Abstract
This report updates results from www.liverpoolmaritime.org, Liverpool as a Trading Port, 1704–1840. Baptism, marriage and burial records from Liverpool parish church registers, rather than census data or street directory entries, provide information about individuals in Liverpool, including enslaved and free African migrants. Wealth valuations from the Consistory Court of Chester provide data on estate valuations from Lancashire as a whole. Preliminary results demonstrate that many sailors resided on a small number of Liverpool streets as well as along the docks. Liverpool’s important maritime sector declined through the nineteenth century, in part because of the abolition of the British slave trade, as fewer surgeons and carpenters sailed from Liverpool, and because Liverpool’s service sector advanced. A disproportionate number of probates concerned shipboard personnel in the slave trade due to the Guinea trade’s comparatively high mortality. Captains who survived slaving voyages accumulated three times as much wealth as they would have earned in alternative maritime trades. Similarly, merchants who invested in slaving voyages usually accumulated more wealth than other Lancashire merchants, though there were increasing numbers of Lancastrians who profited from cotton trades and manufacturing.
Keywords
This report updates results from www.liverpoolmaritime.org, Liverpool as a Trading Port (LTP), a project that focuses on Liverpool’s maritime past, 1700–1840, before the year of Liverpool’s first comprehensive census. Previously we outlined ways to structure relational databases, provided examples pertinent to maritime historians, and discussed some initial results from analysis on Liverpool probates and the port’s cotton trade. 1 Here we state recent developments regarding the project and present new data on sailors’ residences, African migrants to Liverpool, occupational change, and probated wealth. Baptism, marriage and burial records from Liverpool parish church registers, rather than census data, provide our ‘genealogical’ information, which include names of ‘blacks’ in Liverpool during and after the era of the slave trade. 2 Liverpool newspapers and muster rolls are principal sources to document mariners in LTP, and we will analyze Liverpool’s regional and overseas markets in a subsequent article. In analyzing parish register data and probate valuations, we demonstrate the pitfalls in relying on a single class of sources, such as street directories, which reveal historical information.
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Before turning to results, we offer a brief review of LTP’s structure relative to other databases. Providing a fully searchable open access genealogical/maritime history database for academics and non-academics remains the goal of LTP, as outlined in the project’s initial proposal in 2009. 3 As most readers will know, genealogical databases such as ancestry.com or familysearch.org satisfy the demands of people interested in tracing their ancestors. Correspondingly, these databases’ search engines retrieve information on named individuals, with further search criteria restricted to vital dates (births, christenings, marriages, burials), locations of these events and associated spouses and parents. 4 The databases sometimes require users to enter an individual’s name before any search can proceed. 5 No online genealogical database, whether subscription or open access, enables users to search by a field (or variable) called ‘occupation’, 6 and none generate reports. Thus, one cannot restrict a genealogical search to ‘mariner’ or ‘shipwright’, or any other occupation associated with maritime labour. There are British datasets produced by academics that include searchable occupations, but these reside in data archives and usually do not include names of individuals. 7 Online British maritime history databases enable users to search for information about ships or voyages and usually include a captain’s surname; some, though, offer limited search functionality, and all currently lack related genealogical components. 8 Whether accessing a maritime history or a genealogical site, users often cannot download results as text – other than by pasting select results into Word or Excel. 9
One important genealogical site that provides data, as text strings, is the Lancashire Parish Clerk Project, www.lan-opc.org.uk, one in a group of English Online Parish Clerk (OPC) projects initiated twenty years ago and made available on the web from about 2004. 10 For all transcribed and digitized Lancashire parish clerk records, users may search by name, year (with year-range selections), parents and spouses. Users may search ‘Lancashire’ or specific parishes in the shire, but they must provide at least one name. Search results appear as lines of text within the site. For example, by searching for Lewis Robinson +/– 10 years from 1800, in all Lancashire parishes, one finds one marriage record for mariner Lewis Robinson (1799, to spinster Margaret Harrocks) and a burial record for mariner Lewis Robinson (1806), both in St. Nicholas Church. 11 The two St. Nicholas Church register entries contain varying biographical detail. Witnesses John Harrocks and Alice Crooke, without associated occupations, appear in the marriage record. Harrocks, one assumes, is bride Margaret Harrocks’ brother. 12 Robinson’s burial entry reports his date of death, age at death, and street residence (Figure 1). The Lancashire Parish Clerk Project does not match individuals, so users will need to determine whether the mariner Lewis Robinson who married Margaret Harrocks in 1799 is the mariner Lewis Robinson who died in 1806. 13
Lewis Robinson parish register search, Lancashire, year 1800 +/– 10 years.
To enhance the functionality of the Lancashire Parish Clerk data for scholars interested in Merseyside, in 2012 our LTP project began adding to our website the digitized parish register information, available for non-commercial use, from Liverpool churches. We created Baptism, Marriage and Burial Databases, integrating these three with our databases on Probate Indexes, Wills, Educational Qualifications and Voyages. Our project focuses on 1700–1840, before the first comprehensive Liverpool census (1841), 14 but we gathered Liverpool parish register data for 1704–1970: 1,207,744 baptisms, marriages and burials for about 500,000 individuals. 15 The majority of vital records come from two churches: St. Peter and St. Nicholas, Liverpool’s first two Anglican churches, with St. Peter providing all information from 1704 to 1750. 16 To Liverpool residents we added individuals from Bootle, Childwall, Edge Hill, Everton, Rochdale, Toxteth, Woolton, Walton on the Hill and West Derby, to include those who moved from Liverpool to nearby villages, as did broker George Drinkwater, ‘formerly of this Town [Liverpool], but later of Everton’, as his burial record states in 1795 (see Appendix).
In adding parish register data digitized by the Lancashire Parish Clerk Register team, we replicated their fields and created new ones. We used their fields Abode, Occupation, Age, Baptising Minister, Witness (which appears in marriage records), Marrying Minister, and of course dates (with a separate year field), parishes, and source information. Our new fields are Gender, Race/Nationality 17 – which enables users to find, for example, ‘blacks’ in Liverpool – standardized fields, and HISCO codes. In standardizing names, occupations and abodes, ‘Thos.’ becomes ‘Thomas’, ‘chirurgeon’ becomes ‘surgeon’, and ‘Park Ln’ becomes ‘Park Lane’. HISCO (Historical International Standard Classification of Occupations) codes, developed in the 1960s, arrange occupations in nine ‘major groups’ with further divisions into minor and unit groups. A unit group, for example, is ‘Seaman, Able or Ordinary’, HISCO code 9.81.35. That code groups occupations ‘mariner’ and ‘sailor’ but not ‘master mariner’ (or captain), a sailor who had managerial duties, and hence appears in the professional group with the HISCO code 0.42.15, as major group code 0 includes ‘professional, technical and related workers’ and code 0-4 assembles Aircraft and Ships’ Officers. 18
Whereas most genealogical databases, including those specific to Britain, developed first by providing digitized parish church baptism, marriage and burial records, only recently have they begun imaging or digitizing wills proved in ecclesiastical courts. 19 In Britain, prior to the Court of Probate Act (1857), officials from the Church of England administered probate in ecclesiastical courts in England’s 40 ancient counties. Liverpool, in the Diocese of Chester, came under the probate jurisdiction of the Bishop of Chester’s court, the Consistory Court of Chester. That court had two divisions to prove estates valued greater or less than £40, a bishop’s court proving estates above (‘supra’) the threshold, a dean’s court proving estates below (‘infra’) it. 20 Church officials who proved the wills were parish priests, such as reverends George Monk and Lewis Pughe, curates of St. Peter and St. Nicholas’ churches in Liverpool in 1800. Our LTP project has databased three sets of probate information for the Consistory Court of Chester: printed indexes to wills proved at the Court, 1545–1825; 21 original handwritten wills proved there, 1799–1808; and associated handwritten Probate Act book entries, 1779–1810, entries that list executors, administrators and estate valuations.
In LTP, estate valuations on ‘personal effects’ survive for many Liverpool mariners, and our project places individuals on their vessels. The Voyages database in LTP includes vessels entering and departing from Liverpool, information gleaned from Lloyd’s Lists 1741–1808, muster rolls 1772–1809, Liverpool newspapers, Mediterranean Passes, Seamen’s Sixpences and Lloyd’s Register of Shipping. 22 After completing the Voyages database, we will search for matched vessels in Liverpool ship registers, which survive (with gaps) from 1739. 23 Therefore, LTP will include Liverpool- and non-Liverpool-owned vessels frequenting Merseyside, and will further provide details such as partnerships for Liverpool-registered vessels. Linked to specific vessels will be their captains and sailors, including those not ‘bred to the sea’ – carpenters, coopers and surgeons, for example. We will database samples of crewmen on Liverpool slaving vessels, and relate Guinea surgeons to any medical qualifications they attained: whether they apprenticed to a master surgeon and/or received certification from a Royal College of Surgeons or the Liverpool Medical Board.
Search results return genealogical and maritime history information, ‘potted histories’ for our matched database entries, sorted by date. An LTP search for Lewis Robinson, for example, returns fourteen pieces of information. Robinson appears in the historical record first in 1777 when baptized by his parents, porter John Robinson and Mary, John’s wife, at Benn’s Garden Chapel in Liverpool. We have not yet placed him on a Liverpool voyage earlier than August 1798, when he appears on the muster of Hannah, listed third of 30 crewmen. Two Liverpool street directories locate his residence, on Ormond Street (1803) and Duncan Street (1805). On his last Liverpool voyage, in command of Retrieve, Robinson steered the ship back to Liverpool on 8 February 1806. He died within four months, a death noted in the Liverpool Chronicle. 24 His estate, valued below £600, was ‘granted unto Margaret Robinson and John Harrocks and Edward Lowe, the Executrix and Executors’, and the three appeared before Reverend Henry Barton of Liverpool, swearing to the authenticity of the will and confirming that they would work as executors. Lewis Robinson’s one-page will, written on 3 August 1799, names his wife Margaret, John ‘Horrocks’, joiner, and Edward Lowe, cabinetmaker, all of Liverpool, as executors. Witnesses to the will, which Lewis signed, were William Wilbraham, Thomas Clarkson and James Jackson (Figure 2). 25
Lewis Robinson search results, www.liverpoolmaritime.org, INDV0090007574.
In LTP, users may retrieve information on Lewis Robinson via either Standard or Advanced Genealogical and Maritime searches. In addition, summary data about his wealth and voyage history appear in treemaps and charts, grouped with other master mariners (concerning wealth) and slaving voyages (concerning markets). Advanced searches enable searches on combinations of datasets and variables, since an historical rather than narrowly genealogical approach guided our search engine design. 26 In LTP, searches yield frequency counts, including unmatched records. Searching for an individual named William Williams (with no middle name) the most common name in the database, for example, returns 1949 results, though there are not 1949 different William Williamses. Moreover, if mariner William Williams baptized 10 children, his frequency count on ‘mariner’ equals 10 rather than one, and if mariners baptized twice as many children as did, for example, coopers, frequency counts on mariners would over-represent their prominence in Liverpool. Thus, users citing aggregate data would mislead readers if they do not distinguish between life events and individuals. 27 Prototype charts, similarly, aggregate voyages to specific markets – frequency counts on the number of voyages rather than vessel tonnage. 28 Treemaps, tiles scaled by sample sizes, summarize probate valuations by occupation, following HISCO occupation codes.
