen Duke in 1921 and had two daughters, Cynthia Helen and Clara Joyclyn.
  • Ida Gall: Born in 1872, she married Patrick Archibald Fletcher MacLeod in 1900 and had one son, Colin, and four daughters, Helen, Aileen, Agnus, and Dorean.
  • Clarie Gall: Born in 1874, she married Robert Combe of Ceylon in 1902 and had three children: Gordon, Helen, and Clara.
  • Helen passed away in Camberley in 1924 at the age of 80.                                 
• Douglas ALEXANDER22 Mar 1849–1910;
  • Born at Montreuil Estate, St. Patrick, Grenada.
  • Douglas was educated in Aberdeen, Scotland.
  • After completing his education, he returned to Grenada to manage his father’s property, Montreuil, which had been left in trust for the family. He successfully managed and improved the estate, ensuring its prosperity.
  • Douglas became a member of the Executive Council and owned several estates in Grenada. His contributions to the community were highly valued, and he was known for his sound influence and wise counsel.
  • In 1871, Douglas married Annie Elizabeth McEwen, born in 1853. They had eight sons and four daughters. Some of their notable children include:
    • Arthur Walter Douglas Alexander: Born in 1874, he became a planter in Grenada and married Edith McLeod.
    • Douglas Gordon Alexander: Born in 1879, he served with the South African Constabulary and married Louisa de la Mothe.
    • Francis Duncan Thain Alexander: Born in 1881, he was educated at Sutton Valance School in Kent and married Daisy Helen Anne de Gale.
    • Harold George Alexander: Born in 1888, he became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons and served in the Indian Medical Service.
    • Percy Herbert Alexander: Born in 1889, he served in France during the Great War and married Ellen Gilligan O’Shea.
    • Ralph Douglas Alexander: Born in 1891, he served in France during the Great War and married Constance Sharpe.
  • Douglas Alexander suffered a severe stroke around June 1904 and was no longer able to manage the estate. He passed away in January 1910 in London and was buried in the same grave as his father at Bow. (This date of his stroke is an estimation because the source doc stated 1944 which is an error as he had died by 1910. 1904 would fit the chronology in the source doc. It explains why he ceased active management of the estate several years before his death, aligns with the six-year period of decline before his final illness and death in London and it is consistent with the obituary, which describes a man who had been in failing health prior to his final operation and death in 1910.)
  • Obituary 
    “It is with profound regret that we have to record the death of Mr. DOUGLAS ALEXANDER of Spring Bank, St. Patrick, news of which was received by cable from London on Saturday. The news came as a painful shock of surprise to his children and numerous friends here, for two weeks had not yet elapsed since the welcome information was received by cable, that he had been successfully operated on for the complaint which he was suffering and was making satisfactory progress. This sad event will cast a gloom over the whole island, for in Mr. Alexander, Grenada loses one of her noblest sons and one of that very rare stamp of men of whom it can be truthfully said; (He never) made an enemy yet never failed to win the friendship of everyone with whom he came in contact, and one who was more highly esteemed and respected the more intimately he was known. Much as his loss will be felt by the community, to the people of St. Patrick's, his death will be a veritable calamity, for in him, they lose a never tiring benefactor and friend and a wise advisor.  It is no exaggeration to state that the exceptional prosperity that is being enjoyed by all classes in St. Patrick's is largely due to Mr. Alexander's sound influence and goodness of heart for it is well known that practically every peasant and all but a few of the large proprietors of the parish owe their first start in life to financial assistance rendered by him or to the influence he exercised on their behalf. But perhaps the greatest service rendered to the colony by Mr.Alexander was his timely intervention in the early nineties when through his good influence was wise council the peasantry of St. Patrick's were saved from falling victims to the wave of reckless extravagance which ruined or seriously hampered a large number of peasants in every other parish. Mr. Alexander was born at Montreuil Estate, St. Patrick's on the 22nd of March 1849. He left Grenada as a child and was at school in Scotland when in 1866 the sugar industry finally collapsed and he found himself suddenly faced with the necessity of earning his living and assisting in providing for the support of his five sisters. He volunteered to come out to Grenada to assist the almost impossible task of clearing the family estates of the heavy encumbrances which had accumulated during the protracted sugar crisis. He left England early in 1867 with two of his brothers, both of whom entered the Colonial Service and rose to distinguished positions in Jamaica and Demerara respectively. By careful and wise management, Mr. Alexander not only succeeded in redeeming the family estate but so improved it as to render it capable of providing a comfortable income for his sisters, which they are still enjoying. As a reward for his magnificent achievement he was presented by his brothers and sisters with the portion of the estate known as Spring Bank on which he has since erected a fine residence. By judicious investments and hard work Mr.Alexander also succeeded in amassing a comfortable fortune for himself, yet he has never known to turn a deaf ear to an appeal for any charitable object. Mr. Alexander rendered many years of valuable service on the Legislative Council. Although he seldom took a prominent part in the debates, an expression of opinion from him always carried great weight, for his honesty of purpose and soundness of judgment caused him to enjoy in an unusual degree the confidence of his colleagues on both sides of the table. While tendering the sincerest sympathy of the whole community to the bereaved widow and children who are mourning the loss of a model husband and father, we are able to assure them that their grief is widely shared by the people of Grenada who are also mourning the loss of one of the Colony's most valuable human assets.”
  • There is also a memorial of Douglas at Bow Cementry.                                       
• Margaret Drysdale ALEXANDER22 Mar 1849–1929;
  • Margaret was a twin with her brother Douglas.
  • She married Charles Wilfred Neate Hardtman in 1866, who was from an old Huguenot family. Unfortunately, Charles Hardtman passed away three years later, leaving Margaret a widow at 20 years old. She never remarried.
  • She devoted her life to supporting and entertaining the numerous progeny of her siblings and was particularly devoted to Douglas’s daughter Emmeline. 
  • She was known as Aunt Doe                                                                                  
• Thomas ALEXANDER21 Dec 1851– 9 Jun 1925;
  • Thomas was the fifth and third surviving son of Charles Alexander and Margaret Drysdale Douglas. He was educated at the Gymnasium in Aberdeen
  • Thomas was commissioned in the Military Constabulary in Jamaica in 1872. He participated in various operations and obtained a first-class certificate at the School of Musketry at Hythe in 1879.
  • He was awarded the King’s Police Medal and twice acted as Inspector General. Despite being over the age limit, he continued to serve throughout the Great War and retired in 1919, receiving a special letter of thanks from His Majesty’s Secretary of State for the Colonies.
  • On March 21, 1877, Thomas married Agusta Hortence, the eldest daughter of the Honorable Robert Nunes, Member of the Governor’s Executive Council.They had two sons and one daughter:
    • Robert Donald Thain ALEXANDER: Born on September 29, 1878, he had a notable career as an engineer and served in various capacities in India and Burma. He was also a Lieutenant Colonel in the London Scottish and served throughout the Great War.
    • Thomas Patrick Madden ALEXANDER: Born on April 8, 1890, he managed tea estates in Southern India and served in the Royal Air Force during the Great War.
    • Emily Elizabeth ALEXANDER: Born on November 26, 1882, she married Denner John Strutt, elder son of Major General John Rootsey Strutt of the Indian Army, and had three daughters.
  • His wife, Agusta passed away on April 30, 1921, and was buried in Kingston. Thomas later resided in Tunbridge-Wells, Kent, where he died on June 9, 1925, and was buried in the Borough Cemetery of that town. He was remembered as a very efficient and popular officer, a good cricketer, rider, and shot, and a true sportsman in every sense of the word.
• Charles Alexander 1854–1854
• Rosanna Alexander b.1854
• Emmeline Florence Douglas Alexander b.1857
• Florence Alexander b.1859                                                                                                                 
• Death
  Charles’s final journey home took place in 1861. After decades of work in the West Indies, he sailed back to Britain but contracted pneumonia during the voyage. He died on arrival at the Port of London and was buried in Bow, near the London docks, a poignant ending for a man whose life had been shaped by constant movement between Scotland and the Caribbean. He was 59 years old. Four years later, his wife Margaret also passed away. There are memorials of both of them and their son Douglas at Bow Cemetery.                                                                         
• Richardson ALEXANDER Richardson was the second son of Charles Alexander of Auchininna and Helen Thain of Drumblair and was born on January 25, 1812. Richardson married Mary Morrison in 1862, and they had three children: one son and two daughters. His son, Hall Alexander, was born on November 5, 1867, and became the Chief Engineer of the Steamship Line. His elder daughter, Annie, was born on May 2, 1864, and was tragically killed in a motor car accident along with her brother Hall on August 5, 1911. His younger daughter, Jessie, was born on October 4, 1868, and married Reverend Joseph James Lorraine in 1894. Richardson lived a long life, passing away in Aberdeen on January 18, 1903, at the age of 91, just one day after his wife.                                                                              
• Hall ALEXANDER Hall was the third son of Charles Alexander of Auchininna and Helen Thain of Drumblair. He was born on June 9, 1818 and married twice. His first marriage was to his cousin Isabella THAINof Drumblain, Inverkeithny, on December 20, 1842. They had three daughters: 
  • Elsie Thain ALEXANDER (born 1844) - Married Dr. William Lang in 1864 and had thirteen children. She died in 1914.
  • Mary Alexander (born 1846) - Unmarried and died in 1926.
  •  Lillias Alexander (born 1846) - Unmarried and died in 1865.                  

     After Isabella died in 1853. Hall then married his second wife, Isabella Allen, on           December 18, 1860. They had four daughters:  Isabella Helen Alexander (born              December 28, 1861) Edith Gertrude Allen Alexander (Dec 23, 1863 - May 15, 1865)     Anne Millicent Alexander (born October 22, 1865) Alice Maude Alexander (born         1868) 

     Hall died on April 13, 1868, without male issue. His second wife, Isabella                               Allen, and their family resided in Folkstone.  

The Enslaved

Fanny (1802 -) 
Fanny first appeared in the Slave Register of 1817. She was one of the 24 enslaved people at the Good Hope Estate, Petit Martinique (listed under St George in the Slave Register) under the control of James Smith. She was 14 at the time and born enslaved.

James sold her in isolation in 1820 to John Alexander. She was separated from the wider group with whom she had lived and worked. This isolated sale suggests no consideration was given to kinship, familiarity or stability.  She was cut adrift from everyone she had grown up with.

By 1829, Fanny had been moved once more, this time from St George to St Patrick. Although John Alexander remained the legal owner, day-to-day control passed to his brother, Charles Alexander, who acted as his attorney on the island. This shift, recorded formally in the slave registers, highlights how Fanny’s life was governed by decisions made by others, often for administrative convenience, with no reference to her wishes or wellbeing. Movement between parishes meant adapting again to new routines, terrain and expectations.

Fanny stayed in this setting right up to abolition where she would then have entered the apprenticeship scheme before her eventual release in 1838.  She would have been about 35/36 years old at emancipation and could finally have some choice as to how to live the rest of her life. She was the one enslaved person that John Alexander claimed compensation for.

Alexander and Sarah 
Sarah and Alexander were born enslaved on Woodhall Estate in St George, Grenada, into a family whose bonds were repeatedly broken by sale and transfer. Their earliest appearances in the colonial records already reveal how fragile family life was under slavery, even for very young children. 

