My Jamaican Family

In Memoriam, Victor Dey Smedmore

2012-01-29T13:38:00.000-05:00

I had intended to return to my post about my grandfather, William Dey Smedmore, but today, January 29^th, 2012, is the 94^th anniversary of the death of his eldest son, my uncle Victor Dey Smedmore, who was killed in action January 29^th, 1918, in France during the Great War.

My grandfather, William, died before the War started, on July 2^nd, 1914. Would he have been in favour of his eldest son going to England to join a regiment? It’s hard to say. Victor sailed to England with other Jamaicans intent on joining up, as I wrote in a previous post, “Lest We Forget”. Victor joined the Life Guards – the picture of him above shows him in his regimental uniform -- and was sent to France with the British Expeditionary Force as part of the Household Battalion. He was killed in action near Arras on January 29, 1918. The family learned about his death from the War Office by this note which I found in my mother’s papers.

Although the note says that Victor was buried “at a point just North West of Monchy Le Preux, South east of Arras”, he has no known grave. I wrote to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and received this response from them:

"Trooper Victor Dey Smedmore, 1140, serving with the Household Battalion, died on 29 January 1918... He has no known grave and therefore he is commemorated by name, along with others from his regiment on Bay 1 on the Arras Memorial, France. The Arras Memorial stands in Faubourg-d'Amiens Cemetery, Arras, 2 kilometres north-west of Arras Railway Station and bears the names of over 35,000 men lost without trace during the battles of Arras."

Thanks to the kindness of Rory McGregor I do have photos of Victor’s name on the Arras Memorial as well as pictures of the area around. Here is a shot of the memorial showing Victor’s name,

and another of one of the hallways:

While doing research for a friend in the Jamaica Gleaner, I came across a story of the commemoration of the War Memorial at Wolmer’s School, which Victor had attended and found that his name is also commemorated there.

The notice is from the Gleaner of November 13^th, 1923. The monument, erected by the Wolmer’s Old Boys Association, was designed by an old Wolmerian, Vernon Streadwick, and commemorates those men who attended Wolmer’s who had died in the Great War.

Perhaps it’s as well that my grandfather never knew about the War or the death of his eldest son. In my next post I’ll return to William Dey Smedmore and what I was able to learn about him from stories in the Gleaner.

The Smedmores of Port Royal

2011-12-09T16:19:00.000-05:00

William Dey Smedmore and his family lived in Port Royal until about 1896, probably on a street very much like this one pictured above. In fact, they lived at two different addresses according to the records I have found. But I’m getting ahead of myself here. Let’s begin with his marriage, as I know very little about him prior to that event.

William married Amanda Brown at the Kingston Parish Church on 6^th December 1882. He was a bachelor, aged forty-four, and gave his occupation as writer, H. M. Dockyard. Amanda was a spinster, aged twenty-one, no occupation. Both gave their abode as Port Royal. William gave his father’s name as William Dey Smedmore (dead), and Amanda’s was given as Daniel D. Brown. They were married by the Rev. G. W. Downer, and the witnesses were B. Mortimer Dias and C. L. Cunha.

Well, there are a couple of problems with this record. No record has so far been found for William’s father, so we cannot be sure that this was indeed his name. Secondly, Amanda’s father’s name was Daniel Elias Brown, so the middle initial “D” is incorrect. Another oddity is my grandmother’s age. I don’t know if my mother ever saw this marriage record, because, curiously enough, she always claimed that her mother’s birth date was 10 July 1864, and that she was actually only eighteen when she married William. However I have found the record of Amanda’s baptism in the Wesleyan Methodist church, in Jamaican Family Search, and she was definitely born on 9 August 1861, which would agree with her age at marriage. It seems odd to me that my grandmother’s children had a completely different date for her birth, not just a different year but a different month and day!

William’s occupation of “writer in H. M. Dockyard” was also puzzling. I discovered that a writer was a clerk, a civilian employee in the Royal Navy, at the Dockyard in Port Royal. William’s close friend, George Christopher Baylis, who was a connection through marriage to his wife’s half-sister, was also a writer at the naval yard.

The first three children were born at

Sime Street

in Port Royal. According to the birth records the two eldest, Sylvia and Victor, were born at no. 2 Sime Street, in 1884 and 1886 respectively, and the third child, Norman, was born in 1887 at no. 1 Sime Street. Shortly thereafter they moved to Fishers Row. I came across a brief note in The Gleaner of 1^st May 1888 which mentioned this move.