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Having reviewed the scope of LTP, we now turn to new data emerging from it, starting with sailors’ residences. Church officials included information on residences in Liverpool marriage, baptism and burial records, and the Lancashire Parish Clerk team transcribed residence details as ‘abode’. For 41,017 records, 1704–1970, abode is ‘Liverpool’ and, for 19,766 records, ‘Everton’. 29 Abode includes districts or suburbs within today’s Liverpool, such as Brownlow Hill, Islington, and Wavertree. Entries from recent migrants or Merseyside visitors include people from Scotland (526 records), London (372), Ireland (150), Wales (143), and the Isle of Man (79). From a further distance came Julius Christoph Silber (Germany) and British Consul John Hesketh (Brazil). Some parents returned to Liverpool to baptize their children born elsewhere. Clerks noted shipboard births, as in 1780, when Jamaica merchant James Waters baptized his daughter Mary Atalanta Waters, ‘born at sea on board the Ship Atalanta in her passage from Jamaica to this Port’, at St. Nicholas – Mary’s middle name documenting her shipboard birth. Later, in 1796 at St. Nicholas Church, mariner John Foulder baptized his daughter Ann ‘born on board His Majesty’s ship Porcupine lying in the River Mersey’. A few mariners’ abodes were vessels, usually government ships, anchored in the Mersey.
Nine in ten Liverpool parish register entries associated individuals to their residence on a named Liverpool street, but parish clerks do not identify house numbers until 1797 and not consistently until 1830. By contrast, Liverpool street directories began to record house numbers in 1774, after a parish vestry order in 1773 required painted street names and ‘houses accurately numbered’. 30 LTP will database all 27 Liverpool street directories from 1766 to 1829, residency information contained in Liverpool newspapers, extant Land Tax records for 1705, 1708, 1778, 1780 and 1798, and a manuscript Liverpool census from 1801. 31 When this database work is completed, LTP will enable users to identify residents per year per house. For now, users can gauge residency patterns, for example, by occupation. 32
Regarding sailors’ residences in eighteenth-century Liverpool, preliminary results indicate that a quarter of all sailors lived in 23 of the city’s 646 streets or dock quays. 33 Strand, Pitt, Frederick, Chorley and Chapel streets rank 1–5 for 1750–1799 and 1777–1799; Cable Street, one of Liverpool’s original 30 streets, 34 stands out for 1704–1749. Strand, Pitt, and Frederick streets – three of the four most common sailor residences – also appear in the abode column of Agreeable’s unique muster in 1800 (Table 1). 35 But we do not know whether there were ‘sailors’ streets’, as early Liverpool histories and guidebooks do not associate any one street with any one occupational group, except for merchants. 36 Usually they note residences where the poor and wealthy lived, commenting particularly on how the poor lived in cellars and back-courts, whereas the rich lived in two-floor houses, located on higher points in the city, and in posh villages such as Everton. 37 Lewis Robinson, who resided on Duncan Street the year he died (see Figure 1), was one of the early residents of Duncan Street, a street that appears first in a Liverpool directory in 1800, then on Horwood’s Liverpool map in 1803, and finally in church records in 1804. 38
Frequency of sailors’ residences recorded in eighteenth-century Liverpool parish church registers. 1
Sources: See Appendix.
Notes:
Table includes 23 residences with frequencies greater than 100. Of course, the number of streets increased in Liverpool over time, so the data in Table 1 are indicative.
Liverpool streets recorded as ‘abode’ for 50 sailors on Agreeable (TNA, BT98/60, 347). On that unique Liverpool muster roll – the only muster identified (1772–1809) that documents streets – sailors resided temporarily on Frederick Street (10 sailors), New Bird Street (5), Blundell, Bromfield, Crosbie, Dickinson, Mersey and Pitt streets (4 each), Brick and Strand streets (3 each), Grayson and Thomas streets (2 each) and Norfolk Street (1).
In all, the sample reported a frequency of 425 for sailors’ dock residences, 1704–1799, also including Old Dock Quay (98), South Dock (94) and New Quay (69).
In our sample, as many as 306 sailors resided in dwellings at various Liverpool docks, dock quays/keys, dock sides or dock passages, such as Salthouse Dock, Dry Dock Key, Old Dock Quay, Dock Side, or George’s Dock passage. These residences appear also in Liverpool street directories, often with more locational specificity, such as ‘North east side south dock’ or ‘18 East-side South Dock’. An early numbered dock residence in our parish register sample appeared in 1799: ‘No. 1 Graving Dock’. At that address, in late 1789 or early 1790, Makin Simmons counted fourteen people in the ‘Front Houses’ and seven in the ‘Cellars’. 39 Thus, rows of houses, some numbered, fronted Liverpool eighteenth-century docks. Local histories and guidebooks give little detail about these dockland residences; instead, they trumpeted the development of the docks. 40 Certainly, many poor sailors lived on moored vessels or in boarding houses. Many women, such as Margaret Augustus/Lookey, Mary Dale, Elizabeth Evans, Rebecca Hart, Charlotte Kelly, Sarah Lemon, Mary Miller, Ann Sully and Margaret Williams, appear as executors and creditors on many Liverpool mariners’ wills c. 1800, and these women probably provided temporary sailors’ lodgings. 41 Even the wealthier captains would have found housing expensive, and most rented, some unable to keep up with rent inflation. 42
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Whereas parish clerks did not provide sufficiently large observations of non-Liverpool abodes to allow us to confidently quantify migration patterns to Merseyside, 43 they enable scholars to identify Africans in Liverpool, revealing information unattainable in other sources. 44 As early as 1897 Gomer Williams remarked that small numbers of blacks resided in Georgian Liverpool, whether they were the few slaves sold at auction in the port-city or young elite Africans educated in Liverpool. 45 Williams read a range of primary sources, including eighteenth-century newspapers, but did not examine parish registers, a mainstay of genealogical research. Indeed, genealogists first noticed occasional black baptisms in Liverpool church records, and in 1976 Culling published the names and biographical details of 60 blacks, mostly adults, baptized at St. James Church in Toxteth, Liverpool, 1775–1800. 46 Those interested in Liverpool’s history have not followed Culling’s lead; Costello’s Black Liverpool, for example, only referenced six Liverpool church baptism records, 1785–1801, and Longmore identified only two blacks buried at St. John’s churchyard, leading her to conclude that ‘[t]here is little other evidence of the black presence in eighteenth-century Liverpool’. 47 Historians have lagged behind other scholars in studying church records for blacks in pre-1850 British history: literature scholar Imtiaz Habib examined church records to identify blacks in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Greater London; journalist Kathleen Chater mined parish registers for her work on blacks in England and Wales (a study that excluded Liverpool), c. 1660–1807. 48
Our initial research on Liverpool church registers reveals that between 594 and 639 ‘black’ individuals were baptized or buried in Liverpool, 1717–1840. 49 Liverpool blacks were mostly male, and baptism entries document most individuals (Figure 3; Table 2). In our upper tally of 639 Liverpool blacks, we subsume under the designation ‘black’ the following parish clerks’ terms: ‘black’, ‘blackamoore’, ‘coloured’, ‘negro’, ‘slave’, an ‘African’, and/or a ‘native’ of Africa or the Americas, unless evidence clearly suggests otherwise. 50 We do not know whether all ‘natives’ from South America, the West Indies or North America were black. For example, priests baptized 34 ‘natives’ from ‘America’, Delaware, Georgia, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Brunswick, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Virginia. For these individuals, parish clerks did not specify a race, as they did for John Sharp, ‘a Black, a Native of North America’ (baptized in Liverpool in 1780) or William Gordon, ‘a Blackman a Native of Ambay in the Jersies of New York’ (1799 baptism). We will exclude these 34 ‘natives’ in determining our lower tally of 594 blacks. Similarly, baptism records might not specify the race for both parents. On 15 December 1752, a priest at St. Peter’s church baptized Peter Smith, a baby whose mother was Mary Smith, spinster, and father was ‘Mr. Reeds Negro’ named Mercury. 51 We surmise that Mary Smith was a white spinster, as church clerks usually specified non-whites, as did St. Peter’s curate, Reverend Peter Bulmer. In November 1826, he married by banns servant Samuel Brown and spinster Eliza Robinson, ‘both black’. For African youths with parents mentioned, we assume the parents, too, were African. Some African-based white merchants, such as Stephen Tillinghast, returned to baptize children whose mothers, we suspect, were African. We include a range of 594–639, then, since we can only speculate on the race of some ‘natives’ and some parents of ‘black’ or ‘coloured’ individuals.
Example church register entries, individuals with presumed African ancestry, in Lancashire Parish Clerk Project Notes and Abode fields, with results as text strings.
Blacks in Liverpool parish church records, 1717–1840 (by racial descriptors and type of church record).
Source: Liverpool church records (see Appendix).
Notes:
To avoid double-counting and to simplify the table, when sources state multiple racial descriptors, we select ‘black’ as the top-level descriptor, then ‘negro’, and then ‘coloured’ – as these three racial descriptors all indicate African ancestry. Thus Table 2 classifies John Thomas, ‘a Black Youth; a Native of Cape Mount, on the Coast of Guinea, in Africa’, as black rather than a native of Africa.
Includes three natives of Bermuda.
Includes one ‘mulatto’.
From our maximum sample of 639 blacks in Liverpool, there are smaller samples of birth locations, ages, occupations and Liverpool residences. For 364 individuals, parish clerks noted places or regions of birth: 162 from Africa, 124 from the West Indies (including Bermuda), 52 69 from North America, nine individuals from South America – Brazil, Demerara or Surinam – and one ‘man of colour’ born in Lisbon. Clerks gave no further geographical detail for most African entries; when they did, Africans arrived in Liverpool from the Bight of Biafra (14), the Sierra Leone region (14), the Windward Coast (12), the Gold Coast (12), Senegambia (five), West-Central Africa (four), the Bight of Benin (one) and Madagascar (one). Most Africans arrived in Liverpool during the era of the legal British slave trade, and the wide geographical origin of Liverpool blacks demonstrates Liverpool’s dominant trading position in most African Atlantic markets. Regarding the Liverpool blacks from the Americas, most arrived from colonies or US states where slavery remained legal: Jamaica and Barbados (28 individuals from each colony); Virginia (13 individuals); and South Carolina (8). 53 The Liverpool blacks baptized or buried were mostly adults: from the large sample of 276 men the average age was 22 years; the average age of women was 23 years (a sample of 28). Of the 77 Liverpool blacks with documented occupations, 69 were either mariners (46) or servants (23). 54 From our upper-limit sample of 639 Liverpool blacks, 110 parish register entries document a specific Liverpool residence, and these 110 individuals resided at 77 different addresses, scattered over the period 1773–1839. Thus, there were no streets where disproportionate numbers of blacks resided. 55 A typical detailed church register entry, a St. Nicholas baptism on 6 April 1799, reads: William John Dickinson, ‘a Black Man a Native of Norfolk in Virginia about 18 years Old Mariner Resident in Pall Mall’.