Sarah first appears in the 1821 Slave Register at just two years old, recorded under the control of Delia Cockburn, a free-coloured woman who herself occupied a complex position within Grenadian society. Delia had a daughter, Elizabeth Cockburn, with Alexander Cockburn, a Scottish man and son of Walter Cockburn. Elizabeth was later formally acknowledged in her father’s will. Despite Delia’s free status and her proximity to white Scottish networks, the people she enslaved remained subject to sale, separation and exploitation.

By 1825, the registers show that Alexander, aged nine, was also enslaved on Woodhall Estate under Delia’s control.

In 1831, when Sarah was about fourteen and Alexander around twelve, Delia Cockburn sold both children to Charles Alexander. This sale formally severed them from the people they grew up with at the Woodhall Estate.

In Charles Annual Return, it is clear that Alexander and Sarah were indeed siblings. Their mother, Angelique, was herself born enslaved in Grenada in 1791. The earliest surviving register for Angelique dates from 1821, where she is described as having “the 3 first toes of the right foot cut off” which may have resulted from a work related accident from an agricultural tool. Angelique was, consequently, separated from her children and she remained with Delia right up to 1834. 

The family unit was broken again when Alexander was 16 in 1832 as Charles sold him to Robert Walker.

…and then Sarah was sold the following year to the Chambord Estate, compounding the family’s dispersal. By this point, Angelique had been separated from both children, and Sarah and Alexander were separated from each other, each forced into a different enslaving environment, routine, and future.

By the mid-1830s, the legal structure that had governed and fractured Angelique’s family for decades collapsed following abolition and emancipation. Although slavery formally ended in 1834, Angelique, Sarah and Alexander, like thousands of others, were forced into the apprenticeship system, a final attempt to preserve control over their labour. Yet the direction of travel had changed, and for the first time the future was no longer entirely dictated by sale and transfer. 

For Angelique, born enslaved in 1791, survival itself was an act of endurance. She had lived through injury, separation and loss, yet remained alive into the final years of slavery. When emancipation arrived in 1838, she was in her late forties. This was an age at which many formerly enslaved women sought to rebuild family networks, form households of their own choosing, or remain within familiar communities where mutual support mattered more than ownership ever had. Even if she did not reunite physically with her children, emancipation removed the legal power that had once allowed others to sell her, punish her body, or define her existence as property. 

For Alexander, sold away from his family at sixteen, freedom arrived at a pivotal moment. Emancipation meant that he entered adulthood no longer as a transferable asset, but as a man able, however constrained by poverty and racial hierarchy, to decide where to work, whom to associate with, and how to name himself. Many young men of his generation moved into skilled labour, maritime work, or small-scale agriculture. The right to remain with his family had been denied to him in childhood but this was replaced by the possibility of forming one of his own and perhaps reuniting with his sister and mother. 

For Sarah, freedom came in her early twenties. Having endured repeated sales as a child and adolescent, emancipation offered something she had never known: stability that could not be undone by a signature or a ledger entry. Like many formerly enslaved women, she may have sought out family connections, chosen paid domestic work, cultivated provision grounds, or established an independent household. The choices available to her were limited, but they were hers in a way they had never been before. 

What is most important is this: the system that broke Angelique’s family could no longer break it again. Whatever paths Sarah, Alexander and Angelique took after 1838, they did so as free people under the law. Their names ceased to appear in slave registers, sales columns and ownership returns, not because they vanished, but because the records that once reduced them to property lost their power. 

In that silence of the archive lies a different kind of presence: the possibility that, after decades of enforced separation, labour and loss, Angelique, Sarah and Alexander finally lived lives shaped by survival, resilience and choice.

Betsey 
As Sarah was being sold to the Chambord Estate, Charles Alexander bought Betsey, age 32, from the same estate that year (1933).  Betsey was effectively separated from her mother Jeanne.

She first appeared in the 1817 slave Register under the control of Walter Cockburn with Owsley Rowley acting as his attorney (Walter likely to have been the same Walter Cockburn mentioned earlier and residing in Scotland). She was described as being a mulatto born in Grenada.

Betsey remained with Charles until slavery was abolished and likely stayed on through the apprenticeship and then emancipation.  She was the one person that Charles claimed compensation for.

Acknowledgements

 We are grateful to Dr. John Angus Martin of the Grenada Genealogical and Historical Society Facebook group for his editorial support.

References

The ALEXANDERS of INVERKEITHNY LOCHABER and CLAN DONALD©, Compiled by Robert Alexander, 1926, Updated by Michael Outram, starting 1984 https://freepages.rootsweb.com/~ocarroll/genealogy/alex.htm 

William Alexander (judge) - Wikipedia www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/45714 

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/10515 

Delia Cockburn https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/10666

Fact File:     John Aitcheson (Senior) 

Parish: St. Andrew 

Life dates: 1705-1780

John AITCHESON Jnr (- 1770)

 John AITCHESON Jnr. of Rochsolloch, Airdrie, Scotland, purchased Belmont Estate in 1764 after the French ceded Grenada to the British following the Treaty of Paris (1763), which ended the Seven Years' War. Belmont Estate had previously been under French ownership since the late 1600s and was owned by the Hervier and then Bernege families under the French. After the island became a British colony, Aitcheson Jnr. acquired the estate as part of the wave of British land acquisitions that followed the transfer of colonial power. 

In 1764, the same year he purchased Belmont Estate, Aitcheson Jr. signed a petition to King George III. This petition protested instructions given to Governor Robert Melville that would undermine the privileges of the local representatives in the island’s governance. This act suggests that Aitcheson Jnr. was concerned about political representation and the rights of property owners in Grenada, particularly British landowners, during the transition from French to British rule. He continued to sign other petitions throughout the 1760s, further indicating his engagement in the political dynamics of the island at the time.

Although details of his managerial approach to Belmont Estate are limited, the fact that he bought the property as soon as the island changed hands places him firmly among the ambitious Scottish investors who expanded plantation interests across the Caribbean during this period. The Belmont Estate history notes that Aitcheson Jr. died young, leaving no long career on the island. With his death, ownership passed to his father, John Aitcheson Sr. Even in his short tenure, however, Aitcheson Jr.’s involvement in local political petitions reveals him as part of the early British planter elite attempting to influence governance at a moment of rapid colonial change.

Aitchison Jnr bought plots of land next to the Belmont estate that became the Tivoli estate with Alexander Campbell (1739-1795), He also bought “Bloody Bay” lots 8 and 9 in the Northeastern Division (later St John) in Tobago. 

He sold the Tivoli estate together with 200 enslaved workers to John Fordyce, Andrew Grant, Robert Malcolm and William Trotter of London merchants and partners on 30 August 1767.  There was also a schedule for 90 slaves on the Belmont estate. 

Aitcheson Jnr died on 31^st May 1770 in the US.

John AITCHESON Snr (1705-1780)

 After Aitcheson Jnr died, his father, John AITCHESON Snr., inherited Belmont Estate. Unlike his son, Aitcheson Snr. was largely an absentee landlord, meaning that he did not live on the estate or take part in its daily management. He leased the estate for 13 yrs at a price of £2520/yr to Alexander Campbell, former partner of Aitchison, Jr. and owner of the neighboring Tivoli estate.

This was a common arrangement among British plantation owners in the Caribbean, who often resided in Britain while managing their estates through local overseers or managers.

Belmont Estate, like many plantations in Grenada, was originally focused on sugarcane and coffee, with sugarcane being processed on-site into molasses. This was a common practice on Caribbean plantations, where sugarcane was grown, harvested, and processed into sugar, molasses, and rum. The ruins of the watermill on the estate today testify to the intensive agricultural and processing activities that took place there. Over time, crops like cotton, cocoa, nutmeg, and bananas became important to the estate’s production.

In 1770, Aitcheson Snr. leased Belmont Estate to Mr Campbell. The lease was for a period of 13 years at a considerable annual price of £2,520, indicating that Belmont Estate was a highly valuable property. 

He also sold the land at Bloody Bay in Tobago to Campbell.

In 1780, Aitcheson Snr. left Scotland for Grenada and died shortly after his arrival at Belmont Estate on May 31, 1780, at age 75. He was buried in the estate’s cemetery, and his grave can still be visited today.

The Aitchesons’ involvement in Belmont Estate is a reflection of the broader British colonial presence in Grenada during the 18th century. Their ownership and leasing of the estate show the patterns of landownership, absenteeism, and the use of plantations for the production of cash crops, which were central to the colonial economy of the Caribbean. This system was built on the labour of enslaved Africans, and plantations like Belmont would have been reliant on this form of labour until the abolition of slavery in the 19th century.

While John AITCHESON Jr. was briefly active in local politics, his early death and his father's absenteeism meant that Belmont Estate’s direct management was likely left to overseers or lessees like Alexander CAMPBELL, who had a significant role in running the plantation during the lease period. 

Following the death of John AITCHESON Snr., Belmont Estate passed to his eldest daughter Bethia, as per his will. She was instructed to sell the estate and distribute the proceeds among herself, her sisters, Margaret and Isabella and their cousin Gilbert HAMILTON, a Glasgow merchant.

It was sold to Robert Alexander HOUSTON, a member of a prominent Scottish family involved in the sugar trade, based in Clerkington, East Lothian.  It was a prime property.  The 276 acre sugar plantation estate including the enslaved workers, animals, land and buildings was sold for £21,356 (equivalent to about £1.5M today).  However, this value was built on the exploitation of enslaved labour, a grim reality that defined the region’s colonial economy.

One of the notable individuals connected to Belmont Estate was James Dodds, a former overseer who was also an amateur painter. In 1821, Dodds painted a watercolour depicting the central part of Belmont Estate, providing a visual representation of the plantation, including its enslaved workforce. This painting is now preserved at the estate and serves as an important historical artifact, offering insight into the estate’s layout and the daily lives of those who lived and worked there.

Reproduced from Our History – Belmont Estate (belmontestategrenada.com)

Legacy The Aitchesons’ legacy from owning enslaved people lies in how their wealth, property, and family advancement were created, consolidated, and transferred through slavery-based plantation economies during a formative period of British rule in Grenada 

John Aitcheson Jr.’s legacy is rooted in expansion and consolidation. By purchasing Belmont Estate in 1764 immediately after Grenada passed from French to British control, he positioned himself among the first wave of Scottish investors who capitalised on imperial transition.

His ownership extended beyond Belmont to adjacent lands that became Tivoli Estate and to enslaved-labour estates in Tobago, including Bloody Bay. The sale of Tivoli together with around 200 enslaved people in 1767, alongside a schedule of approximately 90 enslaved people at Belmont, demonstrates that enslaved men, women, and children were treated as liquid capital, transferred alongside land to fuel merchant partnerships in London and Glasgow.

His political petitions in the 1760s, framed as defending representative rights, were closely aligned with protecting planter property interests, including the ownership and control of enslaved labour. Although he died young in 1770, his brief career helped embed Belmont and associated estates within a transatlantic commercial network sustained by slavery. 

John Aitcheson Sr.’s legacy is one of absentee extraction and intergenerational transfer. After inheriting Belmont, he managed it largely from Scotland, leasing it at high annual rents that reflected the estate’s profitability under enslaved labour. The wealth he accumulated was managed by overseers, lessees, and the coerced labour of enslaved people whose lives sustained production. When he died in 1780, the estate, including enslaved people, buildings, livestock, and machinery, was valued at over £21,000, a substantial fortune that flowed directly into family inheritance.

