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The HALLs of Jamaica – Allegonda’s Legacy

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Marriages and Social Standing

 

The Family Register, in total, lists only one marriage separation (of Dorothy and Christian Boom), no second marriages (until the 1925 appendix), and no children outside marriage. So far as I can tell, all the people in the Family register are racially pure white. This begs the question 'Was this typical of Jamaica at the time?' and the answer is a resounding 'No!'. (Although I know of no other marriage separations).

 

I'm no historian and what follows is not borrowed from any recognised source so please take it with a grain of salt.

 

Jamaica in the late 1700s and early 1800s was a society with a strong social stratification. At the top were the absentee landlords, the British who owned the land in Jamaica but went there as little as possible. Among these, for instance, was the Duke of Buckingham, who owned Hope Estate in the parish of St Andrew, a whopping 2239 acres in 1840. And Richard Kinkead (dec.) owned Stirling Castle, a 1302 acre estate in the Parish of St Thomas in the Vale. I'd be interested in knowing if he was related to the Edward Kinkead who married into the family at a later date; I suspect that he was.

 

The family did not fall into the landlord class much, by 1840 the only plantations known to have been held by family members are Belmont with 80 acres in the Western District of St Andrew by John Herman Hall, Friendship Brook with 300 acres in Port Royal Parish by John R Jackson dec., and an unnamed farm with 2 acres in St Andrew by William Hall. John R Jackson would be John Rawleigh Jackson brother of Dorothy Gray Jackson / Hall, and only appears in the Family Register as a Godfather.

 

Below the class of absentee landlords are the Planters and Judges. Planters were referred to as "Esquire" and Judges as "The Honourable". I don't know of any judges in the family except possibly John Herman Hall (son of Sarah Mallard) at his marriage to Allegonda in 1829 and Thomas Berry in 1805 (although there are some in unrelated Hall & Jackson families) but there were plenty of Planters; most of the Halls were Planters.

 

Below the classes of Planters and Judges come the Gentlemen and Merchants. With the 'Merchants', I include a whole swathe of similar occupations from saddler to shopkeeper. In this class are George Patterson, Thomas Berry (in 1779) and Brian Manning to name a few. These people intermarried freely with the planters.

 

All the people of the above classes are white. Somewhat lower on the social scale are the poor whites, mariners and common soldiers. These are well defined classes. In the mid to late 1700s, thousands of dead mariners were buried on Jamaica, at times accounting for up to one third of the total burials. Christian Boom senior was a mariner, Christian Boom junior would probably class as a poor white. The number of soldiers baptised in St Andrew at around the end of the 1700s is quite astounding.

 

So much for the whites. Below the whites, and far more populous, are the free coloured races. The distinctions of mullato, quadroon, mustee, sambo and (possibly) black mean very little to social status. By the 1820s 'coloured' or 'brown' was used to denote all mixed race individuals.

 

At the very bottom of the scale are the "n.s." i.e. negro slaves. Some mulatto, quadroon and sambo people were slaves; but they were greatly outnumbered by negros. Negro slaves were never allowed to keep their African names, and although there are many negro slave baptisms (in the countryside, very few in Kingston) there are few if any negro slave burials and few marriages before 1813 in the church records.

 

I suspect that the lack of negro burials and marriages had as much to do with the lack of qualified clergy as with any racial prejudice. Ministers could, and frequently did, baptise more than 50 people in any one day. They couldn't, however, bury or marry more than about three or four people in a day. The numbers of slaves and free coloured people were growing so fast that the clergy couldn't keep up, and so marriages were the exception rather than the rule. Marriages between whites and coloured people just didn't occur.

 

For fun, I noted the dates of various types of marriages in Kingston. Kingston marriage records began in 1725. No black or coloured marriages occur until 1738, when a free mulatto married a free negro. Then there is a big gap to 1755 when two free mulattos married each other. After 1755, marriages between free blacks and / or browns, while not exceptionally rare, where still far less common than marriages between whites.

 

The first slave marriage appears in the Kingston Register in Apr 1803; the second, between a negro slave and a free black, is recorded in May 1807. Group marriages of negro slaves start in 1813. By 1815, the number of slave marriages had increased to more than the number of marriages between whites and kept increasing to 1823. In 1824 and 1825 I didn't notice any slave marriages; possibly slave marriages were entered in a separate register. However, the number of marriages between free blacks and / or browns had risen between 1815 and 1824 to far exceed the number of marriages between whites.

 

I didn't keep good track of mixed race or slave baptisms but couldn't help noticing that in St Andrew individual slaves were being baptised in 1783 and there were group baptisms of slaves in 1787. The number of group baptisms of slaves in the St Andrew Parish Register had risen an incredible amount by 1817 where they totally swamped all other baptisms. For instance, I counted 21 baptisms of slaves with surname Hall or Jackson in the first half of 1817, and no free Hall or Jackson baptisms. The minister agreed with me, and from 1818 the slave baptisms in St Andrew were written in a separate register, for which I was profoundly grateful.

 

There was a bad policy shift in the Church of England in the early 1830s, at a slightly different time in each parish. From a genealogical perspective it is a strong advantage to have illegitimate births before then but not after. The policy shift concerns the listing of the parents names at baptism: before, the surnames and races of both parents were listed, making tracing easy; after, the church wilfully failed to record any part of the names of either parent, or race, making tracing almost impossible. This is sheer bloody-mindedness on the part of the church, after the change it recorded the parents abode, but not their names. The policy didn’t change the ratio of illegitimate to legitimate births. In 1851 (and probably later), about 75% of children baptised in Kingston were born out of wedlock and the ratio hadn't changed much since the 1750s.

 

Successive marriages in the middle of the 1700s were a vital necessity. Mortality rates were incredibly high for people of all races and life expectancies correspondingly short. I sometimes think that the average life expectancy in Kingston when Allegonda Boom / Hall lived there was about 10 years. Partners had to marry again or have mixed race liaisons when spouses died. Dorothy Harrison married at least twice, John Hall senior at least three times, Robert Jackson at least two times. And later, Richard Hall married at least twice and John Herman Hall at least twice. At least one family member had mixed race children before his first marriage. Neither the successive marriages nor the mixed race liaisons are in the Family Register. The Family Register is thus a purified record for a typical Planter / Merchant family.

 

Something, perhaps trivial, perhaps not, is that so far I haven't found any mixed race relationship between a family member and either a slave or someone who isn't at least half white.