In our large parish register sample of 639 Liverpool blacks, 1717–1840, the majority worked as slaves in Merseyside until about 1785 and afterward as freed men, women and teenagers. We can be certain of Liverpool blacks’ freed status for only two individuals, as clerks specified that Peter Johnson, buried in 1745 was a ‘free negro’, as was George Johnson buried in 1776. Only one ‘slave’ was baptized in Liverpool: on 5 July 1819, St. Nicholas church curate Thomas H. Heathcote baptized Dorothy Frankland, ‘a Slave in the Island of Barbados born about 1799’. We surmise that baptism conferred freedom upon Dorothy. Another problematic entry occurs on 19 November 1771, when the St. John’s priest buried ‘Captain Barrow’s Black Freeman Coffee’. We suggest that the name Freeman probably indicates his freed status, and hence Freeman Coffee was Barrow’s servant. But the use of the possessive usually implies an owner-slave relationship. Thus, we include as slaves in Liverpool, Adam, ‘Mr. Fillingham’s Blackamoore’ (1717 baptism), Ellen, ‘a Negro belonging to Capt. Carr’ (1738 burial), Dinah, ‘Mrs. Fry’s negro about 38 years old’ (1761 baptism), and ‘Hanamoe a black belonging to Mr. James’ (1774 burial). The last parish register entry using the verb ‘to belong’ occurred in 1785: Errat, buried at St. John’s graveyard, 30 September 1785, was ‘a black belong’d to Mr. Savage’. If we accept that ‘belonging’ denotes ownership and a master-slave relationship, then 15 slave baptisms or burials occurred from 1773 to 1785, after Lord Mansfield declared that slavery in England contradicted natural law. 56 In all, perhaps 70–75 individuals of African descent, from our sample of 639, were slaves in Liverpool, and after 1785 all Liverpool blacks were free individuals.
Slaving ship captains transported most of their slaves to Liverpool before the American Revolution. As is well known, ‘Negro Row’ was a nickname for a Liverpool street near the docks, and in the mid-eighteenth-century slaves were sold from auction sites near the Custom House. 57 Captains, too, owned slaves, and undoubtedly some were privilege slaves they transported from Africa and the Americas to Liverpool. 58 In 1738, Ellen, ‘a Negro belonging to Capt. Carr’ was buried, and this owner was probably Liverpool captain William Carr. Captain Thomas Derbyshire’s teenage slave Charles Manchester appears twice in church records: his baptism on 22 July 1756 and his burial on 14 February 1759. In 1771 Captain Barrow buried two of his blacks, Richard Thomas and Freeman Coffee. Some slaves or black servants accompanied their captain-owners or captain-employers on board ship. Twelve-year old John Ash, baptized 7 November 1781, from Angola and ‘servant to Captain John Ash’, worked on the Liverpool slaving ship Hector commanded by John Ash. Hector’s muster roll reports that ‘John Ash (Black)’ discharged in Liverpool 28 August 1784 after a yearlong voyage to Angola and Grenada. 59 Samuel Coffee, a servant to Captain James Paisley, was baptized in 1778, and was about 25 years of age. Eight years later a Samuel Coffee, mariner, married to Elizabeth, buried his son Henry Coffee (Table 3).
Select Africans owned by Liverpool slaving ship captains.
Source: See Appendix.
Notes:
Charles Manchester is the only African with a baptism and burial record.
Most likely Robert Erskine.
The clerks did not know names, perhaps because the captain was overseas. ‘Captain Webster’s Black’ died when Webster was on Glory bound to Africa.
James Saltcraig. Two other Africans, omitted from Table 3, also belonged to captains: on 25 November 1767 ‘Captain Bailey’s Black’, unnamed, was buried at St. John churchyard; on 10 December 1767 ‘Captain Morris’s Black’, Campbell Campbell, was buried at St. John. Since we cannot identify captains Bailey or Morris (or Maurice) in Liverpool in the 1760s or 1770s from Liverpool newspapers or street directories, these two men may have resided outside Liverpool. Plausibly, they were military officers.
Prominent Liverpool merchants and political leaders owned slaves. ‘Mr. Fillingham’ who owned Adam, a ‘blackamoore’ (c. 1717), was merchant Thomas Fillingham and later Lord Mayor of Liverpool, 1719–1720. In 1726, a priest buried Williby, ‘Aldm. Gildart Black’ (Alderman Richard Gildart’s black), and Gildart, a major Liverpool slaving merchant, was Liverpool’s representative in the House of Commons from 1734 to 1754. 60 On 24 October 1740, Robert Sharples, ‘Mr. Cobham’s Negro’, was buried at St. Peter’s churchyard, and Cobham was probably John Cobham, Liverpool merchant, later a gentleman in Prescot. John, baptized in 1756, was ‘Mr. Crosbie’s black’, owned by the Crosbie family who produced mayors in Liverpool in 1753 (James Crosbie), 1765 (John Crosbie), 1776 (William Crosbie, sr.) and 1779 (William Crosbie, jr.). In 1756–1772, Owen Brearton, John Blundell, George Campbell, Ralph Earle and John Knight – all men who sat on Liverpool’s council with mayors and aldermen – owned at least one slave, as did merchants John Bridge, John Chorley and Thomas Parker. 61
Merchants based in Africa returned to Liverpool to baptize their children. At least sixteen individuals residing, or having resided, in Africa baptized their children in Liverpool, 1778–1809, often traveling to Liverpool to baptize their children in groups (Table 4). Benjamin Curtis, John Fraser/Frazier, George Irving, and Stephen Tillinghast were merchants and slave traders in Rio Pongo country. Curtis (1774–c.1820), born near Boston, Massachusetts, and whose mother was African, later fathered more than 50 children in Africa, according to the British Foreign Office. 62 After baptizing his daughter Margaret, John Fraser, based near Bangalan on the Pongo River, migrated to Charleston and then to Florida, where he drowned in 1813, the ‘wealthiest and most extensive planter in Florida’. 63 Thomas Powell, another Upper Guinea trader, apparently split time in Africa and Liverpool. When Irishman William Buchanan wrote his will in July 1803 he specified that his property be sold, proceeds remitted to ‘Thomas Powell Merchant Liverpool’, and he bequeathed his estate to his mother, sister, and ‘to the Mulatto Children Edward Henshaw Powell of near Liverpool and Hannah Cumings of Africa’. Those who witnessed his will included Benjamin Curtis. 64 Tenne, Maboy and Yembre, the mothers of Richard Munro, Stephen Henry Tillinghast and James Welch, sound like anglicized West African names, and we assume that these three African women travelled from the Upper Guinea Coast to Liverpool to witness the baptisms of their children. They and others likely sailed to Liverpool in January–April to avoid the May–October rainy season in Africa.
Africa-based merchants’ children baptized in Liverpool, 1778–1809.
Source: See Appendix.
Notes:
Some groups of Africa-based merchants clearly traveled together to Liverpool to baptize their children on the same day.
Four children, all except Thomas Payne, presumably had African mothers and English/US and/or mulatto fathers.
‘the Child is a Native’.
Presumably ‘Mr. Tillinghurst’ who maintained a trading post on the Fatala River in Baga country (Bruce Mouser, ‘Trade, Coasters, and Conflict in the Rio Pongo from 1790 to 1808’, Journal of Africa History, 14, No. 1 (1973), 51, 64).
‘a black boy’.
‘born in Africa’.
Mothers presumably African-born.
‘a native of Sierra Leone on the coast of Africa’.
At least five Africans who arrived in Liverpool and were baptized arguably were sons of African merchants or dignitaries, and at least three came from Old Calabar. On 21 January 1796, ‘Samuel Baron, son of the African King Onramby, alias Johnson, was baptized’ at St. James Church, Toxteth. Though Onramby remains unidentified, at the same church, on 23 May 1798, William Antera ‘a Negro, was Baptized’, and his unusual surname anglicizes his Efik (Calabar) family name Ntiero. On 20 January 1799, chaplain Thomas Blundell, St. George Church, baptized John Ephraim Duke, ‘a Black Man aged 25’. Duke Ephraim (d. 1834) was a leading Efik merchant from Duke Town, Old Calabar, and John Ephraim Duke was probably a son. In 1805, Edward Young, ‘a Blackman a Native of Old Callabar on the Coast of Africa supposed about 18 years old’ was baptized in St. Nicholas’s Church. The surname ‘Young’ also has a Calabar connection with Egbo Young (Ekpenyong), another leading merchant from Duke Town. 65 On 31 March 1828, Reverend Wheeler Milner (St. Peter’s Church) baptized fifteen-year-old mariner George Hogan Acqua, a ‘native of Camarone’ who resided on Preeson’s Row. Acqua (Akwa) was one of the kingly families from Cameroon. 66 Since Liverpool merchants dominated the slave and palm oil trades at Old Calabar and Cameroon, and as early as the 1770s housed and provided English schooling for African men, these five individuals all may have studied in Liverpool schools, fees paid for by their merchant-sponsors. 67
Further research on Liverpool probates and muster rolls will increase, perhaps at least double, the number of blacks residing in Georgian Liverpool. 68 In his will from 1720, Liverpool captain Josiah Harris bequeathed slaves Lowhill (a boy) and Whitecross (a woman) to his wife Frances. Neither Lowhill nor Whitecross appear in Liverpool baptism records, though ‘Josiah Haris, Tythbarn St., saylor’ baptized his daughter Sarah in September 1716 at St. Nicholas’s church. 69 The 1782 will of Mary Chaffers, widow of a Liverpool master-mariner, includes a £5 annuity to a black servant named William Chaffers. 70 Certainly, wills might add names of a few more individuals with African ancestry, but many more names appear in Liverpool muster rolls. On board Liverpool vessels, 1798–1807, surviving muster roll copies record the names of 42 sailors, stewards or cooks from Africa, men such as cook Prince George Bonny, seaman John Congo and steward Will McKneil. 71 Since most pre-1804 Liverpool musters do not indicate ‘abode’, further research will identify plausible African sailors via name and occupation analysis, and thus impute that men such as John Free (from America) and cook George Joseph were black. 72
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Church records reveal information on Liverpool blacks unavailable in other sources and similarly provide historians with occupations that represent cross-sections of Liverpool society. 73 Most scholars who study Liverpool’s occupational structure before 1841, the year of Liverpool’s first comprehensive census, have relied on information contained in street directories. 74 As they note, directories, in documenting 10–15 per cent of the city’s resident population, focus on elites or skilled workers. 75 Indeed, comparing information in church records with directories reveals, for example, that parish clerks record ‘labourer’ as an occupation whereas Liverpool street directories do not. Our church record sample for the year 1800 documents 214 ‘labourers’ in marriage, baptism and burial records. Plausibly, only nine of these 214 individuals match entries in Gore’s Liverpool Directory for 1800, and, of these nine, four are victuallers and three are shoemakers. 76 Of course, the poorest member of a society might never marry, baptize their children, or afford a Church burial, so their occupations would remain unrecorded in any source. 77 Further, documented occupations pose problems as some individuals might hold multiple jobs, an honorific such as ‘esquire’ or ‘gentleman’ may appear instead of a stated occupation, and parish clerks usually associate women with their marital status rather than their occupation. Nonetheless, church records provide much larger samples for a greater range of occupations than any other source.