His will ensured that the proceeds of slavery were redistributed among daughters, sisters, and a Glasgow merchant nephew, demonstrating how slavery underpinned family security, status, and commercial continuity in Britain. 

Crucially, While both father and son were involved in the slave trade, both had died before the Abolition Act and so could not claim compensation.  Robert Houston went on to claim for the loss of 194 enslaved people and received £5024 8s 11d. This absence of compensation does not diminish their legacy but highlights an earlier phase of slavery in which wealth was realised through land sales, leases, and merchant partnerships rather than state payouts. The estate’s later sale price, achieved after decades of enslaved labour under successive owners, was built on foundations laid during the Aitcheson period.

For the enslaved people of Belmont, Tivoli, and associated properties, the Aitchesons’ legacy was one of displacement, commodification, and invisibility. 

Enslaved individuals were counted in schedules, mortgaged, leased, and sold, but rarely named in surviving records. Their labour enabled the Aitchesons’ rise, sustained absentee wealth, and underwrote the prosperity passed on to descendants and business associates in Scotland and London.

Acknowledgements

 We are grateful to Dr. John Angus Martin of the Grenada Genealogical and Historical Society Facebook group for his editorial support.

References

 http://www.belmontestate.net/grenada-history.htm 

Grenada Genealogical and Historical Society Facebook post 

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/863110984 

Messrs Aitchison and Campbell to Messrs. Fordyce Grant and Co. } Mortgage of plantations etc. in Grenada. (docket title)

Fact File: 

Claim Number: 803 

Compensation Award:  £34 8S 0D 

Number of Enslaved in Claim: 1 

Parish: St. Andrew 

Parliamentary Papers: p. 99 

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The Life of Frederick and Mary Aberdeen 

Frederick Aberdeen and his wife, Mary Angelique Aberdeen, were residents of the Providence Estate in the parish of St Andrew, Grenada. Records show that they lived on the estate during the final years of slavery and the transition into emancipation. They had a son Frederick Alexander ABERDEEN who was baptised on 12 Apr 1842 and the family were still on the estate at this time.  

Frederick’s profession is listed as a mason, confirming his status as a skilled tradesman, an occupation that would have been in demand during the period of rebuilding and social transition following emancipation. 

They jointly claimed compensation for the loss of their one enslaved worker called Reine who first appeared listed under their ownership in the 1833 slave register aged 15.  By placing a cross for his name on the register, this suggests that Fred was illiterate. 

Little else is known about the couple’s later lives although these records remind us that Grenada was not confined to large plantations but extended into households and skilled tradespeople who relied upon coerced labour. 

Frederick and Mary Aberdeen’s story is therefore one of ordinary people caught up in a system that advocated enslavement and, although working class, became beneficiaries of the compensation scheme. 

With little other information about the couple, we can speculate that the most likely ancestry for Frederick Aberdeen is that he was a free coloured man, likely of mixed African and European heritage. This conclusion comes from several clues in the historical record: the surname Aberdeen appears in Grenada most commonly among free coloured families rather than white planter dynasties; his occupation as a mason fits the pattern of skilled trades that were dominated by free coloured people in the early nineteenth century; and the fact that he and his wife enslaved only one young woman suggests a modest household rather than a large white-owned estate. Living on the Providence Estate rather than owning it also points to a free coloured working family rather than wealthy European-descended landowners. While we cannot be completely certain without a racial descriptor in the documents, the overall evidence strongly suggests that Frederick belonged to Grenada’s free coloured population. 

Frederick’s surname was probably inherited from an earlier enslaver or estate owner bearing the name Aberdeen, and he retained the name as he entered the free coloured community.  It is less likely to have come from a biological Scottish planter as there is no evidence of a large white Aberdeen planter family in St Andrew or even Grenada.   

Mary Angelique Aberdeen was also most likely a free coloured woman. Her life circumstances mirror Frederick’s in ways that point toward the same ancestry: she lived with him on Providence Estate as part of a modest free household, rather than as part of the white planter class, and together they enslaved only one young girl, which was a common pattern among free coloured families who held one or two domestic servants. 

Her marriage to Frederick, who himself appears strongly to have been a free coloured man, further supports this conclusion, as marriages in that period and community typically occurred within the same social and racial group. Although the records do not explicitly state her race, all contextual clues suggest that Mary Angelique was also part of Grenada’s free coloured population. 

Frederick Alexander ABERDEEN (1842-) 

Their son Frederick had a son with his wife, Elizabeth, born 3 May 1881 and baptised 6 days later in St. Andrew Ref 

There is a birth record recording the arrival of another son between them on 11 May 1884 in St. Andrew. By this time Elizabeth is registered as Elizabeth Aberdeen which confirms that the couple were married. Ref 

There are also marriage records of 3 other people born to a Frederick Aberdeen who could have been his children. Virginia (b.1871), Cornelius (b.1878) and Adrian Augustus (b.1887). There is a record that a Virginia Aberdeen had a daughter in St. Andrew in 1884. She would only have been 13 if it was the same person. 

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The Enslaved

1833 Slave Register 

The 1833 slave register shows that Frederick and Mary Aberdeen had one enslaved a girl named Reine.   Reine was born in Grenada and lived on the Providence Estate in St. Andrew, where she was probably born.      

  1834 Slave Register 

In the 1834 Slave Register, Reine was recorded as 15½ years old, still in their possession, and she remained with Frederick and Mary through the abolition period.

Reine was the only enslaved person in the Aberdeen household, which strongly suggests that her daily life was centred on domestic work: assisting Mary with cooking, laundry, cleaning, and other household duties, as well as running errands. In households that enslaved just one girl, the work was constant and wide-ranging, and girls like Reine were expected to be ever-present, obedient and industrious.

Her presence in the Aberdeens’ home also reflects the social structure of the time. Free coloured families of modest means frequently owned one or two enslaved people, often young girls whose labour provided essential support to the household. Reine’s life would therefore have been intimately entangled with the Aberdeens’ daily routines, expectations and demands.

Although the historical record does not tell us what became of her after 1834, her youth at the moment of abolition meant she would enter adulthood carrying the experiences of enslavement but with the possibility of shaping her own life in freedom.

That said, It is quite likely that Reine remained with the Aberdeens for at least a short period after emancipation, until she was old enough to establish her own household or employment. There is no record of her own family so there may have been no other option but to stay.

It is possible that she was not much younger than Mary Aberdeen who had Frederick Augustus Aberdeen in 1842. The Aberdeens were not wealthy and their limited means suggests they were unlikely to have suddenly employed another servant, making Reine’s continued presence valuable to them. Reine may have stayed on to support Mary as she was bringing up her family.  This would have given Reine stability, familiarity, and shelter while she navigated early adulthood in a changing society.

Reine’s story is a reminder that emancipation was lived not only on large plantations but also within small households, where the lives of young enslaved girls were tightly controlled yet often overlooked in official histories. Reine’s presence in the Aberdeens’ home illuminates both the vulnerability of enslaved children and the resilience required to navigate a world marked by inequality, coercion and profound change.

Acknowledgements

 We are grateful to Dr. John Angus Martin of the Grenada Genealogical and Historical Society Facebook group for his editorial support and Owen Hankey for content contributions.

Fact File: 

Fanny or Jane Aberdeen                            Barbara Aberdeen 

Claim Number: 274                                  Claim Number: 269 

Compensation:  £103 4S 1D                    Compensation: £20 12S 10D 

Number of Enslaved in Claim: 4             Number of Enslaved in Claim: 1 

Parish: St. Andrew                                   Parish: St. Patrick 

Parliamentary Papers: p. 96                    Parliamentary Papers: p. 96 

Life dates: d.1840                                      Life dates: 1797-1867 

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The story starts with…

The Life of Alexander Aberdeen (1771–1815)

Alexander Aberdeen was born in Echt near Aberdeen, Scotland, where he was baptised on 23 May 1771. He was the son of Thomas Aberdein (1738–1815) and Grizel “Grace” Harvie (1735–1825). Both came from long-established Aberdeenshire families whose roots stretched deep into the rural north-east of Scotland. His father, Thomas, was the son of William Aberdein (1705–1779) and Jean Snowie (1711–1790) of Echt, while his mother descended from the Harvie/Mackay line through John Harvey (1691–1767) and Elizabeth Mackay (1691–1776). The extended Aberdeen, Murray, Snawie, Edward, Gordoun and Forbes lines form a rich network of Scottish farming and artisan families, many of whom lived for generations around Midmar, Echt, and Old Aberdeen.

This ancestry places Alexander firmly within the eighteenth-century Scottish demographic that fed heavily into British colonial expansion. Young Scottish men often the sons of farmers, blacksmiths and craftsmen frequently travelled to Grenada and other islands in the Caribbean seeking opportunity as clerks, book-keepers, overseers, and small planters. Alexander followed this path sometime in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, joining a diaspora that would profoundly shape the social and economic world of the Grenada.

By the early 1800s, he had established himself as a planter in the parish of St Andrew, Grenada, with livestock, household goods and modest landholdings. He was literate, respected, and financially stable, moving within the circles of colonial administration and trade. Yet his personal life diverged in ways that reveal a complex and intimate connection to the people of Grenada.

In 1806, Alexander made a bold and unusual decision: he formally manumitted his “mulatto slave named Fanny”, freeing not only her but “all her future issue and increase.” Such language leaves little doubt that Fanny was his partner and that he intended to secure the legal and personal freedom of their children. This manumission placed Fanny and her existing or future children among the earliest free coloured families in Grenada nearly three decades before universal emancipation.

TRANSCRIPTION

Grenada Entered 21st October 1806

Know all Men by these Presents that I Alexander Aberdeen of the Island aforesaid, Esquire, for divers good Causes and Considerations me hereunto moving have manumitted enfranchised made free and from all ties of servitude absolved. And by these Presents do for myself my Heirs Executors and Administrators each and every of them manumit enfranchise and make free and from every tie of servitude absolve my mulatto Slave named Fanny and also all her future Issue and Increase, so that neither the said Alexander Aberdeen nor my Heirs Executors or Administrators or any or either of them shall from henceforth have claim challenge or demand any Right or Title by reason of any slavery or villainage in the said Fanny or her future Issue but that the said Fanny and her future Issue shall from henceforth for ever hereafter be as free to all Intents and Purposes whatsoever as any other Subject of His Majesty King George the Third.

His will, written in 1815, confirms the depth of this relationship. In it, Alexander left everything, after settling debts to Fanny and her children: Jenny, Alexander, Grace, John, Agnes, Eliza and Thomas Hillington. He further acknowledged another daughter, Barbara Aberdeen, who he described as a free mulatto. This open recognition of a mixed-heritage family was unusual among Scottish planters of his time, many of whom fathered children from enslaved or formerly enslaved women but did not legally provide for them. Alexander’s choices ensured that his children would inherit property, security, and social legitimacy uncommon for people of mixed ancestry in the early nineteenth century.