So it appears that the Smedmore home was to be taken over to be used as barracks for the Army. Might this have had something to do with a story my mother told me about her older brother, Victor? As a young child he had reported seeing a soldier in military dress walking up and down the balcony or piazza of the house they were living in. The tale was that the house had been a barracks and that Victor had seen a ghost. Victor would have been about two years old at that time. It’s possible he saw a real soldier if military personnel came to the house to inspect it prior to taking it over. At any rate the family moved from there to Fishers Row where the next four children were born – Elma in 1889, Owen in 1891, Maud in 1894 and Rodney in 1896. Then, some time after this they removed to Kingston where the last two children were born – Lucius in 1899 and Julian in 1902. By 1896 William Dey Smedmore was sixty years old and had retired from his position at the Dock Yard. The family settled down in a large house at

49 Beeston Street

and I have written about that house in a previous post.

In my next post I’ll relate the stories I heard about my grandfather from my mother, as well as a few other items I found in The Gleaner about him … gold to the enquiring genealogist!

My Other Grandfather -- William Dey Smedmore

2011-10-16T15:09:00.000-04:00

Having just about given up on finding out more about my elusive grandfather, Leopold Levy, I’ve decided to move to my maternal grandfather, William Dey Smedmore … not that’s he’s any easier to research. I have no idea who his father was, and only hearsay evidence as to the identity of his mother. I’ll explain why in a moment, but suffice it to say, I do at least know a great deal more about him than my other grandfather, thanks to the stories I’ve collected from my mother and her siblings over the years. I’ve also been able to find a few records pertaining to him as well as items about him in the Jamaica Gleaner.

My mother’s family lived in Port Royal. My maternal grandmother, Amanda Brown’s family had deep roots there and it’s where my grandfather, William Dey Smedmore, was born.

This is a view of Port Royal about 1890, showing the church and town, looking west towards the entrance to Kingston Harbour. The town’s heyday was in the seventeenth century when it served as headquarters for the buccaneers who pillaged the Spanish Main, but all that came to an end with the disastrous earthquake of 1692 when more than half of the town was swallowed up by the sea. What remained was a small fishing village with a naval station and dockyard, but even that would pass away. By 1881 the population was 1205, exclusive of shipping. According to Michael Pawson and David Buisseret in their book, Port Royal, Jamaica (1975):

"By [1900] Port Royal's days as a naval base were numbered. The later nineteenth century had seen the rise of the so-called 'blue water school' of British imperial strategists, advocating very powerful fleets operating out of the United Kingdom, supported by a small number of strongly-fortified bases. The Port Royal yard was too small to rank as one of these, and so in 1905, following the reorganization directed by Admiral Sir John Fisher, her last commodore, F.W. Fisher, hauled down his flag."

My grandfather, William Smedmore, was employed at the Dockyard as an Admiralty writer, but seems to have retired some time between 1896 and 1899 when the family removed to Kingston.

The image below is of the baptismal record for my grandfather, William Dey Smedmore. As you can see, no parents are named in this record, a clear sign that he was illegitimate. For reasons that are highly frustrating to Jamaican researchers, there is a period of time in the baptismal records where many Anglican priests would not record the names of either parent if the child was born out of wedlock. Some would (very few), and some would at least record the mother’s name. Curiously, the very early registers prior to 1825 recorded all this information, including the fact that the parents were not married, but not so by the 1830s.

William Dey Smedmore … and no one can figure out where the name “Dey” came from … was born 29^th October 1836, and baptized on 1^st January, 1837. On June 20^th of that same year Victoria ascended to the British throne. My grandfather, from all that I’ve learned about him, was a Victorian paterfamilias through and through. He appears to have ruled his family in strict Victorian style and was much loved and feared by his nine children, who called him Papa. His word was law, and no one defied it. All of the children lived at home after they moved to Kingston from Port Royal. None of those who married did so before his death, and even the eldest son, Victor, who went to England to enlist in the Army in the First World War, waited till 1915 after his father had been dead for over a year.