Not surprisingly, maritime and port-related occupations feature prominently in the occupational entries recorded by clerks in Liverpool parish churches, 1704–1900. Mariners (mariners, sailors, seamen) 78 account for 18 per cent of all occupations listed, and mariners and labourers total one-third (Table 5). 79 Mariners’ data certainly underestimate the percentages of men working on ships, as carpenters, coopers, shipwrights and surgeons went to sea alongside sailors. Many specialists mustered on board Liverpool slaving vessels, 1700–1807. There are 455 church register entries for surgeons, 1712–1808, many of them men in the slave trade, but only 553 entries for surgeons, 1809–1888, when Liverpool’s population increased ten-fold. Many ‘labourers’ must have worked in docks or warehouses on the Mersey as porters or carters or in day-jobbing. Half of the occupations recorded in Table 5, 1704–1800, related directly to maritime work. Given the large number of transient sailors in Liverpool, which totaled in the thousands, 80 perhaps one in three men walking the streets near the docks were sailors.
Frequency of occupations recorded in Liverpool parish church registers, 1704–1900 (by period). 1
Source: www.liverpoolmaritime.org, marriage, baptism and burial records.
Sample: 300,712 life-events in which Liverpool parish church clerks recorded occupations.
Table 5 includes the 20 most-frequent occupations, 1704–1800, tracked in two subsequent periods.
We coded 191 preferred occupations, following the HISCO classification scheme.
Note:
Table 5 presents data on life-events (baptisms, marriages, burials) for individuals with recorded occupations (see text). Therefore, for example, in 1704–1800 there are not 19,226 mariners in Liverpool but 19,226 life-events concerning mariners.
Whereas labourers, as a percentage of occupations listed in church records, remained around 13 per cent in 1704–1800 and 1851–1900, mariners declined from 23.4% to 13.5% over these two periods. After the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807, the number of skilled ‘mariners’ such as surgeons, coopers and carpenters dropped sharply. The percentage of Liverpool shoemakers, tailors and sawyers declined over this long period; carters, bookkeepers and porters increased, supporting the rise of Liverpool’s service sector in Victorian England (Table 5). 81 We do not have sufficient information to support Longmore’s argument that the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807 de-skilled Liverpool, at least in the short term. 82 In two of her spotlighted occupations, pipemakers and coppersmiths, for example, there appear to be fewer pipemakers from 1787 to 1828 – but more coppersmiths: in 1787–1807, there were 143 church records for pipemakers and seven for coppersmiths; in 1808–1828, there were 134 for pipemakers and 66 for coppersmiths.
Directories often identify ship captains (usually with ‘Capt.’), but early church records rarely distinguish between mariner and ‘master mariner’, the latter term reserved for the nineteenth century. Similarly, the distinction between ‘ship carpenters’ and ‘carpenters’ depends on the proclivities of the church clerks: ‘ship carpenter’ appears disproportionately in St. Peter church records, for example. Shipwrights might refer to men either on land or sea – and could refer to a boat builder 83 – though cross-checking church records with Liverpool muster rolls indicates that a sample of slaving ship carpenters usually appear as shipwrights in their marriage or children’s baptism records (Table 6). 84 A skilled worker may appear in a church record as a ‘mariner’, which functions as a catch-all term. ‘Boatswain’, for example, is a more specific sailor’s occupation that usually does not appear in sources other than muster rolls. There are only eight boatswains, for example, in our large sample of Liverpool church records. ‘Ship’s steward’, ‘armourer’, ‘ship’s carpenter’, each appear once in eighteenth-century Liverpool church records. ‘Chief mate’, ‘1st mate’ or ‘First mate’ appear in only seven nineteenth-century records. Other than ‘master mariner’, church records give scant information about specific mariners’ rank or duties.
Woodworkers in the Liverpool slave trade, as recorded in church records and muster rolls.
Sources: www.liverpoolmaritime.org, marriage and baptism records; muster rolls of Liverpool slaving vessels (1804), TNA, BT98/64.
Notes:
Simon Brigs, as recorded on the muster of King Bell (BT98/64, 230).
Or William Costam.
Hindley is the least probable match, though his surname is unusual.
Listed also in church records as shipwright Philip Peters.
Studies on Merseyside occupations, then, require a multi-source approach to properly assess Liverpool’s workforce and any occupational changes over time. Church records fill many gaps left by the street directories that record 10–15 per cent of the city’s residents, omitting most lower-paid workers and/or renters. Occupations listed in parish registers confirm the great importance of Liverpool’s maritime labour sector in the eighteenth century and its gradual diminution after 1800. Street directories are a stronger source for distinguishing captains from ‘mariners’, but neither directories nor church records provide the occupational detail for mariners contained in Liverpool muster rolls, which consistently report rank after 1803. Muster rolls also contain names of the many Liverpool bachelors who might not appear in any church record, and they document the thousands of transient maritime workers who traveled to Liverpool from afar.
*
Genealogical sites have provided open or subscription access to British christening, marriage and burial records, but they have not yet digitized and databased large samples of probate data. 85 There are printed indexes, published by the Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, which list individuals whose wills were proved in the Consistory Court of Chester. Chester court officials considered wills or estates from individuals leaving ‘effects’ in Cheshire and Lancashire, including sailors from Liverpool who died intestate. The Record Society published these indexes, in 18 volumes, from 1879 to 1980 (covering years 1545–1837), and they list the names of the probated individual, their occupation, residence, and type of will (such as an administration). We have databased the 156,737 Cheshire and Lancashire will index entries through 1825, which include 20,616 from Liverpool, enabling users to search by name, occupation, year or placename. 86 Excluding tuitions of minors, there are 20,409 Liverpool probate entries in the index for 20,187 individuals – thus comparatively few people made more than one will or had their estate probated in more than one court sitting. Of these 20,187 individuals, 16,081 occupations are recorded, 15,845 in the period 1701–1825.
Regarding deceased Liverpool individuals, Chester court officials mostly proved wills from mariners and, of those men, the large majority died on board slaving vessels. Most surgeons, coopers, shipwrights and carpenters, too, died on board Guineamen. Even if one could not match shipboard personnel to Liverpool slaving vessels, implicitly most mariners and woodworkers and surgeons’ deaths in 1701–1808 occurred on board slavers, since the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807 reduced by two-thirds the number of executors and administrators who appeared before Chester court officials. 87 In 1781–1808, for example, officials proved wills of 8091 Liverpool individuals, a total that dropped to 3070 in 1809–1825. Regarding surgeons’ estates, the totals fell from 242 to 35 in the same two periods (Table 7). The church officials who proved wills of deceased sailors, Liverpool curates such as reverends Henry Barton, Frodsham Hodgson, George Monk, Lewis Pughe and Samuel Renshaw, had first-hand knowledge about high mortality in the Liverpool slave trade. They are a group unstudied by historians, and these men may have been some of the unknown abolitionists in Liverpool.
Occupations, probated individuals, Liverpool, 1701–1825 (by period).
Source: www.liverpoolmaritime.org, from printed indexes of wills proved at the Consistory Court of Chester (see text).
Sample: 15,845 Liverpool wills that specify occupations, including gentleman, gentlewoman, esquire, 1701–1825. Table lists 14 occupations, those with at least 25 probated estates, 1701–1780, and is sorted by 1701–1825 totals. Preferred occupation assembles, for example, dealers and chapmen into ‘merchants’.
Notes:
Includes esquires: 1701–1780 (14); 1781–1808 (31); 1809–1825 (45); includes one gentlewoman in 1781–1808 and one in 1809–1825.
Percentage totals may differ because of rounding.
Church officials, in proving the estates of the deceased, would have noticed wealth disparities by occupation, as measured by a valuation of the deceased’s ‘personal effects’ – an approximate valuation that excluded real estate, usually effects ‘under’ or ‘below’ a certain value required to assess stamp duty. 88 Ecclesiastical courts settled estates for those individuals with personal estates valued at least £5, so any sample excludes vast numbers of poor. We have examined and databased handwritten Probate Act Book entries for 30,663 Lancashire/Cheshire individuals whose estates appeared before the church officials of the Consistory Court of Chester, 1779–1810. This total includes 26,977 ‘supra’ will valuations, 1779–1810 and 3686 ‘infra’ will valuations, 1779–1798. 89 From our large sample, there are 23,086 probates that record a single occupation and probated wealth. 90 For now, we restrict our analysis to Liverpool and non-Liverpool individuals and to the wealthiest individuals; in a later study, we will examine more closely wealth by occupation, and isolate those who invested in the Liverpool slave trade to test whether investing in the Liverpool slave trade earned profits above those earned in alternative investments. In that future study, we also will draw upon the information in the Lancashire wills and administrations proved in the Prerogative courts of York and Canterbury, and we will extend our sample beyond 1810. 91
In total, the slave trade played a major role in shaping Liverpool’s wealth valuations in a larger Lancashire/Cheshire context. Including mariners, the personal effects of individuals residing in Liverpool or nearby villages (such as Everton) averaged a valuation of £483 compared to £658 outside of Liverpool. The depressed Liverpool figure reflects the large number of mariners who died in the slave trade, most leaving personal effects behind totaling less than £50. Removing mariners from Liverpool’s totals, the average Merseyside individual’s wealth (less real estate) totaled £1049. Similarly, the high mortality of surgeons in the Liverpool slave trade reduced surgeons’ wealth: 218 Liverpool surgeons’ wills were proved, averaging £284; 145 non-Liverpool surgeons’ wills averaged £608. Surgeons’ wages and perquisites in the slave trade did enable those who survived several voyages to dramatically raise their wealth, but many surgeons died in the trade and never reached their third voyage or the age of 30. 92 By contrast, a master mariner who survived several slaving voyages would earn hundreds of pounds (sterling) in commissions. There were twelve master mariners from Liverpool whose estates were valued at a maximum of £5000, and nine of these twelve captains were slaving captains. 93 Thus, master mariners’ estates from Liverpool averaged £922 compared to £388 for master mariners who did not sail from Liverpool (Table 8).