TRANSCRIPTION

Grenada Entered 29th July 1815

In the Name of God Amen I, Alexander Aberdeen of the Island of Grenada, Parish of St Andrew, Planter, being of sound mind & Memory make this my last Will & Testament. First I Desire to be Decently buried but in a plain Manner & as little expense attending as is possible. Imprimis it is my intention that all Sums of Money due unto Me & also all my Personal property consisting of Household & Furniture Plate Horses Cattle & Sheep be applied as far as Necessary towards paying my Just & Lawful Debts. The residue & remainder of my Estate with all other properties & What Else is or may be Appertaining I give Devise & Bequeath to Fanny Aberdeen a Woman of Colour & her Children or their Survivors, viz. namely as follows, Jenny, Alexander, Grace, John, Agnes, Eliza and Thomas Hillington, & likewise any money there is to be applied towards their Maintenance & bringing of them up to be paid out of Interest for their benefit. Lastly, I Constitute & Appoint George Paterson, practitioner of Physic, Robert Kennedy, Alexander Rofs doctor of medicine and Joseph Simpson Esquire all of the Island of Grenada executors of this my Last Will and Testament and I do request all parties of the named executors to accept individually the sum of fifteen pounds sterling money as a mark of respect for them. This I declare to be my  Last Wills & Testament. In Witness whereof I have hereunto set my hand & Seal this fifteenth
day of June in the Year of Our Lord one thousand eight hundred & Fifteen.

Signed, Sealed & Declared by the within:
Alexander Aberdeen (LS) to be his Last Will and Testament in presence of us who subscribed our names in prescence of said testator and each other

David Patterson King
Yves Delatouche
Angus Campbell

Lastly, I further request and wish that my reputed Daughter Barbara a free mulatto girl
be paid an equal share of the Residue & Remainder of my property with the aforesaid seven children. 

In Witness whereof I have hereunto set my hand this fifteenth day of June 1815
in presence of the above witnesses; the Codicil was signed in the presence of us whose names are herunto subscribed.

David Patterson King
Yves Delatouche
Angus Campbell

By making these provisions, Alexander ensured that his family formed part of Grenada’s emerging free coloured class that later became significant in Grenada’s social and political landscape.

His death was reported in the St Georges Chronicle and Grenada Gazette on July 5 1815.
    

The Life of Fanny (or Jane) Aberdeen (-1840)

 Fanny Aberdeen, sometimes also recorded as Jane Aberdeen, was manumitted by Alexander Aberdeen in 1806 and named in his will with her children as a free woman of colour. Her children took his name and there is little doubt that Alexander was their father.  

Fanny’s life was deeply woven into the machinery of enslavement in early 19th-century Grenada. Over nearly two decades she appears consistently in the Slave Registers of St Andrew, buying, selling, managing, and reporting on the lives of the people she enslaved. Her long paper trail shows that she was an active participant in the system, acquiring people through purchase and Marshal’s sale, selling them on again, and acting as trustee for other proprietors.

Early Years in the Registers: 1817–1821 

Fanny first appears in the 1817 Slave Register with eight enslaved people: six African-born adults: Sandy, Neilson, Nancy, Lidia, Charlotte and Louisa (all in their 30s and 40s), and two five-year-old children, Billy and Alicia, who were born enslaved in Grenada.  Her reporting of Louisa’s death in 1819 reveals the harsh conditions they endured: Louisa died at 42 of “mal d’estomac,” a term used on Caribbean plantations for the fatal consequences of pica, the desperate practice of dirt-eating that enslaved Africans used as an act of bodily resistance or to cope with trauma.

 By 1821, Fanny was already participating in the slave market, selling Sandy, who had ben with her since at least 1817, to John Chapman. Despite confusion in the archival indexing, she was operating in St Andrew, Grenada and not Jamaica as stated incorrectly in the record.  

Expansion and High Turnover: 1822–1825

 From 1822 onwards, Fanny’s involvement intensified. She bought six more people from Julien Allan Delatouche, four of them African-born, and two, Bonette and Jean Rose, born in Grenada. Bonette was described as a mulatto girl of about eleven. Children of African and European descent were often highly valued for domestic labour. 

That same year she reported the deaths of Billy (age 9) and Charlotte (age 37), both from mal d’estomac, an indicator of profound distress among the enslaved. Still, acquisitions continued. The following year she sold Bella and Julie back to the Delatouche family and reported Nancy’s death, again from mal d’estomac.

In 1823, Fanny made further purchases. John, Rosette and little Frances while also signing as trustee for enslaved people owned by Sophia, Caroline and John Alexander. Her dual signature, sometimes as Jane, sometimes as Fanny, appears consistently across the records, confirming that both names referred to the same woman.

 In 1825 was still active: she reported the birth of another child, also named Frances, giving her a workforce of two men and seven women. She was simultaneously managing a second place, in her name Jane Aberdeen, where Rosette gave birth to Margaret. At this point she controlled enslaved people either directly or as trustee at three separate places.  

Decline and Consolidation: 1826–1830

The later 1820s show a pattern of reduction, sale, manumission, and re-adjustment. Lydia died in 1826. Several others; Breeche, Jean Rose and Renette (Bonette) were sold back to Delatouche. Lease and her child Eliza were sold in 1828; Susannah was manumitted that same year, and by 1829 Fanny had only two enslaved people left: Nelson and Alicia, who had been with her since childhood. 

But in 1830, she suddenly expanded again acquiring Fanny (23), Charles (7), David James (19 months) and baby George from a Marshal’s sale. These four were described as mulattoes and had been brought together as a family group. For a short time, her workforce rose to six.

Final Years of Enslavement: 1831–1834

 Her newly purchased teenager Felisha died at sixteen in 1831, once again from mal d’estomac. The following year Fanny sold the entire mulatto family group to Catherine Drysdale, reducing her holding to a single enslaved man. 

In 1833, Fanny’s affairs were administered not by her directly but by her son, John Aberdeen, acting as her agent, suggesting she was unable to appear in person. Nelson, then around 40, was the last person she held.

In 1834, Matthew Lumsden acted as her agent and reported Nelson’s death yet again attributed to mal d’estomac. With his death, the group of enslaved people directly under Fanny’s control came to an end.

  

Compensation and Death

 On 12 October 1835, Jane Aberdeen filed a claim for compensation for four formerly enslaved people. These were likely the individuals she managed as trustee on behalf of the Alexanders rather than her own. The compensation records confirm her continued involvement in the institution even after emancipation. 

Jane “Fanny” Aberdeen died on 23 September 1840, with a death notice published in the St George’s Chronicle on 3 October that year closing the life of a woman whose personal history mirrors the evolution, harsh nature and persistence of slavery in Grenada.

 

1846 Indenture

 

 

 

The indenture documents the sale and transfer of land in St Andrew, by John and Alexander Aberdeen acting as executors of the late Fanny Aberdeen. They are most likely her sons and it was John Aberdeen that handled her slave register in 1933. They acknowledge receiving the sum of thirty-nine pounds, twelve shillings and six pence from a man named Saint Joseph. This payment completed the sale of land formerly belonging to Fanny Aberdeen, forming part of the settlement of her estate after her death.

 It refers to forty-two acres, originally part of the Bellona Estate in the St. Andrew. A survey diagram was included in the original document. The indenture formally grants, sells, releases and confirms the land to Saint Joseph and guarantees that he and his heirs may hold, occupy and enjoy it permanently without interruption or dispute. The document is signed and sealed by Alexander and John Aberdeen and witnessed by Edward Harvey.
    

Alexander Aberdeen’s children

Of his children we note the following: 

The Life of Alexander Aberdeen (Junior) c1801-1875

 Alexander Aberdeen Junior was one of the most prominent members of Grenada’s free coloured community in the nineteenth century. Born in St Andrew in the first years of the 1800s, he was the son of Alexander Aberdeen, a Scottish-born planter from Echt, Aberdeenshire, and Fanny, a mixed-heritage woman whom his father had enslaved but later freed. 

In 1806, when Alexander Junior was still very young, his father executed a formal deed of manumission freeing Fanny and “all her future issue,” which meant that Alexander Junior was legally free decades before the emancipation of enslaved people in the British colonies. When his father died in 1815, he named Fanny and all their children as his heirs. Alexander Junior therefore grew up in the rare position of being a free, property-connected person of colour in early nineteenth-century Grenada, at a time when such status provided crucial stability and opportunity. 

As he reached adulthood, Alexander Aberdeen Junior established himself in St George’s and began his working life as a book-keeper in several commercial firms. 

This occupation was typical for free coloured and mixed-heritage men whose literacy and numeracy allowed them to move into clerical work rather than the manual labour expected of the enslaved. 

Over time he gained the confidence of the colonial administration and was appointed Clerk of the Market in St George’s, a post that required daily supervision of trading practices, prices, weights and measures. 

By the late 1830s Alexander Junior was sufficiently recognised to appear in official notices, such as the 1839 issue of The Grenada Free Press, which lists an “Alexander Aberdeen, Gentleman” as appointed to the post of Ensign in the St George’s Regiment. This was a commissioned junior officer rank. Although militia appointments often carried local political weight rather than military significance, they nonetheless signalled standing, respectability and acceptance among Grenada’s middle class.

 Alexander Aberdeen Junior established himself as a literate and respected free coloured man within Grenada. He had grown up with a status that was unusual for someone of mixed descent in the early nineteenth century, having been freed along with his mother Fanny by his father in 1806. His later life demonstrates that he was relied upon for administrative and clerical responsibilities. 

After his mother died, he was responsible for finalising the legal transfer of her property together with his brother John Aberdeen as executors of an indenture made on 11 February 1846. He was involved in ensuring that the land previously belonging to the deceased Fanny Aberdeen, could be lawfully conveyed to the purchaser, Saint Joseph. His participation indicates that he occupied a recognised position within family and local networks, responsible for executing legal formalities and safeguarding the proper transfer of title.  His presence in this indenture is consistent with the reputation later described in his obituary of 1875, in which he is remembered as dependable, honest, and trusted in public matters. 

Alexander Aberdeen Junior lived a long life, reaching the age of seventy-four. He died on 3 October 1875 at his residence at Monckton Street, St George’s, after what the obituary described as a short illness although his death record indicates some sort of poisoning. 

 His obituary records that he later served as Treasurer of the Society for the Education of the Poor, an important charitable institution. His roles placed him squarely within the civic life of the town and testify to the trust placed in him by both the government and the community.  He was also remembered as “honest, industrious and good-hearted,” a man agreeable in temper and respected for his “sterling qualities.” He appears to have been well known, with a large number of friends and relatives present at his funeral in the burial ground at Hospital Hill. 

Alexander Aberdeen Junior’s life reflects a remarkable generational transition. His father’s decision to free Fanny and her children enabled Alexander to grow up as a free man, secure property rights, and participate in the civic and administrative life of Grenada in ways that would otherwise have been extremely difficult for a person of mixed heritage in the early 1800s. His long service, good reputation and prominent obituary show that he became a respected member of Grenadian society whose life bridged the eras of slavery, emancipation and early post-emancipation governance.
    

The Life of John Aberdeen

 John Aberdeen belonged to the second generation of the Aberdeen family established in Grenada by the Scottish planter Alexander Aberdeen and the formerly enslaved woman Fanny, whom Alexander freed in 1806. He was named in his father’s will of 1815.  

The earliest known reference to John Aberdeen appears in the Grenada Free Press of 2 February 1831. He is listed under the St Andrew’s Regiment of Militia as an absentee from muster. It should be noted that militia rolls were poorly attended across the Caribbean, and absences were frequent. Names appeared repeatedly in these lists without any consequence to a man’s social status, employment prospects, or respectability. 

This notice places John squarely within the class of free coloured or mixed-heritage men who, by the 1830s, were required, or socially expected, to serve in local defence forces. His presence on the roll indicates he was officially recognised as a free man and a resident of some standing in St Andrew, since militia rolls did not typically include the poor or transient.

