Trying to make sense of slave registers

While trying to reconstruct the history of family from Saint Kitts, I sometimes look at records in the Former British Colonial Dependencies Slave Registers. They can not only give clues to enslaved people, but also their slave owners. My husband’s third great-grandmother, Catherine Fasioux, was living in St Kitts in the early 1800s, where she gave birth to Ann Francis Catherine Maillard, his second great-grandmother. It’s believed that she may have come from the French West Indian island of Guadeloupe, but little is known about her. There are a handful of slave registry records in which she appears, so I’ve looked to them to see if they can fill in her story at all. Along the way, I’ve found some insight into how complete and accurate the registers are.

The British colonial slave registers were created after Great Britain abolished their transatlantic slave trade in 1807. They were intended to carefully track slave ownership, to make sure that no new enslaved people were brought in from Africa, but also as a means of determining monetary compensation for owners when slavery was abolished in 1834. In St Kitts, the first register was produced in 1817, and it was meant to list all slaves on the island, as a baseline accounting. The succeeding registers were compiled about every 3 years, and only recorded changes in slave holdings, documenting an increase in number (by inheritance, new births, etc.) or a decrease (by causes such as sale, manumission, death of owner, or the death of the enslaved). Explanations for these changes were often noted, giving information about the life situations of owners and slaves alike.

Monetary compensation was supposed to be based on the perceived value of slaves, which could be determined using an enslaved person’s age, gender, skill level, and even the profit levels generated by the island where a slave was held. The registers were expected to be accurate and complete, so that compensation could be correctly calculated. So were they accurate?

As an example case, I found that Catherine Fasioux was listed as an owner in the 1825 and 1828 registers, but her name is mentioned in notes under other owners in the 1831 and 1834 registers. In 1825, she is listed as owning 3 enslaved people, and it was noted that she owned none in the previous register period of 1822. The three people listed were:

  1. Damon, a “creole of St Kitts” (so born in St Kitts), a 22 year old mason
  2. Sukey, also a creole of St Kitts, a 22 year old house servant
  3. Jack, a four and a half year old boy, also born in St Kitts

Both Sukey and Jack are noted as passing to Catherine through the will of “Joseph Warner, deceased”, while Damon was purchased from William Warner, also deceased. Was there a family link between Catherine and the Warners? Possibly.

It’s interesting that Damon was a mason, as that was a potentially valuable and marketable skill. In the years leading up to abolition, the British government tried to encourage its West Indian territories to allow slaves to earn money outside of their normal workday, in order to purchase their own manumissions. Could a mason have put away money with that goal in mind? And do the records for other years give any clues about a possible family relationship between Damon, Sukey, and Jack?

Going back in time to the first register in 1817, we find the two adults listed under owner William Warner:

  1. Damon, 25 year old creole of St Kitts, mason
  2. Sucky, 22 year old creole of St Bartholomew, house servant

In the next register of 1822, they aren’t mentioned, which should imply that they are still held by William Warner. No mention of Jack is made in either 1817 or 1822 with Damon and Sukey.

In the 1828 register, Damon isn’t mentioned, which should mean that he was still held by Catherine Fasioux. Sukey and Jack now appear listed with a Doctor John Benjamin Waterson:

  1. Sukey, 22 year old creole of St Bartholomew, house servant purchased from Catherine Fasioux
  2. “Jack Sukey”, 1 year and 3 month old creole of St Kitts, purchased from Catherine Fasioux

These two certainly appear to be the same Sukey and Jack as the ones recorded in the 1825 register, but Jack’s age goes from 4 1/2 down to 1 year, which looks like a mistake. Even if the first child Jack died, and another Jack was born, those events should have been recorded. Sukey is also said to be born in St Bartholomew in two registers, while in others she is listed as from St Kitts, so there are more inconsistencies.

On to the 1831 register, we now see Damon listed with a George Wright Mardenbrough, as a 26 year old mason born in St Kitts, “by purchase from Catherine Fasioux”, so sometime between 1828 and 1831, it appears that if Catherine was still living in St Kitts, she no longer had slaves. Was this because of her own death, or for other reasons? That is still a mystery. What is really interesting is that the “Jack Suckey” now listed with John B. Waterson is noted as one of four slaves who gained their freedom through manumission. How was it that young Jack came to be freed? Could it have something to do with Damon, the mason? The three enslaved people definitely appear together in different combinations over the years, so perhaps there was a family connection.

Another sign of inaccuracies with the registers is that in both 1828 and 1831, Jack’s age is given as 1 year and 3 months, which sounds like lazy record keeping, just copying ages from the last publication, rather than correctly updating.