Probated wealth valuations, Liverpool vs. non-Liverpool individuals from Lancashire/Cheshire, 1779–1810.
Source: www.liverpoolmaritime.org, from Probate Act Book valuations of deceased’s personal effects, Family History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah (FHL), Reels 2106805, 2106806, 2107007.
Sample: 23,086 probate valuations, individuals with recorded occupations whose wills or administrations were proved in the Consistory Court of Chester, 1779–1810.
Notes:
Table 8 includes probated wealth valuations by occupation for individuals with one stated occupation, except for farmers and medical practitioners. Thus, ‘farmer and yeoman’ valuations are aggregated with valuation from ‘farmers’. Medical practitioner is an imputed occupation that aggregates apothecaries, dentists, midwives, physicians and surgeons. Italicized occupations follow the terminology stated on probate documents.
Not surprisingly, manufacturing wealth in Lancashire/Cheshire centered outside Liverpool in the years 1779–1810. There are Chester Court probate valuations for 523 manufacturers, but only nineteen in Liverpool, and these valued less than half the non-Liverpool average of £1263. Muslin, smallware, fustian, woollen, check and cotton manufacturers located outside Liverpool. For all 523 manufacturers, half were in Greater Manchester – in Manchester (104), Bolton/Great Bolton/Little Bolton (25), Stockport (23), Salford (15), Ashton-under-Lyne (12), Oldham (nine) and Bury (eight), and numerous smaller villages and towns nearby. For all cotton-related occupations – individuals working in carding, dealing, manufacturing, printing, shearing, spinning, and weaving, and whose personal effects averaged £1109 – there were only seven Liverpool-based workers from a sample of 413. Only in sailcloth manufacturing did Liverpool compete with regional suppliers, though the small samples of sailcloth manufacturer probates indicate that Liverpool suppliers’ probates were valued at less than half of those sailcloth makers residing northeast from Merseyside. Though a crude comparative measure, Liverpool’s aggregate ‘wealth’ from 7486 probates (including those without specified occupations) totaled £3,817,405. The total for Lancashire/Cheshire (29,852 probates) was £17,737,587, and for Greater Manchester (3412 probates), £2,888,683.
Bankers, esquires and merchants top the list of the wealthy in Lancashire and Cheshire. Liverpool’s bankers in the sample numbered two, William Clarke (£10,000) and his son William, junior (£5000). William Clarke, senior, developed his banking businesses after profiting from linen trades in the 1760s and 1770s, and from his banking firm emerged Leyland and Bullin’s – partners Thomas Leyland and his nephew Richard Bullin, later two of the richest men in England. 94 Esquires included men and women of old landed wealth and those who made their fortunes via trade. The Stanleys and Stanley-Massey-Stanley families, gentry from Cheshire dating their baronetcy to 1661, included Jane Stanley (probate 1804, £80,000) John Stanley-Massey-Stanley (probate 1808, £15,000), Charles Stanley (probate 1792, £5000) and John Stanley (probate 1791, £5000). 95 But the ‘rich list’ for Lancashire/Cheshire included mostly men who made their fortunes in commerce or industry. That list included Samuel Taylor, Thomas Naylor, and James Borron, cotton manufacturers in Greater Manchester (Table 9). Samuel Taylor is the best known of these three men, and he testified before Parliament in 1788 as to the importance of Manchester cotton textiles to the British slave trade. 96
Largest probates of Lancashire/Cheshire individuals recorded in the Consistory Court of Chester, 1779–1810 (not adjusted for inflation). 1
Source: FHL, Probate Act Books, 1779–1810, Consistory Court of Chester, reels 2106805–6.
Sample: 26,977 probates of individuals whose effects, before debts were paid, valued more than £40.
Notes:
Table includes 34 individuals, including those without a stated occupation (such as spinsters and widows) whose ‘personal effects’ (excluding real estate) may have reached a threshold of £20,000.
33 probates, as do most, report effects ‘less than’ the amount specified. Exception: John Stanton, whose effects valued exactly £20,000.
The Hollinsheads invested in coal mining, stone quarrying and canals.
Thomas Moss, Cornelius Bourne, John Smith, Benjamin Hammond and Arthur Onslow invested in Liverpool slaving ventures. Of the five, Hammond earned the most money from slaving investments. Between 1778 and his death in 1804 he invested in 42 Liverpool slaving ventures.
Probate ‘occupation’: esquire.
Probate ‘occupation’: gentleman.
Probate ‘occupation’: merchant.
Also Prerogative Court of Canterbury will.
Probate officials did not usually specify types of businesses in which merchants were concerned. They identified no merchant, for example, as an African or ‘slaving’ merchant or ‘whaling’ merchant. But our sample includes 91 men identified as ‘liquor merchants’ – which includes wine (23) and brandy (two) merchants – and 46 timber merchants, men whose probates averaged £1123 and £1567, respectively. These valuations fall well short of the smaller sample of cotton merchants’ wealth – £5225, again pointing to the new wealth created via the expanding cotton manufacturing businesses in Lancashire. Liquor and timber merchants’ wealth also fell short of slaving merchants’ earnings. Pope’s sample of leading Liverpool slaving merchants’ wealth averaged £18,500 and a median of £5000, figures that our research will support, given that we both draw upon probate valuations. As Pope notes, some slaving merchants earned great wealth in the trade, but overall, his sample of 94 probate valuations indicates that ‘Liverpool’s leading slave merchants enjoyed mixed fortunes’, and 56/94 left estates under £5000. 97 Adding minor slaving merchants to his sample will lower average slaving wealth. Nonetheless, even those whose estates valued £2500 would have accumulated wealth that exceeded that of most Lancashire/Cheshire merchants, except for some cotton and corn merchants.
The relationship between commercial wealth – particularly via the slave trade – and industrial wealth awaits a future study in which we can examine biographies of merchants and manufacturers over several generations. That study also will widen our probate sample to include Lancashire individuals whose wills were proved in the Prerogative courts of York and Canterbury and extend to the generation beyond 1810. Our preliminary hypothesis, though, is that little overlap existed between commercial/maritime and industrial wealth: new families emerged to pioneer trades in each sector; few ‘maritime’ families’ sons became manufacturers; and Liverpool continued to develop its commercial sector to service industrial Lancashire and the wider Midlands, often via raw cotton imports and distribution.
*
Liverpool as a Trading Port, www.liverpoolmaritime.org, presents large samples of genealogical and ‘maritime’ data to enable scholars to deepen studies on the histories of Liverpool and Lancashire. Here we focused on the project’s ‘genealogical’ aspect, when, before the first systematic Lancashire census (1841), church records contained the largest and most representative samples of personal information – whether street addresses, occupations or ethnicity, including African ancestry. Census data include, by definition, decadal information conducive to studying longer-term trends. Church records, by contrast, enable scholars to examine short-term change, and complement information contained in city directories, probates, muster rolls, and newspapers. 98 Further work on residency, occupations and race/nationality will enable scholars to finely map Liverpool’s spatial demography over time. Most records that identify individuals of African ancestry appear in parish register entries – usually adult baptism records – helping to better place Liverpool’s history in the context of Atlantic slaving. Onomastics will enable scholars to chart Liverpool’s nascent Irish, Welsh and Scottish communities. Probates, though they only contain samples from those leaving personal property valued £5 or greater, nonetheless enable scholars to assess wealth by location and occupation, and help to demonstrate shifting fortunes in industrializing Lancashire. A ‘slave trade elite’ certainly existed in Liverpool, but during 1780–1810 the increasing wealth in cotton began relocating Lancashire energy from Liverpool towards Greater Manchester.
Footnotes
Appendix
Parish clerk records in Liverpool as a Trading Port, 1704–1840 (by church and time period). 1
| Parish church | Year 2 | 1704–1749 | 1750–1775 | 1776–1800 | 1801–1820 | 1821–1840 | Totals |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| St. Peter | 1704 | 33151 | 40742 | 42183 | 89899 | 215341 | 421316 |
| St. Nicholas | 1776 | 0 | 0 | 101867 | 81840 | 58341 | 242048 |
| St. Paul | 1776 | 0 | 0 | 11317 | 17749 | 13705 | 42771 |
| St. John | 1767 | 0 | 4275 | 14813 | 7673 | 8675 | 35436 |
| St. Thomas | 1750 | 0 | 7319 | 7536 | 4900 | 2743 | 22498 |
| St. Anne (Richmond) | 1789 | 0 | 0 | 6562 | 11903 | 2487 | 20952 |
| St. George | 1760 | 0 | 2056 | 1178 | 1638 | 1485 | 6357 |
| St. Peter’s (RC) 3 | 1839 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 6244 | 6244 |
| Christ Church | 1797 | 0 | 0 | 191 | 2692 | 2007 | 4890 |
| Holy Trinity | 1813 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1218 | 2287 | 3505 |
| Pitt Street Chapel | 1802 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 3086 | 0 | 3086 |
| St. Catherine | 1831 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1795 | 1795 |
| Welch Baptist | 1815 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 147 | 1016 | 1163 |
| Mount Pleasant | 1802 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 242 | 901 | 1143 |
| St. Luke | 1831 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 567 | 567 |
| Bethesda | 1802 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 389 | 0 | 389 |
| St. Matthias | 1834 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 213 | 213 |
| All Saints | 1835 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 213 | 213 |
| Totals | 33151 | 54392 | 185647 | 223376 | 318020 | 814586 |
Source: www.liverpoolmaritime.org.
Notes:
St. Peter’s and St. Nicholas’s churches account for four in five parish clerk entries over this 137-year period. Though ledgers from St. Nicholas survive from 1660 – the earliest surviving Liverpool parish registers – our project does not yet include its pre-1776 data. Clerks in these two churches also reported biographical information more comprehensively than others. Though there are 14,477 St. Thomas church records, 1750–1800, for example, only 16 entries concerning eight baptisms report named Liverpool streets (each parent has an entry for each child). By contrast, the first entries in our database, baptisms from 2 July 1704, report that Thomas Spencer, carter, lived on Lord Street, and Thomas Ashton, ship’s carpenter, lived on James Street. We currently are adding St. James (Toxteth) records to the site.
The table includes first year of data, and, except for St. Nicholas, first year of surviving parish registers.
Roman Catholic Church.
1.
Stephen D. Behrendt, Carl W. Blackmun, Linda R. Gray and Robert A. Hurley, ‘Liverpool as a Trading Port, 1700–1850: An Online Public Access Database’, International Journal of Maritime History, 24, No. 1 (2012), 265–300.
2.