I know very little of my grandfather’s life between his baptism and his marriage to Amanda Brown in 1882. It was my mother who told me, when I was about fifteen, that my grandfather was illegitimate. I was warned on pain of death not to let on to my two aunts, Sylvia and Elma, that I knew this. According to my mother, William Dey Smedmore was the son of an English sailor and a woman of Port Royal by the name of Ann Wood. When I began my family history research I searched the Port Royal baptismal records and did find a baptism for an Ann Wood, born in Port Royal 2 February, 1811 and baptized 12 October 1813.

Assuming this is my Ann Wood she was the illegitimate daughter of a Port Royal slave owner and vestryman named John Owen Wood. Her mother was one Mary Holms. I cannot, however, prove that she was the mother of William Smedmore. If she were, then she would have been 25 years old when he was born. I have not so far been able to find out anything more about her … whether she married, or when she died. My mother told me that her father had been brought up by two aunts, but I have no evidence for this and do not even know who they could have been. Indeed, his birth is a mystery!

I found one more mystery surrounding my grandfather. Purely by chance I came across a birth record in Port Royal for one Dorothy Priscilla Theodosia Smedmore, the daughter of an Elizabeth Handfield, born 6 July 1879. No father is named in the record. Could this have been an illegitimate child of William Dey Smedmore? I know of no other Smedmores apart from my mother’s family. This child was born before the marriage of my grandfather. One thing is certain … no member of the family ever mentioned this child and I’m inclined to think that they knew nothing about this, assuming again, that this was my grandfather’s child.

In my next post I’ll continue the story of William Dey Smedmore.

My Grandfather Leopold -- Still a Mystery!

2011-08-05T17:41:00.000-04:00

Okay, I know what you must all be thinking! Why have I waited so long to get another blog post up? To be honest, I’ve been bitterly disappointed by my inability to find out more about my elusive grandfather, Leopold Levy. As I reported in my last post, I thought I had found his birth and the marriage of his parents. The Leopold Levy I found … indeed the only one who showed up in the birth indexes for Strasbourg for the right time period … was born 6 December 1846 to Benjamin Levy and his wife, Marie Ann Bloch, at 115 Grand’ rue, Bas Rhin, Strasbourg. This fitted with what I knew about him so far, but in order to confirm that what I had found was correct, I really needed another piece of the puzzle – his marriage record which would most likely give the name of his father.

According to the notice in the Gleaner of Friday, July 23, 1886, Leopold and my grandmother, Alice Rodrigues Da Costa, had been married in Colon by the Registrar on 16 July of that year. All attempts so far – with help from others – to find a record of this marriage have been in vain. It is not clear whether the record is in Colon, Panama, or in Colombia, since Panama in 1886 would have been a province of Colombia. I have two documents which show that Leopold was in Colon. One is the birth record for his eldest child, Daisy, who was born in Kingston two months after the marriage, so presumably Alice returned to Jamaica as soon as she could after the marriage, but, one assumes, without Leopold.

Leopold’s occupation is given as merchant and his place of residence as Colon. One other document I have – thanks to another researcher, Jacky Paul Bentzinger of Bogotá, Colombia – refers to Leopold as a shopkeeper in Colon. It is on a page in French from a business ledger where his name is listed along with other French business people who had apparently suffered losses because of a fire. Other occupations listed on the page are of the manager of a section of the French Canal Company, and of an agent of the same. Leopold’s loss in francs appears to be 2363.00

There is no date on this ledger and that is all I have about him in Colon!

The reason he is still a mystery is that since my research into his supposed birth in Strasbourg I have found evidence on line which shows that the Leopold Levy I found cannot possibly be my grandfather! While trolling on Ancestry I came across two records for a Leopold Levy, born 6 December 1846. Here is the first one:

This is a record of a Leopold Levy, born 6 December 1846 in Strasbourg, who opted to become a French citizen on 28 May 1872. A little background here -- Germany having won the Franco-Prussian War, annexed the French departments of Bas-Rhin, Haut-Rhin, Moselle, a third of Meurthe, and some of Vosges. The Treaty of Frankfort contained a provision for French citizens of the region to retain their nationality and to be allowed to move to France. Many of the Jews of Alsace did this, becoming, in effect, refugees from their homeland as they had to leave Alsace. Now, this particular record might indeed refer to my Leopold, since I have no idea when he would have immigrated from Alsace or France to the West Indies. However, the second document completely destroyed my research! Here it is:

