Aisley Harriott

[pentre]

Enjoyed this, but got a bit confused. Does anyone know where the 'Smith' surname came in - I kept waiting for someone to explain, but decided I'd missed a vital bit of information. No repeat tomorrow, from what I can see, so no chance to see it again, and sort it out!

[Editor]

As far as I understand it surnames are very problematical when it comes to the enslaved population (see our guide to tracing slave ancestors in our 'About the series' section under Ainsley Harriott). According to that slaves often just chose a surname on emancipation and, if I remember rightly, she was born into slavery but would have become emancipated so perhaps she just chose Smith? I'll try to look into it...

Sarah

[Baggybooks]

I remember an actor on Casualty (now Kwame Kwei Armah) discovered his name had come from a Slave Owner. Once he knew that, he changed it to something more appropriate to his family's true origins.

[waldie84]

I imagine it's quite a common thing to do - didn't Mohammed Ali do exactly that when he changed from Cassius Clay? What an interesting point of view for the programme though; knowing he is descended from slaves on one side and slave owners on the other - it makes it more difficult to change one's "slave-name" if your actually a descendant of the person, though this would depend on how strongly you felt about that side of the family, I suppose.

[pre1837]

I thought Cassius Clay changed his name as respect when he changed his religion.

[eurogordi]

Slaves would often adopt the names of their owners, or choose an Anglicised name they liked at the point of Christian baptism. A few, including one female slave named Juba who appears in my own family tree, retained their African names. However, many slaves were only recorded by their first name, adding further complications when trying to identify lines of descent.

We also need to be clear about various dates in slavery history and I felt that this wasn't made too clear in Ainsley's episode. 1807 saw the abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, but slavery continued for another 31 years in Jamaica. The bill for the Abolition of Slavery came into force during 1834, but existing slaves simply became apprentices employed, rather than owned, by the same masters. When this scheme didn't work, slaves were eventually given unrestricted freedom in 1838 (the dates vary slightly on other islands).

On a related forum, someone has asked how anyone can come to terms with being descended from a slave owner. Perhaps I can answer that. My ancestry is European, but my 7x great grandfather lived in Jamaica and owned at least four slaves - three of which produced children by him. He also fathered further children to at least two other slaves who had been granted freedom.

When I discovered this my feelings were those of surprise and then shock, as I had no idea that my family had been connected to slavery in anyway. I then discovered that my 6x great grandmother had continued to own slaves as had her daughter, while her son (my 5x great grandfather) returned to England and appears to have severed connection with Jamaica.

So how did I deal with this? I had to learn to realise that what is not acceptable in 2008 was perfectly legal more than 200 years ago. I don't have to condone what my ancestors did or be proud of their actions, but by placing them within a historical context I was able to overcome my emotions.

And there were two slight consolations. In his will by 7x great grandfather provided for the children he had produced with slaves, allowing his mixed race descendants to purchase their freedom soon after. And, as a friend told me at the time, I could have been descended from a slaver trader which would have been much worse.

[ksouthall]

Perhaps I am being naive here, but isn't there some sort of saying that everything is "a sum of all its parts" ? If this is a genuine saying, then all our ancestors are a part of us, whether we like what they did or not.
We cannot change what our ancestors did so, however hard it may seem, we just have to accept it and live with it. We cannot change the past, we can only learn from it and hope that we do not make the same mistakes our predecessors did.

So if people have ancestors who were slaves and other ancestors who were slave owners, or worse, slave traders, they have to accept that those people shaped their lives. Ainsley Harriott would not be here if it weren't for [b]all[/b] of his ancestors. We can't pick and choose the ones we want and disregard the others.

[colliehouse]

How true, and of course, it may be that in 200 years our own descendants feel shame about what we did, even though now we can't imagine what we might be doing that will be wrong in the future.