Liverpool’s first census, 1801, included partial information on residents’ occupations. Laxton first analyzed the census in his study of Liverpool’s social geography, housing and occupational structure. His occupational analysis remained tentative since the 1801 census enumerated 59,783 people, but included occupations for only 3862 residents (P. Laxton, ‘Liverpool in 1801: A Manuscript Return for the First National Census of Population’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 130 (1981), 73–113). Laxton was part of a team researching Liverpool censuses, 1841–1911, a funded project that began in 1972, but apparently that project fell into hiatus. See Richard Lawton and Colin G. Pooley, ‘The Social Geography of Nineteenth-Century Merseyside: A Research Project’, Historical Methods Newsletter, 7 (1974), 276–84. Regarding Lancashire census data, see http://lancashirecensus.co.uk/intro.htm; 
.
3.
4.
Other British genealogical (subscription) websites: www.findmypast.co.uk; www.thegenealogist.co.uk; .
5.
6.
For some sites, one can search for an occupation in the Keyword field, but such searches retrieve no results. For example, in Ancestry a search for Liverpool surgeons (Lived in = Liverpool and Keyword = Surgeon) from the 1841 UK census returned no results [accessed 1 May 2017]. Other websites, such as , do not include keyword searches. In this article, we use ‘field’ and ‘variable’ interchangeably.
7.
For example, ‘Male Occupational Data from English Parish Registers (Processed Summary Data), c. 1700–1820’, SN 5398, data available via the UK Data Archive, which includes 15,260 records from Lancashire (1951 from Liverpool) and 16 data fields. Individuals are not included in the dataset, and a ‘record’ does not link to an individual. Thus, in 1750–1752, clerks in Liverpool St. Peter baptized 220 sailors (Record ID 4707) and 88 joiners (Record ID 4708). Each record, then, is a frequency count.
8.
Users can now search Lloyd’s Lists Marine News, 1740–1837, an online database with fields on personal name, ship name, notes, location and dates, information taken from the first section of Lloyd’s Lists. The project has not yet digitized/databased information on vessel departures and arrivals contained on pp. 2–3 of the Lists (www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/lloydslist/). The Global Ship Number System database (gsn.ncl.ac.uk), which holds records on 15,303 British-built or British-engineered merchant ships or warships greater than 2500 tons, 1828–1970, does not include captains’ or owners’ names. It is part of the British Shipbuilding Database, with data on 80,000 ships (not yet online). Future renditions of will include genealogical information on captains, surgeons, and merchants in the British slave trade.
9.
In 2013 Ancestry added the DNA tab that leads users through steps required to download a tab delimited text file (https://dna-explained.com/2013/03/21/downloading-ancestrys-autosomal-dna-raw-data-file/). AncestryDNA uses DNA science to help identify possible family connections via genetic ethnicity predictions. Regarding the workaround to paste results into Excel, see www.mkrgenealogy.com/searching-for-stories-blog/spreadsheet-magic-importing-data-from-ancestrycom. Some maritime history sites, for example , allow users to download all searches (as text files) and the entire dataset (in SPSS).
10.
Parish clerk projects appeared on the web without fanfare, and family history researchers stumbled upon the various online sites in 2003 and 2004, as genealogy chat rooms indicate (see, for example, discussions in 2004 in ). Volunteers working for the Lancashire Parish Clerk Project transcribe and digitize the parish register information in Excel spreadsheets. Note that parish registers differ from bishop’s transcripts, which copy the register information but usually omit some details.
11.
Users also can retrieve results directly from Google searches by searching, for example, ‘Lewis Robinson’ Liverpool 1799. The first two search results return pages from . For convenience, we refer to St. Nicholas ‘church’, though it first, until 1698, was a ‘chapel of ease’ for the parish church (and under the vicar) of Walton-on-the-Hill. A chapel of ease is a church building other than the parish church and located closer to parishioners – as the parish church of Walton was 5 kilometres northeast from the centre of Liverpool.
12.
In July 1802 John Harrocks, joiner, baptized his daughter Margaret, suggesting that he witnessed his sister’s marriage three years earlier, and named his newborn daughter after his sibling.
13.
The two entries for Lewis Robinson indeed document information about the same individual. Robinson worked in the British slave trade. He was born on 9 February 1777 and christened a week later in Benn’s Garden Chapel, a Presbyterian and Unitarian dissenting church. His parents were John and Mary Robinson, and his father worked as a porter. The LDS Family Search genealogy site (www.familysearch.org) digitized the Benn’s Chapel documents – yet to be transcribed by – but omitted John Robinson’s occupation. See Stephen D. Behrendt, ‘The Captains in the British Slave Trade from 1785 to 1807’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 140 (1991), 125. Like many slave trade mariners who married, Lewis Robinson married shortly before departing Liverpool on a slaving voyage: he is listed third of 30 sailors on board Hannah, which sailed on 11 August 1799 (London, The National Archives (TNA), BT98/60, 275). Though born into a dissenting family, and Liverpool dissenters were often abolitionists, mariner Lewis Robinson worked in the slave trade. For Benn’s Garden Chapel and Liverpool dissenters, see James E. Bradley, Religion, Revolution and English Radicalism: Non-conformity in Eighteenth-Century Politics and Society (Cambridge, 1980), 286–7.
14.
Initially we will provide larger samples of data for 1765–1837. The first run of Liverpool newspapers date from 1765 (Williamson’s Liverpool Advertiser and Mercantile Chronicle, 4 October 1765); the last printed index of wills proved in the Consistory Court of Chester includes probates from 1834–1837 (Florence Dickinson, ed., Index to the Wills and Administrations Formerly Preserved in the Probate Registry, Chester, 1834–1837 (Liverpool, 1980). Regarding shipping to/from Liverpool, the project will extend back to 1700, gleaning data from Liverpool Port Books (TNA, E190/1361/1).
15.
As we have only completed select name-matching, we approximate the number of individuals included in the 1,207,744 life events. Between 1704 and 1850, there are 940,152 life events in . The project includes later data, since uploading all digitized data, per church, proved more straightforward than integrating select years.
16.
There are 33,151 St. Peter Church records, 1704–1749, uploaded to www.liverpoolmaritime.org. The earliest Liverpool parish registers, from St. Nicholas’ Church, date from 1660, but have not yet been digitized by the Lancashire Parish Clerk Project team. Available St. Nicholas’ records are baptisms and burials (from 1776) and marriages (from 1788). See .
17.
Here we follow Ancestry’s ‘Race/Nationality’ field label.
18.
For HISCO: http://socialhistory.org/en/projects/hisco-history-work; Marco H. D. van Leeuwen, Ineke Maas and Andrew Miles, HISCO: Historical International Standard Classification of Occupations (Leuven, 2002). We followed the HISCO codes in creating five number IDs – hence codes 98135 for sailors and 04215 for captains. Later we will add occupation codes from a competing classification scheme developed at Cambridge University, the PST (Primary, Secondary, Tertiary) system, which groups occupations into three categories. See: . Cambridge University’s projects on occupations (England, Wales, Scotland) provide raw data via the Economic and Data Service at the UK Data Archive, but their datasets omit the names of individuals. Most of their 35 datasets use nineteenth-century census data.
19.
Findmypast provides some images of wills proved at the Consistory Court of Chester (). The National Archives (Britain) provides online access to wills proved at the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, 1384–1858. From 1858 wills were proved in secular courts. Ancestry.co.uk provides access to 1858–1966 wills.
20.
David H. Pratt, Researching British Probates, 1354–1858: A Guide to the Microfilm Collection of the Family History Library (Wilmington, DE, 1992), xvi, 69.
21.
Regarding searching online for full-text Cheshire and Lancashire wills, one can search by occupation only in findmypast.com (https://familysearch.org/search/collection/1589492; https://user.xmission.com/~nelsonb/lws.htm; ).
22.
These are the six main sources to study Liverpool vessels and voyages from c. 1750. The seventh source, port books, do not survive for Liverpool (overseas voyages) after 1726.
23.
By contrast, the earlier Liverpool Ship Register Project first databased records in the ship registers and then supplemented that information with voyage details about the Liverpool-owned craft. See David Richardson, Kathy Beedham and M. M. Schofield, ‘Liverpool Shipping and Trade, 1744–1786: A Computerised Edition of the Liverpool Plantation Registers’ [1992], .
24.
Died, ‘On Friday, Captain Lewis Robinson, Duncan-street, late commander of the Retrieve, of this port’ (Liverpool Chronicle, 28 May 1806).
25.
These witnesses were not fellow sailors on Hannah. We have identified only Wilbraham, a liquor merchant who resided on Edmund Street.
26.
Marriage records also provide indications of literacy – individuals (husbands, wives, witnesses) who cannot write their names write ‘X’. We have not yet programmed searches for literacy.
27.
We currently have matched only 996 individuals recorded in multiple parish register entries. As with all large genealogical projects, we will not be able to match confidently all individuals’ records, and many common-named people, such as William Williams, working in a common occupation, such as ‘mariner’, will remain ‘orphaned’ in the database – unmatched to their other records. We will match same-named individuals via probabilistic matching, considering the rarity of names and, as data points, using imputed ages, occupations, and street addresses.
28.
As we develop LTP, we will add tonnage figures recorded by various sources and create an imputed tonnage figure per vessel per voyage.
29.
That ‘Liverpool’ (no street specified) total, 4 per cent of our sample, includes 40,398 marriage entries, 474 baptism entries, and 170 burial entries (with some double-counting from matched individuals with more than one parish ledger entry).
30.
[John Corry], The History of Liverpool, from the Earliest Authenticated Period down to the Present Time (Liverpool, 1810), 151.
31.
We have completed the street directory database for Gore’s 1800 directory and Baines’ 1824 directory: Gore’s Liverpool Directory (1800); Edward Baines, History, Directory, and Gazetteer, of the County Palatine of Lancaster, 2 vols. (Liverpool, 1824), I: 205–352. The directory database includes businesses and individuals, and we have given streets and individual houses (identified via house numbers) unique IDs, residency information that might also appear in Liverpool street directories, newspapers, land tax records, death duty ledgers, and census data.
32.
Since the number of Liverpool streets increased over time, and some disappeared during city renovation, one should present frequency counts for specific years or time periods.
33.
Since we have not grouped all life events via probabilistic name-matching, results are preliminary and indicative. Mariners’ street rankings would hold unless some mariners baptized a disproportionate number of children or made a disproportionate number of marriages. A list of 646 Liverpool streets and addresses, including the Infirmary, appears in Gore’s Liverpool Directory (1800), 217–23. By contrast, Chadwick’s 1725 Liverpool map lists 53 ‘Streets, Lanes & Alleys’, and a Liverpool directory from 1781 reported 232 streets (Gore’s Liverpool Directory (1781), 135–6). Church records, too, list infirmaries as addresses – mostly for burials, not surprisingly. The earliest baptism record linked to an infirmary: on 24 November 1789 sailor John Reuben and wife Sarah, abode ‘Infirmary’, baptized their son John.
34.