This is a record from the Electoral Rolls of Paris in 1891. It shows the same Leopold Levy, the optant, born 6 December 1846, now living in Paris, at 2 Championner, and his occupation is given as “cocher”, i.e. coach driver. This cannot be my grandfather, who, when his fourth child, Essie Gertrude Levy, was born 30 March 1891, was at that time an accountant in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

All that research – for naught! The Leopold Levy born in 1846 in Strasbourg could not possibly be my grandfather. And that is why I need to have his marriage record, assuming that one exists, in the faint hope that it would give his parents’ names and once and for all confirm who he was, and where and when he was born.

I gave my previous post the caption – “A Cautionary Tale”. One cannot jump to conclusions based on one or two pieces of evidence. Genealogical research requires more than that to confirm one’s conclusions. I am missing the most crucial piece of information which might indeed settle once and for all the identity of my elusive grandfather!

Finding Leopold -- But Did I? A Cautionary Tale

2011-06-05T13:07:00.000-04:00

It’s been several months since my last post, about my elusive grandfather, Leopold Levy. I apologize for the delay which in many ways mirrors the difficulty and frustration I have experienced in trying to discover more about him. At one point I thought I had indeed found out who he was and where he came from, and then other information surfaced and now I’m once again unsure … This is why I call this a cautionary tale because so often we think we’ve found the records we need to round out our genealogical research and then something else comes along which throws a spanner in the works.

In my previous post I said that I had found an item in the Gleaner which set me on the trail. This was his death notice in the Gleaner of March 5, 1917. Up to this point I didn’t even know when he had died. All I had been told was that he died in Havana, Cuba. Well, even this was incorrect!

Leopold had died in Cuba all right, but in Santiago-de-Cuba, on the south coast of the island, west of Guantanamo, and nowhere near Havana, which is on the north coast. Santiago-de-Cuba would have been much closer to Jamaica for purposes of travel. The notice, which I assume was placed by his widow, Alice, indicated that he had been born in Strasbourg, Alsace, and that he was 69 years old. Based on this information, then, my next task was to search for the birth of a Leopold Levy in the birth indexes for Strasbourg. These records, fortunately, had been microfilmed by the LDS. I assumed a birth date for Leopold of approximately 1848 and that is where I began.

I was to discover later that the name Leopold Levy is fairly common, but my search in the microfilm turned up just one that seemed the most likely … even though the birth date given was 5 December 1846. This Leopold Levy was the son of one Benjamin Levy and his wife, Marie Anne Bloch.

The record, of course, was in French, as follows:

ACTE DE NAISSANCE

La six Décembre, mil huit cent quarante-six, a dix heures ........ faisant fonctions de l’Etat civil de la ville de Strasbourg .... département du Bas-Rhin, est comparu BENJAMIN LEVY, age de quarante six ans, et profession de Commissionaire domicilie a Strasbourg, ... nous a présenté un enfant du sexe masculin, ne a Strasbourg, ne le cinq Décembre mil huit cent quarante six a onze heures du soir a Grand ‘ rue, No. 115.... fils de lui déclarant et de MARIE ANNE BLOCH, son Epouse. ... et a donné le prénom de Léopold.

According to the above Leopold’s father was one Benjamin Levy, age 46, a commissionaire living in Strasbourg at no. 115 Grand’ rue. Witnesses to the birth registration were Jacques Maas, commissionaire, and Jacques Hoffmann, garcon brasseur, both of Strasbourg. [A commissionaire is an agent of some sort and a garcon brasseur would have worked in a brewery].

I then went looking for a marriage record for Benjamin Levy and Marie Anne Bloch. I was hoping that there might be a further clue in the names of their parents which might tie them to Alice’s and Leopold’s children. So far, I had found no such naming patterns. I did find a marriage record for them as follows:

ACTE DE MARIAGE

Le Onzième jour du mois d’Octobre de l’an 1842, à 10 heures du matin Acte de mariage de Benjamin LEVY, majeur d’ans, né en légitime mariage le 20 floréal an 8, à Strasbourg, domicilié à Strasbourg Profession commissionnaire, veuf de Barbe STÜFFEL, décédée en cette ville le 2 février 1840, Fils de feu Juda LEVY, colporteur, décédé en cette ville le 19 septembre 1826, et de feu Agathe MAYER, décédée en cette ville le 23 mai 1822, Et de Marie Anne BLOCH, majeure d’ans, née en légitime mariage, le 15 décembre 18 06, à Matzenheim (Bas-Rhin), domiciliée à Mülhausen (Haut-Rhin), fille de feu Simon BLOCH, chaudronnier, décédé à Matzenheim le 5 mars 1820, et de feue Rosine DREYFUSS, décédée à Matzenheim le 19 mai 1810.