Where is Sukey in 1831? This is a frustrating question, as she doesn’t appear with either Jack or Damon. There were quite a few enslaved women named Sukey in the St Kitts records, but in 1831, none are obviously the one I was searching for. There is one Sukey, owned by a Mary Amory, who was manumitted in 1831. Jack was still owned by John Waterson in 1831, but Sukey isn’t listed with him, so it’s not clear what happened to her. It’s difficult to search for her by age, because that information is clearly very inconsistent, with Sukey recorded as being 22 years old in 1817, 1825, and 1828, Damon’s age actually decreased by 2 years between 1817 and 1825, and Jack’s ages are clearly problematic over the years.

The last register was created in 1834. Jack doesn’t appear, as we can hope that he was manumitted and off the registers. While Damon the mason appears in 1834, owned now by Christopher Mardenbrough, he is noted again as purchased from C. Fasioux, but his death is sadly also recorded as occurring sometime between 1831 and 1834. He may have been approximately 40 years old at that time.

Further information could be gained by looking for Jack’s manumission papers in St Kitts, if they exist. If his freedom was bought, they could tell us who paid the costs. If Jack lived long enough to reach at least the year 1859, the Kittitian civil records could document his death or the birth of children, but what surname would he have used? That unfortunately might be a needle in the haystack proposition.

 

Sources

  1. Ancestry.com Former British Colonial Dependencies, Slave Registers, 1813-1834, 2019
  2. UNESCO, Memory of the World Register, Registry of the Slaves of the British Caribbean 1817-1834
  3. Earning and Learning in the British West Indies: An Image of Freedom in the Pre-Emancipation Decade, 1823-1833 by Olwyn M. Blouet, The Historical Journal Vol. 34, No. 2, 1991, Cambridge University Press
  4. The Slave Experience in the Caribbean: A Comparative View, in Alberto Vieira, ed., Slaves With or Without Sugar, Funchal: Região Autónoma da Madeira, 1997
  5. Legacies of British Slave Ownership, University College London Department of History, 2019

4 Comments

  1. […] were listed under William Thomson as manumitted. Their ages, though possibly not accurate (the accuracy of ages in the registries varies wildly), do reflect that Susan was older than Thomas. Assuming that the original birth dates […]

    January 13, 2021
    Reply
  2. Robert M Simon said:

    I have had good luck in using the Colonial Slave Registers for Trinidad in this collection as a means of tracking and tracing both enslaved workers/servants and the people who enslaved them. The Trinidad registers give both first names and surnames for enslaved persons, and start in 1813. The headings often describe the family relationships of the persons who are filing the returns (e.g., fathers filing on behalf of children, husbands on behalf of wives, etc.). I have created a research guide and finding aid for the Trinidad registers to facilitate their use for family history research. It discusses some of the vagaries of the online indexes that Ancestry.com produced. The guide may be found at https://www.academia.edu/49009865/Understanding_and_Using_Trinidads_Slave_Registers_1813_1834_for_Family_History_Research.

    October 31, 2021
    Reply
    • dreamer said:

      Wow! The finding aid you developed for Trinidad is so helpful! I only wish that all the British colonies provided such detailed and complete information in their registries. I have so many take-aways after reading your excellent paper.

      First and foremost is the heavy weight of injustice that permeates every slave registry. Of lesser import, but still a matter of interest, is the need for broad searches in indexed databases, to avoid missing entries. The quality of indexing on services like ancestry.com and familysearch.org varies greatly, and can be especially problematic for the West Indies, where both owners and enslaved people came from a wide variety of cultures and languages, leading to unusual names that get indexed in all kinds of crazy and inaccurate ways. Evidence of this is in the recently released index for St Kitts and Nevis civil registrations on familysearch.org. Seeing the transcriptions of historic names I am quite familiar with – when I can actually find them – is quite painful. The value of the cross-referencing of page numbers and name indexing in the Trinidad registries over the years is huge – if only the St Kitts registries had incorporated that. And so much information in each entry – family relationships, the agricultural products of plantations, etc., I would find really interesting and helpful.

      Browsing through the Trinidad registry, I found several mentions of owners with the surname Maillard, which is of particular interest to me. The Maillards were a French Huguenot family that came to the St Kitts in the 1600s, and I’m curious now about a possible relationship between the Trinidad Maillards and the Kittitian Maillards.

      One note – in your paper you mentioned “country marks” on some enslaved people. I looked into that for a blog post on the slave registry of Dominica, and believe that at least in some cases, the marks were made with a scarification process from their own culture, not by enslavers: http://cornerofgenealogy.com//a-cannonier-from-dominica/.

      Many, many thanks for your extensive finding aid for Trinidad, and your insights on the slave registries as an important research resource!

      Linda

      November 1, 2021
      Reply

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