Diane E. Ascott, Fiona Lewis and Michael Power, Liverpool, 1660–1750: People, Prosperity and Power (Liverpool, 2006), 11.
35.
Only one sailor on Agreeable matches confidently with a corresponding parish register entry: David Denson of Dickinson Street appears in an 1805 baptism entry for St. Nicholas, but he then resided on Cleveland Square (, INDV0020060961). Richard Wilkins (Frederick Street), also on Agreeable, may not be the same mariner as Richard Wilkins, who resided on Pool Lane and has eleven parish register entries.
36.
Thus, Wallace remarks that buildings on ‘Paradise-street, Hanover-street, Duke-street … are principally the residence of merchants’. These buildings have ‘large and extensive cellaring’, used formerly to warehouse goods, but perhaps now let ‘to many people following trades’ ([James Wallace], A General and Descriptive History of the Ancient and Present State, of the Town of Liverpool (Liverpool, 1795), 81). Indeed, Simmons’ survey of Liverpool cellars in 1790 identified twenty people living in cellars on Duke Street (Makin Simmons, ‘Names of the Streets, Lanes, &c. within the Liberties of Liverpool’, in Gore’s Liverpool Directory (1790), 253).
37.
Laxton, writing about Liverpool in c. 1801, notes that in central Liverpool, ‘labourers were more likely to found in cellars’, but he stresses that ‘few residential quarters of the town could be unequivocally assigned labels, such as “poor labouring-class housing” or “opulent middle-class residents”ʼ (Laxton, ‘Liverpool in 1801’, 88–9). Taylor noted that cellars were ‘the home of almost half of the town’s working-class population for much of the nineteenth century’; on some streets in the south end of Liverpool, half the population lived in cellars as early as 1790 (I. C. Taylor, ‘The Court and Cellar Dwelling: The Eighteenth Century Origin of the Liverpool Slum’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 122 (1971), 69, 78).
38.
Gore’s Liverpool Directory (1800), 219, lists Duncan Street, though reports no residents living there. Horwood’s map depicts Duncan Street without house numbers and with only one building – on the corner of Duncan and Upper Pitt streets (R. Horwood, Plan of the Town and Township of Liverpool Shewing every House (1803), TNA, WO78/5766). According to Liverpool directories, in 1804 Lewis Robinson, mariner, resided at 33 Ormond Street (Woodward’s New Liverpool Directory (1804), 131) and the next year he resided at 17 Duncan Street (Gore’s Liverpool Directory (1805), 179).
39.
William Cumberland, flourman, north-east side south dock (Gore’s Liverpool Directory, 1769, 12); Bridget Fletcher, victualler, 18, East-side South Dock (Gore’s Liverpool Directory, 1777, 30); Simmons, ‘Names of the Streets, Lanes’, Gore’s Liverpool Directory (1790), 250.
40.
For example, William Moss, The Liverpool Guide (Liverpool, 1799), 26–37; The Stranger in Liverpool (Liverpool, 1812), 58–67, the latter noting that Liverpool’s Old Dock ‘is surrounded with houses, shops and merchants’ warehouses’ (59).
41.
For Sarah Lemon, see Behrendt et al., ‘Liverpool as a Trading Port’, 292–3. Margaret Augustus married c. 1801 and her surname changed to Lookey.
42.
Our project will database Land Tax records, which specify owners and residences of houses. Corry states that ‘a house in Church-street, which in 1793 was rented for twenty-five guineas a year, was let on a lease, in 1806, at the annual rent of one hundred and thirty-six pounds ten shillings’. This house was ‘Mr. Ward’s music-shop’ – Cornelius Ward, ‘music repository’, 23 Chapel Street ([Corry], History of Liverpool, 235; Gore’s Liverpool Directory, 1810, 249).
43.
Though by providing an individual’s name, onomastics can help to establish migration patterns from, for example, Ireland or Scotland or Wales or the Isle of Man to Liverpool. For a recent study of Irish surnames in London, see Adam Crymble, ‘A Comparative Approach to Identifying the Irish in Long Eighteenth-Century London’, Historical Methods, 48, No. 3 (2015), 141–52.
44.
Since Liverpool directories omit individuals born in Africa, and no African-born person from Liverpool left an extant will, church records are the best source to document the number of Africans residing in Liverpool. One can find individuals with events in Liverpool churches by searching for ‘Africa’, ‘a black’ or ‘negro’ in a Google search within the URL . The Google search Africa site: lan-opc.org.uk, for example, retrieved 295 results [accessed 1 May 2017]. A few Liverpool wills mention Africans by name, as we discuss below.
45.
Gomer Williams, History of the Liverpool Privateers and Letters of Marque with an Account of the Liverpool Slave Trade, 1744–1812 (Liverpool, 2004), 372–3, 474–6, 542. Williams reproduced documents concerning Africans sent to Liverpool for education, but added no commentary. Journalists and historians have mostly followed Williams’ lead by referencing small numbers of slaves sold or educated in Liverpool. See, for example, Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London, 1984), 59–60; Paul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson, ‘Trust, Pawnship, and Atlantic History: The Institutional Foundations of the Old Calabar Slave Trade’, American Historical Review, 104, No. 2 (1999), 342; Paul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson, ‘Letters of the Old Calabar Slave Trade, 1760–1789’, in Vincent Carretta and Philip Gould, eds, Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic (Lexington, KY, 2011), 95–6.
46.
Harold Culling, [‘St. James Toxteth Registers’], Liverpool Family History Society Journal, 1, No. 1 (1976), 9.
47.
Ray Costello, Black Liverpool: The Early History of Britain’s Oldest Black Community, 1730–1918 (Liverpool, 2001), 17, 30, 36, 104, 105; Jane Longmore, ‘Civic Liverpool: 1680–1800’, in John Belchem, ed., Liverpool 800: Culture, Character and History (Liverpool, 2006), 161.
48.
Imtiaz Habib, Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500–1677: Imprints of the Invisible (Aldershot, 2008); Kathleen Chater, Untold Histories: Black People in England and Wales During the Period of the British Slave Trade, c. 1660–1807 (Manchester, 2009). Lynn’s 1998 comment still holds: that journalists mostly have written about blacks in Liverpool, and they focus on the second half of the nineteenth century (Martin Lynn, ‘Liverpool and Africa in the Nineteenth Century: The Continuing Connection’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 147 (1998), 50–2).
49.
We have not yet examined all registers from St. Nicholas, 1660–1775 (see Appendix). But, for the 1705–1731 period, few blacks were baptized or buried at St. Nicholas. The only possible African-born persons in the church registers are a child and parent: Fortune, daughter of ‘Quaint, Dayle [Dale] St, mugpainter’, born 16 May 1720 (Robert Dickinson, ed., The Registers of St. Nicholas’s Church Liverpool. Part II, 1705–1725 (Leyland, 1963), 72).
50.
Clerks wrote ‘native’ also to identify people who presumably were not black, such as William Owens, ‘a native of Amlech Anglesea’ and John and Zacut Steevans, natives of Constantinople. We identify African mothers by their first names, as we discuss below.
51.
Merchant Samuel Reed, a Liverpool slaving ship partnership-owner, is the most plausible owner of Mercury.
52.
Clerks sometimes distinguished birthplace from residence: on 23 September 1778 Adam Kendrick, ‘a Native of Bermudas, supposed to be about twenty Years of Age, Servant to Mr. Jennions of the Island of St. Eustatia in the West Indies, Merchant’, was baptized at St. Nicholas’ Church.
53.
Most arrived after 1783, when Liverpool’s trade with the United States increased sharply.
54.
The other occupations (each one): barber; cabinetmaker; carpenter; cooper; cordwainer; drummer; joiner; and labourer. Of the skilled craft workers, three were natives of Barbados. For example, on 21 November 1826, Providence Rogers, a cooper, 26 years of age, ‘a native of Barbados West Indies’, was baptized at St. Peter’s Church, Liverpool.
55.
Excluding families, Water Street housed the ‘most’ Liverpool blacks, as three black men and one boy (at least two of whom were servants) resided on the street in 1777, 1780, 1787 and 1789.
56.
We agree with Cotter, who argues that historians have overstated the degree to which slavery persisted in England in the four decades following the Mansfield decision (William R. Cotter, ‘The Somerset Case and the Abolition of Slavery in England’, History, 79, no. 255 (1994), 31–56).
57.
Williams, Liverpool Privateers, 474; Fryer, Staying Power, 59–60.
58.
Captains probably did not return to Liverpool to sell their privilege slaves.
60.
Thomas Fillingham owned the Liverpool slaver Two Brothers, which engaged in a voyage in 1716–1718. Fillingham undoubtedly invested in more slaving ventures, but Liverpool data are sparse before 1730. Richard Gildart invested in at least nineteen slaving voyages, 1714–1761, though some might have been co-financed by his son Richard Gildart, junior.
61.
Gore’s Liverpool Directories, 1766–1774, record names of Liverpool merchants and politicians.
62.
Bruce Mouser, ‘Trade, Coasters, and Conflict in the Rio Pongo from 1790 to 1808’, Journal of Africa History, 14, No. 1 (1973), 51, 64; Bruce Mouser, ‘Landlords-Strangers: A Process of Accommodation and Assimilation’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 8, 3 (1975), 436–7; Bruce Mouser, ‘Towards a Definition of Transnational as a Family Construct: A Historical and Micro Perspective’, in Jacqueline Knörr and Christoph Kohl, eds, The Upper Guinea Coast in Global Perspective (New York, 2016), 25, 28–30.
63.
Daniel L. Schafer, ‘Family Ties that Bind: Anglo-African Slave Traders in Africa and Florida, John Fraser and his Descendants’, Slavery and Abolition, 20, No. 3 (1999), 1.
64.
Family History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah (FHL), Reel 88961, will of William Buchanan, dated 9 July 1803, proved 26 February 1804, Consistory Court of Chester. Earlier, on 1 December 1776, Liverpool mariner Thomas Powell, Highfield Street, baptized his child Edward Henshaw Powell. This captain Thomas Powell appears to be the Captain Powell who died c. 1788 or 1789. Though it seems extraordinary that two individuals named Thomas Powell each had a son named Edward Henshaw Powell, perhaps the Powells were kinsmen.
65.
Regarding Efik merchants, see Stephen D. Behrendt, A. J. H. Latham and David Northrup, The Diary of Antera Duke, an Eighteenth-Century African Slave Trader (New York, 2010). Efik naming patterns transposed first and last names, so Ephraim Duke was son of Duke Ephraim.
66.
Ralph A. Austen and Jonathan Derrick, Middlemen of the Cameroons Rivers: The Duala and their Hinterland, c. 1600–c. 1960 (Cambridge, 1999), 35–50.
67.
Lovejoy and Richardson, ‘Letters of the Old Calabar Slave Trade’, 95–6.
68.
