Call and Response: The University Of Glasgow and Slavery

The University of Glasgow has published a blog post about its current exhibition, Call and Response: The University of Glasgow and Slavery, which continues until 31 JAN 2020:

In August this year, Call and Response: The University of Glasgow and Slavery opened in the University of Glasgow Chapel. The exhibition seeks to explore the unknown or unexpected ways collections can be related to racial slavery, and continues the conversation by widening the range of responses to these historic legacies. Call and Response centres around responses to items in collections held by Archives & Special Collections, the Hunterian Museum and the Library’s maps collection.

By opening this dialogue and extending the reach of the exhibition, it is important to acknowledge the histories of enslaved people and their role in the University’s story. This continues the conversation started in 2016 when the University of Glasgow acknowledged that despite the strong abolitionist stance in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it continued to accept gifts and bequests from people who profited from slavery to further institutional goals.  In September 2018, Professor Simon Newman and Dr Stephen Mullen published Slavery, Abolition and the University of Glasgow, a report which quantified those financial gains and recommended a programme of reparations.

Call and Response features responses to 12 items and can be viewed online as well as in person. It is free and open to all until 31st January 2020. Visit the exhibition and give your response to be part of this difficult but necessary conversation.

For further details and to view the online exhibits (see pic), visit https://universityofglasgowlibrary.wordpress.com/2019/12/17/call-and-response-the-university-of-glasgow-and-slavery/

Chris

Order Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet (2nd ed) at https://www.pen-and-sword.co.uk/Tracing-Your-Irish-Family-History-on-the-Internet-Paperback/p/16483. and Tracing Your Scottish Ancestry Through Church and State Records at https://www.pen-and-sword.co.uk/Tracing-Your-Scottish-Ancestry-through-Church-and-State-Records-Paperback/p/16848. Further news published daily on The GENES Blog Facebook page, and on Twitter @genesblog.

University of Glasgow benefited from the Slave Trade

The BBC has an interesting article online about how the University of Glasgow (https://www.gla.ac.uk) benefited form the Slave Trade, thanks to donations it received in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The amount received in today's money is estimated to be between £16.7m and £198m in value. As a consequence, the university is planning to launch a "reparative justice programme".

The University's Principal, Professor Sir Anton Muscatelli said: "Although the university never owned enslaved people or traded in the goods they produced, it is now clear we received significant financial support from people whose wealth came from slavery. The university deeply regrets this association with historical slavery which clashes with our proud history of support for the abolition of both the slave trade and slavery itself."

For more on the story visit https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-45539706

For resources on Scotland and the slaver trade at the National Library of Scotland, see https://www.nls.uk/collections/topics/slavery.

Chris

For my genealogy guide books, visit http://britishgenes.blogspot.co.uk/p/my-books.html, whilst details of my research service are at www.ScotlandsGreatestStory.co.uk. Further content is also published daily on The GENES Blog Facebook page at www.facebook.com/BritishGENES.

Ancestry adds US bound English emigrants in bondage 1614-1775 list

Ancestry has added a new collection, Emigrants in Bondage, 1614-1775, accessible at http://search.ancestry.co.uk/search/db.aspx?dbid=61074. Here's the blurb:

About Emigrants in Bondage, 1614-1775

Between 1614 and 1775 more than 50,000 English men, women, and children were sentenced to be deported to the American colonies for crimes ranging from the theft of a handkerchief to bigamy or highway robbery. After years of painstaking research, the names of nearly all those transported were extracted from official court records by Peter Coldham and published in the landmark work The Complete Book of Emigrants in Bondage in 1988 and its Supplement in 1992, forming the largest and most complete passenger list of its kind ever published. From this unexpected source the researcher at last had the means of learning the names of the persons transported to the colonies, the charges against them, the dates and places of sentencing, the ship names, and the places of arrival in the colonies.

The original volume of Emigrants in Bondage published in 1988 acknowledged that there were some notable omissions from the list of transported felons then printed, which remained to be researched and remedied. The Supplement of 1992 began to supply the omissions, but now with the publication of More Emigrants in Bondage, Mr. Coldham has closed the remaining gaps. Altogether there are some 9,000 new and amended records in this important new work, which is arranged and annotated in the same way as the parent volume. To the original list of 50,000 records, these additions come as a windfall, arising from the availability of previously closed archival resources and the re-examination of conventional transportation records such as Assize Court records, Circuit Court records, and the quaintly-named Sheriffs' Cravings, to which can be added newspapers and printed memoirs.

The addition of 9,000 records to the canon makes this the most important list of ships' passengers to be published in years. Whether as a list of additions or corrections, this new work is an indispensable tool in the researcher's arsenal, and anyone using the parent volume and supplement cannot possibly ignore this volume. Questions about the peopling of colonial America come readily to mind when looking at a book like this--questions about ancestors, too--and the answers found here are both challenging and surprising.