In the 1846 indenture relating to Fanny Aberdeen’s property, he appears as one of the executors of her estate, together with his brother Alexander Aberdeen.  Being named as an executor indicates that John was trusted, literate, and capable of handling legal responsibilities. It also shows that by the mid-nineteenth century he was considered an adult of maturity and authority, involved in managing family property and representing the interests of the Aberdeens in official matters. 

John’s appearance in both the militia roll and the indenture suggests that he was part of the core generation of the Aberdeen free coloured family, one that came of age in the decades between his manumission in 1806 and emancipation in 1838. Like others of mixed heritage in this period, he navigated a complex colonial society, gaining civic responsibilities even as racial hierarchies persisted. 

Although no known obituary survives for him, the pattern of his appearances suggests that he lived into the mid-nineteenth century and remained part of the network of free people of colour who increasingly shaped community life in Grenada.

 
The Life of Barbara Aberdeen (c.1797 – 22 November 1867)

Barbara was named as Alexander Aberdeen’s reputed daughter and described as a free mulatto girl. She would have been about 18 when he died. Her life can be pieced together only from brief appearances in Grenada’s surviving records, but even these fragments show a woman who held responsibility during a period of profound change on the island. 1817: 

Mother of Amelia Sim 

An 1818 baptismal record dated lists Amelia Sim, daughter of Andrew Sim and Barbara Aberdeen. She was born on 10 May 1817 and baptized on 24 December 1818 in St George’s. Ref  

Barbara is carrying her maiden name on the certificate. As Andrew is named in the register and Amelia carried his name, it is likely that Barbara and Andrew were in a recognised relationship but not legally married. 

Given her estimated birth year of c.1797, Barbara would have been around 20 years old when Amelia was born.   

1829: Acting as an Agent in St Patrick 

Barbara first appears in the 1828 and 1829 Slave Registers, where she is recorded as an agent for Andrew Sim in St Patrick. In that role, she submitted the registration of one enslaved person: Prudence, a 40-year-old African-born woman.  

Her signature appears as an “X”, indicated she was illiterate.  

As Prudence was the only enslaved person under their ownership, and a woman, it is possible that Prudence was brought in by Andrew to support Barbara in her domestic duties, Amelia would be about 10 years old. 

Life Through Emancipation and Its Aftermath 

Barbara lived through the apprenticeship period and the transition from slavery to full freedom in 1838. Although there is no record of her owning property or enslaved workers directly, it is clear that Prudence was brought in to support her and Barbara’s role as an agent in 1829 shows that she was familiar with colonial administrative processes. 

Death in 1867 

Barbara Aberdeen died on 22 November 1867, aged 70 from “senility”.  However, In the mid-19th century, the word “senile” simply related to old age. It did not specifically refer to dementia the way we use it today. Many doctors used “senility” simply as a respectable way of saying the person’s body had worn out.

Her lifetime spanned the height of plantation society and the aftermath following emancipation. 

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The Enslaved by Fanny Aberdeen   

Table of Enslaved People held by Jane/Fanny Aberdeen by Year as recorded in the Slave Registers

  Key:
A = Acquired
B = Born
D = Died 
P = Present 
M = Manumitted
S = Sold 

SANDY (c.1777–after 1821)

Sandy was an African-born man who appeared on Fanny Aberdeen’s estate in 1817 at around 40 years old. Having survived the Middle Passage as a young adult, he worked for Fanny for at least four years until she sold him in 1821 to John Chapman. His sale suggests he remained physically capable despite decades of labour and trauma. Sandy’s life reflects the resilience of the African-born enslaved who endured removal, resettlement, and forced labour into late adulthood. 

NEILSON / NELSON (c.1782–1834) 

Nelson first appears in 1817 as a 35-year-old African man. He remained with Fanny through repeated deaths, sales, and restructurings, eventually becoming the last enslaved person she held. Nelson lived under Fanny’s ownership for at least 17 years, one of the longest-recorded relationships in the register. He died in 1834 of mal d’estomac. Despite his decades of survival his final years highlight the prolonged vulnerability of ageing African-born enslaved men. 

BILLY (1812–1822) 

Billy was born enslaved in Grenada and appeared in the 1817 register at age five. He grew up under Fanny’s control alongside Alicia, likely a sibling or close companion. In 1822, at just nine years old, he died of mal d’estomac. Billy’s short life reflects the precariousness of enslaved childhood in such places. 

NANCY (c.1783–1823)

 Nancy was an African-born woman aged 34 in 1817. She lived and laboured on Fanny’s estate for at least six years and died in 1823 at around 40 years old from mal d’estomac. Her death, like several others on Fanny’s estate, reflects a pattern of suffering among African-born women, who often bore the greatest emotional, physical, and reproductive burdens. 

LIDIA / LYDIA (c.1783–1826)

Lydia, an African-born woman, first appears at age 34. She remained with Fanny for nearly a decade. She likely participated in heavy labour and possibly mentoring younger Creole-born enslaved people. Lydia died in 1826 at age 41. Her long presence there underscores the reliance on African women in sustaining plantation workforces after the slave trade ended. 

CHARLOTTE (c.1784–1822) 

Charlotte was a 33-year-old African woman in 1817. She lived under Fanny’s ownership for at least five years and died in 1822 at about 37, also from mal d’estomac. Her record is one among several African women under Fanny’s control who died young from conditions linked to trauma and deprivation. 

ALICIA (1812–after 1829)

Alicia, born enslaved in Grenada in 1812, was recorded with Fanny from age five into her teenage years. She survived childhood deaths, repeated sales, and the dispersal of her companions. By 1829, she and Nelson were the only two enslaved people left with Fanny. After this she disappears from the record. 

LOUISA (c.1777–1819) 

Louisa was a 40-year-old African-born woman in 1817 and died two years later, aged 42, after suffering from “lame legs” and mal d’estomac’. 

 LEASE / LEECE (c.1795–1828)

Lease was a Creole woman born around 1795. She lived on Fanny’s estate from at least 1821 until she and her infant daughter Eliza were sold to Tomas Castale in 1828. She gave birth to a daughter, Eliza, in 1827, only to be sold the following year highlighting the fragility of enslaved family life. Her fate after sale is unknown. 

SUSANNAH (c.1808–manumitted 1828)

Born in Grenada around 1808, Susannah appeared as a teenager on Fanny’s estate and lived there throughout the turbulent 1820s. In 1828, at around 25 years old, she obtained her manumission from Fanny. She is one of the few enslaved people associated with Fanny whose freedom was formally secured before full emancipation. 

BRECHE / BREECHE (c.1790–after 1826)

Breeche was an African-born man, aged 32 in 1822. He remained with Fanny until 1826, when he was sold back to Julien Allan Delatouche. His sale suggests he retained economic value and physical ability despite the intense labour of his thirties. His trajectory reflects the common cycle of purchase, exploitation, and resale. 

JOHN PIERRE (c.1775–sold 1824)

John Pierre, a 47-year-old African-born man, was purchased by Fanny in 1822 and sold back to Delatouche two years later. 

BELLA (c.1781–sold 1823)

Bella was a 41-year-old African-born woman purchased in 1822. She was sold back to Delatouche in 1823, along with Julie. Her brief ownership shows the instability of enslaved women’s lives and the frequency of rapid turnover even in small holdings. 

BONNETTE / BONNET / RENETTE (1811–sold 1826)

Born in Grenada in 1811 and identified as a mulatto, Bonette was bought by Fanny in 1822. At age 15 she was sold back to Delatouche. Her early sale, before childbearing age, may indicate domestic training or perceived market value. Her life embodies the vulnerability of mixed-race children in the colonial slave economy. 

JEAN ROSE (1809–sold 1826)

Jean Rose was a Creole girl born around 1809. Acquired in 1822 at age 13, she remained with Fanny until 1826, when she too was sold back to Delatouche. 

JULIE (c.1798–sold 1823)

Julie was a young African-born woman, aged 24 when Fanny purchased her. She was sold back to Delatouche the following year. Her brief appearance suggests Fanny frequently traded enslaved women for profit or restructuring. 

JOHN (c.1803–after 1825)

John, aged 18 in 1823, was purchased and registered under “Jane.” In 1825 he was recorded as 20 years old on that same estate. His movements reflect a secondary property portfolio Fanny operated alongside her primary one. 

ROSETTE (c.1797–after 1825)

Rosette, purchased in 1823 at about 26 years old, was recorded as a mother by 1825, having given birth to Margaret. Her life reflects the forced reproductive role imposed on enslaved women, whose children enlarged the labour force. 

FRANCES (born 1821/1824) 

There were two girls named Frances: Frances (born c.1821) Purchased in 1823 as a two-year-old, she lived on the estate attached to Jane Aberdeen’s secondary property. She appears again in 1825, aged four. Frances (born 1824)Born on Fanny’s main location, this infant’s birth was recorded in the 1825 register. She grew up in an environment of sales, deaths, and shrinking household numbers; nothing further is recorded about her after early childhood. 

MARGARET (born 1824)

Born to Rosette on Jane’s secondary location, Margaret symbolises the continuation of enslaved family lines despite the absence of stability or protection from sale. She was recorded at age one in 1825. 

ELIZA (born 1827)

Eliza was born to Lease in 1827. She was sold with her mother to Tomas Castale in 1828 when she was only one year old. Her forced removal as an infant was typical of the era and demonstrates how enslaved families were routinely fractured. 

DESIREE (c.1824–manumitted 1827)

Desiree, aged three in 1827, was manumitted that same year. She is the youngest person in Fanny’s records to obtain freedom, likely reflecting a specific request or negotiated arrangement. 

FANNY (c.1807–sold 1832)

Purchased in 1830 and described as a 23-year-old mulatto woman, she arrived with her three young sons. They formed a rare intact family group on Fanny’s estate. In 1832, the entire family was sold to Catherine Drysdale. 

CHARLES (born c.1823–sold 1832)

A seven-year-old mulatto child purchased as part of the above family unit. He was sold with his mother and brothers in 1832. 

DAVID JAMES (born 1828–sold 1832)

Brought under Fanny’s control as a 19-month-old baby in 1830. He was sold at around 3¾ years old to Catherine Drysdale in 1832. 

GEORGE (born 1829–sold 1832)

A 3½-month-old infant in 1830, George was sold at 2¼ years old with the rest of his family in 1832. His presence shows his mother had recently given birth before being taken by Fanny. 

FELISHA (c.1815–1831)

 Felisha was a 16-year-old girl who died in 1831 of mal d’estomac. Her youth, gender, and the manner of her death underline the emotional and physiological toll that enslavement inflicted on adolescents. 

SUMMARY 

Across the years 1817 to 1834, more than thirty enslaved people lived, laboured, were born, died, bought, or sold on the small St Andrew estate managed by Jane “Fanny” Aberdeen. Their lives reflect the broader instability of Grenadian slavery in its final decades, as well as the human endurance required to survive it. 

The 1817 register shows a workforce dominated by African-born men and women, Sandy, Nelson, Nancy, Lydia, Charlotte and Louisa, who had survived the Middle Passage years earlier and were forced into hard labour as middle-aged adults. They formed the backbone of the work force, working alongside one another until death or sale removed them from the records. Several died from mal d’estomac, a term associated with extreme trauma, starvation, illness and the psychological suffering of enslavement. 