We do not believe that Liverpool cemeteries memorialize any African individuals from Georgian Liverpool. Sophie Oldham’s research identified graves of 23 slaves buried in Britain, but none in Liverpool (Sophie Oldham, ‘Remembering the Enslaved at Home: Slave Burials in Britain from 1701 to 1868’, Newcastle University, 2016, ).
69.
Neil Sayer, ‘Lancashire Record Office Handlist 69: Sources for Black and Asian History’ ([Preston], 2010), 4; Dickinson, ed., Registers of St. Nicholas’s Church, 50.
70.
Longmore, ‘Civic Liverpool’, in Belchem, ed., Liverpool 800, 161.
71.
Stephen D. Behrendt, ‘Human Capital in the British Slave Trade’, in David Richardson, Suzanne Schwarz and Anthony Tibbles, eds, Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery (Liverpool, 2007), 79; TNA, BT98/67, 222, BT98/67, 144, BT98/65, 67. These three African men worked on Liverpool slaving vessels William, Perseus and Roehampton, respectively.
72.
John Free, America (no occupation stated), Liverpool slaving ship Lord Nelson, 1800–1801; George Joseph, cook, Liverpool slaving ship Victory, 1801–1802 (TNA, BT98/61, 140; BT98/62, 182). For common black sailor names, see Martha S. Putney, Black Sailors: Afro-American Merchant Seamen and Whalemen Prior to the Civil War (Westport, CT, 1987), 53.
73.
Studies of occupations in Merseyside focus on the second half of the nineteenth century, and principally examine census records, 1851–1911. Lawton noted (1871 focus) how Welsh, Irish and Scottish communities in Liverpool worked in occupations that varied by skills (Welsh often in building trades and shipping/commerce; Irish as unskilled labourers; Scots in skilled labour, and as merchants, shipbuilders or other professional classes) and resided, mostly, in separate city sections (R. Lawton, ‘Population and Society, 1730–1900’, in R. A. Dodgshon and R. A. Butlin, eds, An Historical Geography of England and Wales (London, 1978), 351–5). Neal, using data from censuses, 1841–1891, analyzed the Irish-born population of Liverpool and Irish residency patterns in city sections. Frank Neal, Sectarian Violence: The Liverpool Experience, 1819–1914: An Aspect of Anglo-Irish History (Manchester, 1988), 4–15.
74.
An exception: Ascott, Lewis and Power, Liverpool, 1660–1750, who note that occupations recorded in Liverpool parish registers overwhelmingly document male – not female – occupations. For women, the authors found fewer than 20 occupations from a sample of 20,000 marriage and burial records, 1660–1750 (88).
75.
Jon Stobart, ‘Culture versus Commerce: Societies and Spaces for Elites in Eighteenth-Century Liverpool’, Journal of Historical Geography, 28, No. 4 (2002), 471–85; Jane Longmore, ‘Residential Patterns of the Liverpool Elite c. 1660–1800’, in John Dunne and Paul Janssens, eds, Living in the City: Urban Elites and their Residences (Turnhout, 2008), 173–90.
76.
And here we matched individuals with the same name residing on the same street: (1) labourer (church record) or victualler (street directory) Richard Burgess, Earle Street; (2) labourer or victualler Richard Blackbourn/Blackburne, Crosbie Street; (3) labourer or shoemaker William Georgeson, Oldhall Street; (4) labourer or shoemaker John Hughes, Key Street; (5) labourer or victualler Ralph Jolley/Jolly, Cumberland Street; (6) labourer or shoemaker William Jones, Knight Street; (7) labourer or victualler John Morgan, Kitchen Street; and (8) labourer or butcher or victualler John Williams, Crosbie Street. Of course, there might be two individuals of the same name residing on the same street. John Dutton, our plausible ninth match, resided on Tythebarn Street; church records list him as a hairdresser (1792, 1797, 1798), carter (1798), porter (1799) and labourer (1800, 1803); Gore’s Directory lists him as a victualler who maintains a hairdresser’s shop (1796) and hairdresser (1800, 1803). Mary is the wife of the hairdresser and carter/porter/labourer, so we assume there is one John Dutton on Tythebarn Street.
77.
A parish church might pay for pauper burials, and ‘pauper’ appears in 406 burial records, 1768–1785, for St. John’s Church. Of these 406 records, however, only seven occupations appear, all for men (three sailors, one footman, one joiner, one soldier and one traveler).
78.
Early Liverpool church records differentiate between ‘Saylor’ and ‘Mariner’ but that distinction wanes after the mid-eighteenth century.
79.
For the growing importance of Liverpool’s maritime sector in the period 1660–1750, see Ascott, Lewis and Power, Liverpool, 1660–1750. Using church marriage and burial data, they demonstrate that ‘[b]etween 1741 and 1760 the mariner group grew threefold over the previous twenty-year period and reached 50 percent of testators, a reflection of Liverpool’s mid-eighteenth-century maritime capacity’ (82).
80.
Wallace noted that in official Liverpool enumerations ‘neither foreigners nor strangers are included’ (Wallace, History of Liverpool, 58). Corry cited an 1801 census that stated there were 6000 ‘registered sailors’ in Liverpool ([Corry], History of Liverpool, 268).
81.
For developments in Liverpool’s manufacturing, industrial and service sectors, see Graeme J. Milne, Trade and Traders in Mid-Victorian Liverpool: Mercantile Business and the Making of a World Port (Liverpool, 2000).
82.
Jane Longmore, ‘“Cemented by the Blood of the Negro”: The Impact of the Slave Trade on Eighteenth-Century Liverpool’, in Richardson, Schwarz and Tibbles, eds, Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery, 236–46.
83.
For example, in May 1765 ‘Roger Fisher and Son, Shipwrights’, advertised Young Prince of Wales for sale (Williamson’s Liverpool Advertiser, 17 May 1765).
84.
Any tabulation of Liverpool sailors or mariners would not, of course, include sailors residing outside Liverpool, and Liverpool resident-sailors may not have married in, or baptized their children in, Liverpool churches, or have been buried in Liverpool churchyards. Further, many sailors died at sea and/or were bachelors. In any year, 20 per cent of all sailors in the Liverpool slave trade, for example, died in the trade, and the large majority were bachelors. Regarding slave trade mortality, see Stephen D. Behrendt, ‘Crew Mortality in the Transatlantic Slave Trade in the Eighteenth Century’, Slavery and Abolition, 18, No. 1 (1997), 55–7. The Consistory Court of Chester, 1779–1810, proved the wills of 3996 Liverpool mariners, 580 of whom (14.5 per cent) were married. Of those who married, most were captains or other officers. Comparatively few active slaving mariners like Lewis Robinson (Figure 1, ) died in Liverpool and were buried in Liverpool churchyards.
85.
86.
See note 21.
87.
They swore oaths as to the authenticity of the will and supporting documents, steps required to prove the will.
88.
For 27,782 of 29,852 valuations, the figure is below a specified maximum amount. Acts of Parliament established probate valuations bands – numbers rounded in the hundreds – to determine stamp duty. Regarding these valuation bands as wealth proxies and differences between probate records and death duty registers, see David R. Green and Alastair Owens, ‘Metropolitan Estates of the Middle Class, 1800–50: Probates and Death Duties Revisited’, Historical Research, 70, No. 173 (1997), 294–300.
89.
The Probate Act Books are held on microfilm, FHL, reels 2106805 and 2106806 (supra wills), 2107007 (infra wills). Probate Act Books begin listing valuations in 1779. Probate Act Book infra wills are missing for 1800–1826, and we have yet to integrate into our database our copies of the original 1619 infra wills, 1799–1808. Thus, valuations we discuss overestimate the wealth of certain occupations, such as mariners (two in five infra wills, 1799–1808, concern mariners’ personal effects), but we believe that the wealth rankings will hold.
90.
Most ‘missing’ data are occupations for women (recorded usually as widows or spinsters). There are probated wealth valuations for 29,852 of the 30,663 individuals in our sample.
91.
Most Lancashire wills, we suspect, were proved in the Consistory Court of Chester. Owens, who examined 500 Stockport wills, 1800–1857, found that 95 per cent of the wills proved from this Lancashire town, south of Manchester, were probated at Chester (Alastair John Owens, ‘Small Fortunes: Property, Inheritance and the Middling Sort in Stockport, 1800–57’ (Unpublished PhD thesis, Queen Mary, University of London, 2000), 56, 58).
92.
For surgeons’ mortality, Behrendt, ‘Crew Mortality’, 60–1.
93.
The slaving captains: Thomas Cannell, David Christian, William Cockerell, Alexander Grierson, Richard Hart, Thomas Jolly, Thomas Oliver, William Quarrier, John Spencer. The non-slaving captains: Hugh Hutchinson, John Quirk, Robert Williams.
94.
Thomas Leyland died in 1827 with an estate valued at least £600,000 – by far the wealthiest British slave trader and one of the wealthiest Britons. He passed his fortune to nephew and partner Richard Bullin who, before he died in 1844, supposedly handed his successor a cheque for £1,000,000 (John Hughes, Liverpool Banks and Bankers, 1760–1837 (Liverpool, 1906), 56–9, 177; H. R. Fox Bourne, English Merchants: Memoirs in Illustration of the Progress of British Commerce, 2 vols (London, 1866), II: 294–5).
95.
Robert H. Mair, ed., Debrett’s Peerage, Baronetage, Knightage, and Companionage (London, 1884), 185; Daniel Lysons and Samuel Lysons, Magna Britannia, 2 vols. (London, 1810), II: 553.
96.
Joseph E. Inikori, ‘Slavery and the Revolution in Cotton Textile Production in England’, in Joseph E. Inikori and Stanley L. Engerman, eds, The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on Economies, Societies and Peoples, in Africa, the Americas, and Europe (Durham, NC, 1992), 171–2.
97.
David Pope, ‘The Wealth and Social Aspirations of Liverpool’s Slave Merchants in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century’, in Richardson, Schwarz and Tibbles, eds, Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery, 168–70, 208–15. Pope reports probate valuations for 124 of Liverpool’s ‘leading slave merchants’, active in the trade from 1750 to 1799. Pope’s sample of 94 appears to include wills and administrations for 77 merchants with one probated figure as well as 17 merchants with ranges of probated figures (such as ‘above £600 and below £1000’). He excludes 18 merchants with probates from the 1780s, at which time valuation bands for stamp duty were no higher than £5000, seven with probated values exactly equaling an upper valuation band for stamp duty, and five merchants with Limited Administrations. Median wealth of £5000 is much less than average wealth (£18,500) because of the super-rich: the estates of Thomas Leyland, John Bolton, Benjamin Arthur Heywood, William Pole, Daniel Backhouse, and Thomas Earle had valuations of £600,000, £180,000, £90,000, £80,000, £70,000 and £70,000, respectively. Note that Pope’s valuation for Benjamin Hammond (£2000) should read £20,000.
98.
Liverpool newspapers, for example, occasionally state house dimensions in advertisements.