Note: The entries in this collection are highly condensed from the original records. For information on how to read and interpret these records, each volume includes a guide that describes the format of the entries. For additional help, a key to abbreviations is also included in each volume (A-Sh, Sl-Y).

The source is two books:

Coldham, Peter Wilson. The Complete Book of Emigrants in Bondage, 1614-1775. Baltimore, MD, USA: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1988.

Coldham, Peter Wilson. More Emigrants in Bondage, 1614-1775. Baltimore, MD, USA: Genealogical Publishing Co., 2002.

Chris

For details on my genealogy guide books, including A Decade of Irish Centenaries: Researching Ireland 1912-1923, Discover Scottish Church Records (2nd edition), Discover Irish Land Records and Down and Out in Scotland: Researching Ancestral Crisis, please visit http://britishgenes.blogspot.co.uk/p/my-books.html.

Lincoln born Jamaican planter and slave owner papers digitised

Beinecke Library has digitised diaries and papers of Thomas Thistlewood, a Jamaican planter and slave owner, who was born in Lincolnshire, England, in 1721. From the library's blog (http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/collections/highlights/thomas-thistlewood-papers), the following is the material that has been digitised:

The papers consist of diaries, weather journals, commonplace books, reading notes and other material documenting the life, work, and intellectual interests of the Jamaican planter and slaveowner Thomas Thistlewood. Thistlewood's 37 diaries contain daily entries dating between 1750 and 1786. Topics include Thistlewood's work as an overseer, and later owner, of slaves, including his methods of assigning work, alloting provisions, and discipline; his personal and sexual relationships with several, including his lengthy relationship with Phibbah; and slave rebellions and rumors of rebellions, including Tacky's Revolt (1760). Thirty-four annual weather journals containing daily summaries, including precipitation measurements. Diaries from 1764 through 1767 also contain separate lists of daily Fahrenheit temperatures and rainfall amounts.

To access the material, visit http://brbl-dl.library.yale.edu/vufind/Search/Results?lookfor=OSB_MSS_176&type=CallNumber&sort=title

(With thanks to Cyndi Ingle)

Chris

For details on my genealogy guide books, including my recently released Discover Irish Land Records and Down and Out in Scotland: Researching Ancestral Crisis, please visit http://britishgenes.blogspot.co.uk/p/my-books.html. My Pinterest account is at https://www.pinterest.com/chrismpaton/.

TNA podcast - Researching Untold Histories

The latest podcast from the National Archives at Kew is entitled Researching Untold Histories, a 55 minute discussion by author Dr Kathleen Chater on her latest book, Researching Untold Histories: Black people in England and Wales during the period of the British slave trade, c.1660-1807.

The podcast can be heard at http://media.nationalarchives.gov.uk/index.php/researching-untold-histories/ or downloaded for free from iTunes.

Chris

My latest book, Discover Scottish Civil Registration Records, is now available from http://www.gould.com.au (print) and http://www.gen-ebooks.com/unlock-the-past.html (ebook), whilst Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet is available at http://www.pen-and-sword.co.uk/Tracing-Your-Irish-History-on-the-Internet/p/3889/. My next Pharos Scottish course, Scotland 1750-1850: Beyond the OPRs, starts Nov 13th - see http://pharostutors.com.

Legacies of British Slave Ownership

I've just picked up an interesting tweet from none other than the Labour Party's Diane Abbott MP (thanks to a retweet from Pam Smith!), about an online resource from University College London called Legacies of British Slave-Ownership. The site has a searchable database of former slave owners from Britain - from the home page:

"Colonial slavery shaped modern Britain and we all still live with its legacies. The slave-owners were one very important means by which the fruits of slavery were transmitted to metropolitan Britain. We believe that research and analysis of this group are key to understanding the extent and the limits of slavery's role in shaping British history and leaving lasting legacies that reach into the present. The stories of enslaved men and women, however, are no less important than those of slave-owners, and we hope that the encyclopaedia produced in the first phase of the project, while at present primarily a resource for studying slave-owners, will also provide information of value to those researching enslaved people."

You can search the database by individuals or firm's names, or by info on addresses or within notes. The site is freely accessible at www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/.

I've just checked, and have found 72 slave owners from Glasgow, 3 from Belfast and 35 from Dublin - London returns 689 names.

(With thanks to Diane Abbott and Pam Smith)

Chris

Pre-order my new book, Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet, through Pen and Sword (30 April 2013), or purchase early at Who Do You Think You Are Live 2013 in London. For my other genealogy books, please visit  http://britishgenes.blogspot.co.uk/p/my-books.html; whilst for my online Scottish based genealogy courses please visit the Pharos Teaching and Tutoring Ltd site.