The creole born children grew up in constant insecurity. Billy and Alicia, both born in Grenada and registered at age five, symbolise the vulnerability of enslaved childhood. Billy died by age nine from mal d’estomac, while Alicia survived into adulthood but ultimately disappeared from the records. Other children, like Frances (1824), Margaret (1824), Desiree (1827), and Eliza (1827), were born into slavery only to be sold, manumitted, or removed within a few years. 

Families existed but were often broken apart. Lease and her daughter Eliza were sold together in 1828.  Rosette and her daughter Margaret, were kept together. Fanny and her three sons (Charles, David James, and George) were purchased as a unit and sold together two years later.  But other family ties were severed repeatedly. Infants and toddlers were frequently sold or died young, and family groups were transferred between places, bought back by former owners, or separated permanently. 

Fanny Aberdeen regularly bought enslaved people in batches, particularly in 1822 and 1830, and just as often sold them back into the market. Adults such as Bella, Julie, John Pierre, Breeche, Bonette, and Jean Rose were acquired and then eliminated through sale only a few years later. Every enslaved person lived with the knowledge that they could be removed at any moment. 

A small number achieved manumission. Two individuals; Susannah (1828) and Desiree (1827) were freed by Fanny. They were rare exceptions in a system otherwise defined by perpetual bondage. 

Death from distress and deprivation was common. Multiple individuals; Louisa, Billy, Charlotte, Nancy, Felisha, and finally Nelson died of mal d’estomac. Many died in their 30s and 40s, consistent with the life-shortening effects of plantation labour, high stress, hunger, abuse, and chronic trauma. 

By the early 1830s, only Nelson and Alicia remained from the original group. After Alicia disappeared from the records, Nelson stood there alone. He died in 1834 and was the last enslaved person held by Fanny Aberdeen.

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Mal d’estomac

 In the 1800s, when an enslaved person in Grenada was recorded as dying from mal d’estomac (“stomach disorder”), it often referred to a condition linked to dirt-eating, known medically as pica, but described by plantation doctors as Cachexia Africana. 

Many enslaved Africans continued the longstanding cultural practice of consuming certain types of clay, something widely done across Africa, the Americas, and Indigenous societies for medicinal, dietary, or spiritual reasons. But in the Caribbean plantation environment, their attempts to recreate this practice were misunderstood and forbidden.

 Enslaved people ate earth for reasons including hunger, stress, malnutrition, cultural continuity, mineral supplementation, and psychological survival. But planters and doctors saw the behaviour as a “disease,” blaming the supposed weakness of African bodies rather than the brutal conditions of slavery. Instead of recognising the role of starvation, trauma, and deprivation, they labelled the habit mal d’estomac or simply “dirt-eating,” claiming it was fatal and widespread. 

European women who suffered from pica for similar reasons, pregnancy, anaemia, stress were treated gently and seen as curable. Enslaved Africans, however, were seen as mentally flawed or physically inferior, and the same behaviour was considered deadly. Plantation doctors frequently wrote that many enslaved people who developed the habit were “lost,” and some claimed that half of plantation deaths were caused by this so-called disorder.

 In reality, the deaths often stemmed from malnutrition, poor sanitation, untreated infections, parasites, dehydration, and the extreme physical and psychological pressures of enslavement. The label mal d’estomacprovided planters with a convenient explanation that hid the true causes of illness and mortality on estates. 

Thus, death by mal d’estomac in Grenada was largely a product of cultural misunderstanding, medical racism, and the harsh realities of plantation life. It reflected the gulf between African knowledge systems and European plantation medicine, and it exposed the ways enslavers used pseudoscience to blame enslaved Africans for the suffering that slavery itself inflicted.

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 The Enslaved by Barbara Aberdeen 

Prudence was born in Africa and was forced into the transatlantic slave trade. She survived the Middle Passage and first appears in Grenada’s records in 1817, legally owned by Andrew Sim but in the possession of George Watson. 

Since she was born in Africa, there is no record of her actual date of birth but she is estimated to have been born in 1789 so would have been about 28 in 1817.    

By 1828 she was in the possession of Barbara Aberdeen, likely working in her home where she would have performed domestic work such as cooking, washing, cleaning and tending a garden.  Prudence may also have helped to raise Barbara’s daughter, Amelia and have been the steady, grounding adult in the household who quietly kept everything running. 

She is seen again in the 1829, 1833 and finally 1834 slave registers under Barbara Aberdeen.    

She worked for Andrew Sim for at least 17 years. Her character emerges here as a dependable, capable and trustworthy person. 

Now aged about 45 years old, she lived long enough to see slavery end and to enter the apprenticeship system that followed. 

Though the archive records little more than her name, age, and origin, the continuity of Prudence’s life suggests a woman of quiet strength, resilience, and dignity.  She was someone who endured profound upheaval yet remained a steady presence through decades of change in Grenada. 

Acknowledgements

 We are grateful to Dr. John Angus Martin of the Grenada Genealogical and Historical Society Facebook group for his editorial support and Owen Hankey for content contributions. 

Example Text

Fact File: Elizabeth Aerstin 

Claim Number: 147 

Compensation Award:  £27 10S 5D 

Number of Enslaved in Claim: 1 

Parish: St. George Parliamentary Papers: p. 95

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The Aerstin family, as recorded in the early 19th-century Slave Registers of Grenada, appears to be part of a small, interconnected group who were involved in the enslavement of people. The family is likely connected through blood relations, with John, Elizabeth, Sarah William and Catherine Aerstin all listed as proprietors in the Slave Registers. Their holdings were relatively modest compared to larger plantations. 

John Aerstin emerges as the central figure in the family’s history in early-19th-century Grenada. In 1817 he was based in St George that held eighteen enslaved people.

The 1818 register showed a number of changes. John bought 13 year old Grenadian Bella from Robert Hodge. He sold John, Thomas and Dick to James Smith. John Louis, Peggy, Matty, Charlotte, Mary Clare and Amelia were also sold, this time to Richard James Warren.

He ended the year with 11 enslaved people under his control.

In 1819, the Slave Register shows that a child named May was also born under his control. Her mother, Cesarine, was described as a Black Creole, born in Grenada, while May was listed as a mulatto child, her mixed parentage left unspoken but implicitly revealing the dynamics of power on the plantation. 

John enslaved two more people that year; Charlotte from Matilda B. Warren (perhaps the same Charlotte that was sold the year before) and Thomas from David McEwen. They were both 19 years old. 

 In the 1820 Slave Register, John had 14 enslaved people under his control (6 male, 8 female).  He made the following changes. He sold Jack (22) to William Pitt and manumitted Charlotte (20).  He bought Angel (21) who gave birth to a daughter Francoise.

The 1821 Slave Register shows that he had placed his interests under the possession of Catherine Aldridge.  

Peter, Cesarine, and May were shipped to Trinidad for sale, while Margaret and Lucy were transferred to Sarah and Elizabeth Aerstin respectively under a contractual arrangement tied to the late Sarah Fletcher, John was the executor of her will. It is likely that he was closely related to Sarah and Elizabeth in some way. There is a record of John AERSTIN selling an enslaved worker under execution in the Marshall’s office on 18 Feb 1822.  

The Slave Register of this year, again under the possession of Catherine Aldridge showed 6 males and 4 females under his control. James was 9 months old.

He likely died before emancipation, which would explain why no compensation claim exists under his name. There is also a record of a John Aerstin who died in Grenada in 1831, aged 29. 

John may have had children with a woman recorded variously as Elizabeth Bagenhall, Backenhall, or Ballingale. The records of Samuel (1808) Ann (1807), Jane (1810), and Charles Aerstin (1814) suggest that a parallel domestic life existed alongside his role as plantation owner. There is also a record for the birth of Thomas Aerstin with Louisa Harris in 1820,  Elizabeth Helen Aerstin with Catherine Pire in 1829.
    

Elizabeth Aerstin

 Elizabeth comes into focus through the 1821 Slave Register, when she appears as the owner of Lucy, who had been bequeathed to her by the late Sarah Fletcher. The record reads “This Slave bequeathed to me Sarah Aerstin by the late Sarah Fletcher deceased & commonly included by the deceased’s Executor John Aerstin in his return”  

This transfer was formalised through the executor, John Aerstin. For more than a decade, Elizabeth’s register entries show no change: she owned only Lucy, and her holdings neither grew nor diversified. Elizabeth’s life appears modest compared with John’s. She had enslaved one person and did not engage in buying or selling others. Lucy appeared in the registers of 1824, 1825, 1829, 1833 and 1834. 

When emancipation came in 1834, her enslaved worker, Lucy, by then 22½ years old, was legally freed. Elizabeth later received compensation in October 1835, amounting to £27 10s 5d, for the loss of Lucy’s labour.   

Sarah AERSTIN was also included in the 1821 register. She is listed as the owner of Margaret, a ten-year-old bequeathed to her by the late Sarah Fletcher under the same executor, John Aerstin, like Elizabeth. Sarah’s small-scale ownership resembles Elizabeth’s.  

By 1824 she had sold Margaret, then aged thirteen, to Samuel Weatherhead. She held one other female enslaved person at that time, though no further details are recorded. After 1824, Sarah disappears from the registers entirely. Whether she died, migrated, married under a different surname, or simply ceased to own enslaved people remains unknown.

William Aerstin 

William Aerstin appears briefly but significantly. On 7 April 1821 he exported three enslaved people; two females and one male, from Grenada to Trinidad. These individuals may have been the same Peter, Cesarine, and her daughter May who had been enslaved by John Aerstin and were removed around the same period. His actions suggest that William participated directly in the inter-Caribbean slave trade.

There is a record of a William and Rose Aerstin having a son, Edmund,  born on 9 November 1823 in St George.   

Catherine Aerstin
Catherine enters the historical record in 1817 as the enslaver of a woman named Francoise in St George. Her involvement appears minimal, and it is unclear how she connects to John or the others. She may have been a relative, wife, or widow, or simply part of a wider Aerstin network in the parish.

Summary 

Collectively, the Aerstins formed a small but active slave-owning family in St George, participating in the transfer, management, and sale of enslaved people between at least 1817 and 1834. Their activities spanned  ownership (John), small-scale inheritance and custodianship (Elizabeth and Sarah), and intercolonial exporting (William). The Aerstin family’s slaveholding activities were relatively small in scale but typical of the era, involving the inheritance and sale of enslaved people within family structures. The connection between John, Elizabeth, and Sarah suggests a tight-knit family unit. The lack of further records for Sarah and the relatively limited number of enslaved people held by  Elizabeth contrasts with the slightly larger operations overseen by John before his death. The family appears to have profited from the British system of compensation after abolition, which rewarded slaveholders for the loss of "property" when enslaved individuals were freed.

The Enslaved

The people enslaved by the Aerstins reflect the human stories behind the numbers, registers, and transactions. They include children, mothers, young adults purchased for labour, and individuals forcibly exported across the Caribbean. 

John, Thomas and Dick 

Born in Africa, John, Thomas and Dick had all crossed the Atlantic in chains and survived the horrors of the Middle Passage. All carried with them memories of another continent, a childhood spent beneath a different sun, before being forced into a world that stripped them of their name and history. All three were bound by a shared experience of loss and endurance. 

In 1817, their names appeared together in the records of the John Aerstin  their lives catalogued as property. Then, in 1818, their fates intertwined yet again as they were sold together to James Smith. The sale meant the wrenching separation from what little community they had built, but it also meant that, at least for now, they would not face the unknown alone. 

You can imagine, on the journey to their new destination, they would reminisce of the stories from their homeland, whispering fragments of songs and traditions that had survived the years. Thomas, despite his fifty years remained a figure of quiet strength, his endurance a silent testament to resistance. John, the youngest at 30, drew strength from their presence, learning that survival was not just about the body, but about memory and companionship. 

They faced an uncertain future. Yet, by holding onto each other, they carried with them the spirit of endurance and the hope that, no matter how the world sought to break them, their lives and their memories of Africa would persist. 

But their reprieve was brief. James Smith, into whose hands they had been delivered, did not intend to keep them for long. Almost immediately, he arranged their sale to George Cruikshank, another figure in the tangled web of Caribbean slavery. For John, Dick, and Thomas, it was another abrupt transition, their fates dictated by the shifting interests of men whose lives were built on the trafficking of others. 

This was the last we saw of Thomas.

James Smith appears from the record to be more of a middleman than a long-term owner. His rapid transfer of the men suggests he was a trader, one who moved enslaved people as commodities, seeking profit in every transaction rather than seeking to cultivate or manage estates. For John, Dick, and Thomas, this meant their lives were measured in values and exchanges rather than roots or relationships, and each new sale threatened further separation and uncertainty. Still, moving as a group, they clung to the fragments of familiarity and memory that could not be sold, even as the world around them changed with every transaction.

Dick was sold again on 1825 to James McBurnie. The record now whos him to have country marks most likely on his face.  This transaction marked yet another upheaval in Dick’s life, as he was forced to leave behind any sense of stability he might have begun to rebuild. Each sale chipped away at the fragile connections to people and place, but Dick’s repeated presence in the records is a testament to his endurance. Despite the unrelenting cycle of displacement and uncertainty, he continued to survive his story a silent chronicle of resilience amid continual upheaval.

George Cruikshank went on to claim compensation for 3 enslaved people.  There was a black African called John who was one of them but born c.1791. As birth dates of enslaved Africans were not recorded by traders, their age was assumed and manipulated for commercial gain.  Could this in fact be the John we are following.  If so, he managed to survive through this entire ordeal! 

Dick appears in James McBurnie’s 1825 register, age 59. Now known as Dick C as there was another Dick in the register. There was an African  John listed too but the dates don’t match the one we are following and the country marks would be a change from the earlier records – but we saw this change with Dick.  This was the last we saw of Dick.

Jack, Dick and Peggy 

Jack (21), Dick (28) and Peggy (51) were sold to William Pitt in 1820. They faced another sudden displacement. This was further impacted by their onward sale as William sent them to Trinidad with a few others. 

Their fortitude lies in the courage with which they confronted the unknown: torn from familiar surroundings, yet carrying with them unspoken resilience that they needed to survive.

Peter 

Peter was born enslaved in Grenada and was transported to Trinidad just as he entered adulthood in 1821. His fortitude is found in his journey: the heartbreak of removal, the strength to adapt again, and the courage to continue living in a world that repeatedly uprooted him. 

John Louis, Peggy, Matty, Charlotte, Mary Clare and Amelia 

We can see from John Aerstin’s register that these were all sold to Richard James Warren in 1818.

Richard Warren’s slave register for 1819 tells us more.  Richard was the legal owner but they were for his sister Matilda Warren who was a business owner in St George.  He recorded Amelia’s death that year, age 47 from a fever. He also sold Charlotte (20) to John Aerstin.

The following year, we see that Matty gave birth to a daughter Betsey and that the holding was in the lawful possession of Matilda and not Richard. In fact, it might be safe to assume that he had died as his name disappears from all future records.

Unfortunately, Betsey died in infancy aged 4 months. The record says that she died from eruption of the skin which was a term used to describe a range of issues including ulceration, yaws (a common chronic infectious disease) or even smallpox. As enslaved people had limited access to medical treatment, a mild skin eruption could become life-threatening through infection, fever or septicaemia.

Sadly, Peggy died in 1823. An inquest concluded that she had died by the virtuation of God which really meant she passed by natural causes, at 54 years old.  The inquest may have been called for because of the suddenness of her passing. The Amelioration Act that was passed in 1823 required such an inquest if a death had been sudden, suspicious or resulting from severe punishment. The act was passed as the British government were facing huge pressures from abolitionists and wanted the system to appear more humane and reassure Parliament that the system was being reformed. A coroner would be appointed and a white jury. Even if the death had been as a result of brutal treatment, the enslaved witnesses were not allowed to testify and prosecutions of the perpetrators were almost non-existent.

We see John Louis (13), Mary Claire(15) and Matty (27) and in Matilda’s register of 1825.

There was mixed news in 1829. 

Matty was manumitted in that year and was free from bondage that had been part of her whole life to that point. At 31, she could finally start planning the rest of her life. 

Mary Claire died of consumption. This was a common condition in enslaved people due to the unsanitary and confined conditions they had to live in. She was just 19.

Matilda went on to claim compensation for the 5 people she had enslaved in 1834. One of which was John Louis. He survived!  He was also just 21 years old so, after the period of apprenticeship, he would have been free to live a life more of his choosing.

Cesarine and May 

Cesarine was a black woman born in Grenada. She gave birth to May in 1819 from a white father (likely to have been an overseer). She was  transported to Trinidad, thankfully with May, for onward sale in 1821. Despite all this, she remained a mother, a survivor, and an important constant for her daughter. 

Margaret 

Margaret saw many changes in her early life. She first appears in the register of 1817 under the control of John Aerstin. She was then transferred to Sarah Aerstin in 1821 who sold her to Samuel Weatherhead in 1825.

She was on the move again in 1827 as Samuel sold her on. She was still just 15 years old.

Margaret’s childhood consisted of constant reassignments between households. Each shift required adaptive strength. Her ability to withstand separation, reattachment and new environments is itself remarkable. 

Lucy 

Lucy possesses one of the longest and clearest life histories in the Aerstin records. She was transferred to Elizabeth Aerstin in 1821 and remained with her through 1834. Her survival from infancy to adulthood during the harshest years of slavery demonstrates deep resilience. In 1834 she finally saw the end of enslavement at 22, living proof that fortitude endures even when freedom is delayed.

Angel and Francoise 

Angel was taken under John Aerstin’s control in 1820 and gave birth to a daughter, Francoise soon afterwards. She was 21.  Angel would have to negotiate a life of demands, long hours on top of motherhood. Yet she continued, nurturing her daughter despite uncertainty about their future. Francoise represents the fragile but determined emergence of new life in an environment built on oppression. 

John 

This Martinique-born man, present in 1829, had already endured migration between islands. His appearance suggests a life shaped by multiple colonial systems. His fortitude lies in surviving across borders, labour regimes, and decades of upheaval.

Summary 

The stories of the enslaved associated with the Aerstin family reveal lives marked by relentless upheaval, resilience, and adaptability. Though many of their names appear briefly in the records, their legacies were anything but small. They became the ancestors of many Grenadians living today, the builders of villages and farming communities, the first to negotiate wages, purchase land, educate their children, and establish the foundations of the island’s modern society. Their transition from bondage to freedom was a generational rebirth. In this way, the stories of the enslaved connected to the Aerstins do not end in tragedy but in continuity. Their endurance ensured that Grenada’s cultural, familial and historical lines survived, and their descendants inherited not only freedom but a strength rooted in centuries of perseverance. Their lives, though obscured in the archival fragments, are testament to the courage, adaptability and quiet triumph of a people who refused to be erased.

References 

Slave Registers for: 

• John Aerstin from 1817, 1818, 1819, 1821, 1822
• Catherine Aerstin 1817, 1821
• Elizabeth Aerstin 1821, 1834
• Sarah Aerstin 1824
• George Cruikshank 1825
• William Pitt 1820
• Richard Warren 1819
• Matilda Warren 1820, 1821, 1825, 1829, 1834
• Samuel Weatherhead 1827

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to John Angus Martin of the Grenada Genealogical and Historical Society for his editorial support

Fact File:     Eleanor Alder 

Claim Number: 156 

Compensation Award:  £61 18s 6d 

Number of Enslaved in Claim: 3 

Parish: St. George 

Parliamentary Papers: p. 95 

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Eleanor Alder

 Eleanor Alder appears in the Grenada compensation records as a small-scale enslaver who was based in the parish of St George and held three enslaved people at the time of emancipation. She submitted Claim No. 156 and received £61 18s 6d when slavery was abolished, an amount reflecting both the limited size of her holding and the intimate household-based nature of her reliance on enslaved labour. She would have held the enslaved to work in her household, in a business or even rented their services out.  In any event, records suggest a woman of modest means, and her own signature in the Slave Registers was a simple cross which indicates that she was illiterate. This detail offers a glimpse into her social position: a woman who occupied authority over others while lacking the literacy and formal education that many plantation and business proprietors possessed. So, it is most likely she used the enslaved for her own purposes. 

It would seem that Eleanor depended on just two enslaved women to keep her household running, Elsey (sometimes called Alice) and Phillis, with the addition of Mary Louise until she was sold to Lawrence Von Weiller in 1821. It was a small group, but their hard work was what kept everything going. They almost certainly were working within a domestic capacity rather than in a field-based plantation setting.   Eleanor’s daily life and social standing were shaped by their constant presence and work. Their labour would have included cooking, cleaning, carrying water and tending to the house. 

The registers show that Eleanor managed a shifting enslaved household across nearly two decades of reporting, selling Mary Louis in 1821 and recording the birth of Fancheon to Elsey in 1826. These transactions reveal how even small-scale enslavers used sale, purchase, and reproduction as mechanisms for maintaining their labour force. By 1834, on the eve of full emancipation, Eleanor Alder still held three enslaved persons; an adult woman approaching old age, a young woman at the height of her strength, and a child whose lives and relationships had become deeply entwined with the rhythms of her household. Her story, though modest in scale, forms part of the wider picture of small female enslavers in Grenada whose domestic settings were nonetheless sustained by exploitation, and the legal ownership of other human beings.

What was Eleanor’s racial identity?

We have found no record that explicitly states Eleanor Alder’s colour or racial identity. However, when we place all the available evidence side by side and consider the social structure of early-nineteenth-century Grenada, one conclusion becomes significantly more likely than the others.  She was most likely white.

Several factors support this interpretation.

• She owned multiple enslaved women.
• She was illiterate and signed the registers singularly herself. From this, we can assume that she was the head of the house (there is no record of her marital status). She may have inherited the means to acquire the workers from a former spouse or other inheritance.
• She traded with a white man for the sale of Mary Louise.

That said, “free coloured” in St George did own small numbers of enslaved people, and illiteracy was not uncommon among them. However, this occurred less often before the 1830s and there would be other clues to ethnicity in parish or manumission records, none of which have surfaced for Eleanor.

Also, a formerly enslaved and single woman owning multiple enslaved women herself was less common.  Although, it must be remembered that many of these women had "relationships" with white men who may have provided the means to own property, including enslaved.  Still, nothing in the registers suggests that Eleanor had recently transitioned from enslavement to freedom, and socially she operated firmly within the enslavement system.

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The Enslaved

Records from the Slave Registers by year 

 
Key: B = Born, P = Present, S = Sold 

The people Eleanor Alder enslaved; Elsey (also recorded as Alice), Mary Louis, Phillis, and Elsey’s daughter Fancheon, form a small but emotionally powerful enslaved community shaped by intergenerational bonds, forced labour, and the insecurity of sale and separation. Their stories, as recovered from the Slave Registers, reveal the intimate scale of domestic enslavement in Grenada and the resilience of women who lived through displacement, childbirth, and the unrelenting control of an owner’s household.

Elsey and Fancheon

Elsey, born in Africa between 1777 and 1780, was the anchor of this enslaved group. By the time she first appeared in the 1817 register she was already a mature woman, forcibly removed from her homeland decades earlier and likely carrying memories of her original language, culture, and family. Over the years she was consistently recorded, always present, always serving suggesting that she was Eleanor’s most relied-upon worker. Late in life, in 1826, she gave birth to her daughter, Fancheon, showing both the exploitation of enslaved women’s reproductive bodies and the strength of a woman who became a mother again in her late forties.

Fancheon grew up entirely within the confines of the Alder’s affairs, her earliest years spent in servitude and likely shadowing her mother’s tasks within the household.

Fancheon was recorded from infancy through to age eight during the final years of slavery. Born into a system already beginning to collapse, she represented the last generation of enslaved children under Alder’s control. Her early years were shaped by her mother Elsey’s labour and by the enforced intimacy of a tiny enslaved household where the boundary between childhood and servitude was thin and shifting.

Who was Fancheon’s father?

Records do not name Fancheon’s father, but several clues help us understand what is most likely. Fancheon was born in March 1826 to Elsey, an African-born woman in her late forties. Both mother and daughter were recorded as Black, and there were no enslaved men listed on Eleanor’s property at that time. This means that Fancheon’s father cannot have been an enslaved man belonging to Eleanor, since her small household consisted only of enslaved women. The father must therefore have come from outside of this setting.

In early nineteenth-century Grenada, when a small domestic enslaved household contained only women, the majority of children born under these circumstances were fathered by free men living or working nearby. These men were most commonly white or free coloured and had social, economic, or physical access to the household. In an environment where enslaved women had no legal rights over their bodies and were routinely exposed to coercion, such paternity was seldom the result of an equal or consensual relationship. Elsey’s advanced age at the time of Fancheon’s birth strengthens this interpretation.

It is possible that the father was an enslaved man from a neighbouring urban household, since Eleanor lived in St George’s where domestic properties stood close together. Enslaved men working as grooms, tradesmen, or hired labourers often moved between properties. However, African-born enslaved women in their late forties rarely entered consensual relationships with enslaved men, especially when no enslaved men were present in their immediate domestic environment. Pregnancies at this age were far more often the result of sexual exploitation by free men with authority or proximity.

The social realities of Grenada at the time strongly suggest that the father was a man from outside the household, very likely a free man who had the power to exploit Elsey’s position.

Phillis

Phillis, born in Grenada in 1813, grew into adolescence and adulthood while still enslaved by Eleanor Alder. By the time emancipation arrived in 1834 she was twenty-one and would have been indispensable to the household’s labour.

The surviving registers do not explicitly identify her mother, but the available evidence allows us to make a strong and well-reasoned assessment. Phillis appears consistently on Eleanor Alder’s property from 1817 through to emancipation. At the time of her birth, the only African-born women under Alder’s control were Elsey and Mary Louise. Both women were of childbearing age in 1813, making either a possible mother. Elsey would have been in her mid-thirties, while Mary Louise would have been around twenty-two.

It is also possible that she was bought as a child before she reached 4 years old.

The relationship between Phillis and the other enslaved women offers important clues. Phillis remained with Elsey across every slave register, through changes in ownership and household structure. When Mary Louise was sold to Lawrence Von Weiller in 1821, Phillis did not accompany her. In small domestic enslaved households like Eleanor Alder’s, mothers and young children were generally kept together unless a deliberate decision was made to separate them. The fact that Phillis stayed while Mary Louise was removed suggests that they were not regarded as a mother-and-child pair. In contrast, Phillis grew into adulthood alongside Elsey and later with Fancheon, forming the kind of intergenerational domestic unit characteristic of enslaved family groups centred on a matriarch.

Elsey’s later childbirth further strengthens the likelihood that she was Phillis’s mother and may have been fathered by the same man.

Marie Louise: From Africa to Emancipation – A Life Traced Through the Registers

Mary Louis, also born in Africa suggested around 1791 (there are no records to confirm the date of birth). She appears in the 1817 register as a young woman in her twenties, sharing with Elsey the experience of forced migration and loss. Her life took a different path in 1821 when she was sold to Lawrence Von Weiller, a transaction that demonstrates how easily family-like bonds within small enslaved households could be broken. It is possible that she was the mother of Phillis, who appears as a young Grenadian-born girl in the registers, though it is more likely that Phillis was Elsey’s child.

Marie Louise’s life is one of the rare stories we can follow across more than two decades of Grenada’s slave registers. She was an African woman whose presence is recorded with remarkable consistency from 1821 through to emancipation in 1834. Her life reveals the instability of enslavement, the emotional and physical endurance of African-born women, and the shifting household fortunes that shaped the fate of the enslaved.

Early Life and Sale in 1821

Marie Louise was forcibly transported from Africa to Grenada during the later years of the slave trade. By 1821, aged about 31, she was enslaved by Eleanor Alder, living in a small domestic household where she worked alongside one or two other enslaved women. That year, Eleanor sold her to Lawrence Von Weiller, a transaction that uprooted her from a familiar yet coercive environment and relocated her into the domestic orbit of a new enslaver at a pivotal moment. 

• Note: Lawrence Von Weiller was a free coloured man of mixed African and French heritage. He was charged but pleaded and was found not guilty for his involvement in Fedon's Rebellion 1795-1976 and was discharged. He was one of those who had surrendered. He owned a plantation in St Andrew.

Here, she joined Duncan and Madeline also from Africa, both aged about 40, Billy (27) from Demarara and a mixed race girl called Kate (5) who was born in Grenada.

1821 is also the year when Lawrence Von Weiller manumitted a 45 black African woman called Nimee. For Marie Louise, this must have been a moment of mixed significance. On the one hand, entering a household where manumissions occurred may have offered some hope of being released at some stage. On the other, she may just have been a replacement for Nimee. Whatever its meaning, this episode places her life at the intersection of hope and pragmatic exploitation.

Transferred by Will After Lawrence’s Death (1825)

By the 1825 Slave Register, Lawrence had died. Marie Louise, then aged 35, was inherited by Mary Magdeleine Von Weiller, likely Lawrence’s widow or daughter.She was bequeathed to Magdeleine together with Billy (31), Madelaine (44) and Kate (12), who she knew from her time with Lawrence. She was also joined by John (8) who had been purchased from Robert McBurnie.

This very act of being willed as property and having to move without choice illustrates the brutal legal reality governing her life. Even in death, enslavers retained the right to direct the future of the enslaved, severing them from potential manumission and re-embedding them into new authority structures without their consent.

The 1829 Slave Register records Marie Louise again, this time aged 39, still owned by Mary Magdalene together with Madeleine and Kate

The three appear to have formed a small, stable domestic unit. Their ages and origins suggest a multigenerational household: two African-born women in mature adulthood and one younger Grenadian-born girl entering her mid-teens. The fact that there were no increases or decreases from the last register in Mary Magdalene’s household would indicate that John and Billy left soon after they were acquired. Still Enslaved in 1834: The Final Register Before Emancipation

The 1834 register, the last before full emancipation, lists Marie Louise again, now aged 43½ years. Madeleine (32½) and Kate (20) were still there too, forming a tight-knit trio whose lives had become deeply intertwined after years of shared forced labour.

To be recorded in 1834 means Marie Louise lived to see the legal end of chattel slavery in Grenada. She entered the island as an enslaved African girl or young woman and survived into the new era of apprenticeship. This is an extraordinary arc of endurance for someone who had already survived the Atlantic crossing, sale, inheritance, and decades of coerced labour.

What This Reveals About Her Experience

• Marie Louise’s life story, reconstructed from careful archival tracing, becomes a powerful testament to the lived experience of African-born women who endured and adapted across major transitions:
• She survived the Middle Passage.
• She was sold at least once, inherited once, and never freed before 1834.
• She lived in three consecutive enslavers’ households.
• She forged long-standing bonds with other enslaved women, especially Madeleine and Kate.
• She remained stable in one household long enough to reach emancipation alive

This was a remarkable outcome given the mortality rates for African-born enslaved people. Her story, preserved across multiple returns, gives us one of the clearest examples of an African-born Grenadian enslaved woman whose life spanned the system’s final decades and ended in the moment of its collapse.

Summary

Although Eleanor Alder was neither wealthy nor part of the large planter class, her possession of three enslaved women makes sense once we consider the nature of labour in domestic settings in early nineteenth-century Grenada. Households like hers relied entirely on human labour for every aspect of daily life. Enslaved women performed a wide range of tasks that today would be divided among several occupations, and their roles were physically demanding, continuous, and often required overlapping skills and constant availability.

A single householder, especially an illiterate woman without a husband—depended on enslaved women to run her entire domestic world. Household labour included cooking over open fires, washing clothes by hand, fetching large quantities of water (as there were no pumps in most domestic settings), cleaning, tending small gardens or kitchen plots, preserving food, carrying goods to market, and sometimes producing items for sale. In addition, enslaved women cared for livestock, fetched firewood, and assisted with small-scale agricultural tasks if the property had provision grounds or cash crops. A lone enslaved woman could not reasonably sustain all of this work, particularly as many tasks had to be done simultaneously.

Age was another factor. Elsey, the African-born woman under Alder’s control, was already in her late thirties or early forties when the registers began and later reached nearly fifty. Older enslaved women were usually the most experienced and trustworthy, but physically they could no longer shoulder the heaviest work alone. Eleanor would have required a younger woman, such as Phillis, to take on strenuous duties. When Phillis was a child, Eleanor still required a second adult, which explains the presence of Mary Louise in the early years. In small households, enslaved children could not contribute meaningfully until they were older, making an additional adult woman necessary to maintain day-to-day operations.

Domestic settings also needed continuity. Illness, pregnancy, or injury could leave a household without labour, so enslavers often kept two or three women to ensure that essential work continued uninterrupted. With no enslaved men under Alder’s control, the women may also have been responsible for tasks that mixed-gender enslaved households usually shared. In this sense, the three women functioned as a complete labour unit: one older, experienced matriarch; one younger woman becoming the main labourer; and, eventually, a child growing into work roles as she matured.

Finally, the presence of three enslaved women reflects the social expectations of the time. Even modest white women in St George often owned multiple enslaved people because it was seen as a marker of respectability. Domestic labour was not only a necessity but also a symbol of status. Eleanor’s reliance on enslaved women allowed her to sustain the appearance and functioning of her interests, even if she herself lacked literacy, wealth, or broader social power.

Together, the enslaved workers under Eleanor Alder’s control formed a small but resilient community. There were African-born elders holding memory and trauma, Grenadian-born daughters inheriting both burden and strength. Their labour sustained the Alder household, their relationships gave them emotional survival, and their presence reveals how even small households were sites of coercion but also endurance, and intergenerational resilience.

References

Slave Registers for Eleanor Alder from 1817, 1821, 1825, 1826, 1831, 1833, 1834

Slave Registers for Lawrence Vonweiller from 1821 (and another from the same year)

Slave Registers for Magdelaine Vonweiller from 1825