One thing I’ll say for French records … they are indeed comprehensive! The above record told me that Benjamin Levy had been previously married to Barbe Stuffel, who had died 2 February 1840, that he was the son of Juda Levy, a peddler, who had died 19 September 1826, and his wife, Agathe Mayer, who had died 23 May 1822. Benjamin married Anne Marie Bloch 11 October 1842, and she was the legitimate child of Simon Bloch, a tinker, and his wife, Rosine Dreyfuss.

Assuming all this was indeed correct it really didn’t give me any clue as to how Leopold got to the Caribbean. His origins appeared to be humble, yet I had been told that my grandfather could speak about seven or eight languages. He would have spoken French and probably German or Yiddish, and he obviously spoke English and must have been able to converse in Spanish as he spent time in Colon, Panama and Cuba. As I mentioned in my previous post, the family claimed he was an oculist, though I never found that term applied to him. He was, according to the records I found, a book-keeper, a merchant, a clerk … but still an educated man. This didn’t seem to fit with the humble background I had found. What I really needed, of course, was to see his marriage record, which hopefully would give his father’s name. As for how he got to the West Indies … again I was unable to find any record through Ancestry for a passport issued to him. So, the question remained … did I have the right Leopold Levy? As I said at the beginning … this is a cautionary tale and in my next post you will see why.

Looking for Leopold: My Search for my Elusive Grandfather

2011-01-16T15:40:00.000-05:00

Back in November and December 2007 I wrote about my research into my Levy family, specifically my attempts to find out more about my elusive grandfather, Leopold Levy. In those posts I wrote of what little I knew of him -- the story that he came from Alsace, was proficient in seven languages and had supposedly married my grandmother, Alice Rodrigues Da Costa, in Haiti. I also described how I found out that the marriage had actually taken place in Colon, Panama, that they lived in Kingston where their seven children were born, how three of those children died in childhood and that the family had moved around, living at various addresses in Kingston. Later on, in 2009, I wrote about my grandmother, Alice Rodrigues Da Costa, but somehow I never returned to Leopold. It’s time for me to go back to my paternal grandfather and what little more I’ve been able to find out about him.

A few years ago I made contact with a cousin in the United States. My cousin, Cheryl, is the granddaughter of my Aunt Essie, my father’s sister. Although my mother did keep in touch with Essie and her daughter-in-law, Gloria, Cheryl’s mother, the family was never close, though I do recall that Essie would send us a box of Whitman’s Sampler chocolates at Christmas. Cheryl and I corresponded several times by good old snail mail, and she sent me a number of photographs which she had found in her grandmother’s possession. Most were not identified, but I am pretty sure that a couple of them were of my grandfather, Leopold, and of his wife, Alice. Here is the photo which I believe to be of Leopold:

Of course, I have no proof that it is him, but I like to think that it is. Also in the photos I received was this one, which I am quite sure is of Alice and two of her children, my father, Michael and his sister, Essie.

I see the resemblance to my father in the eyes of the little boy, but I’m even more sure of the little girl, especially when I compare her face to the one in this photo of my Aunt Essie:

It’s always been one of my regrets that I never knew either of my grandfathers, both being so much older and dying long before I came on the scene. Ironically, I have no photograph of my grandfather, William Dey Smedmore, but I certainly knew quite a bit about him, thanks to my mother and her siblings. My grandfather, Leopold, was a mystery. He was from Alsace, or as the family called it, Alsace-Lorraine, that unfortunate part of Europe between France and Germany which seemed to bounce back and forth between the two countries. I knew nothing of how he came to be in the West Indies, or how he met my grandmother. I knew that they had married in Colon in 1886, barely two months before the birth of their eldest child. I knew this because of a notice in the Gleaner which had been pointed out to me by Madeleine Mitchell who had come across it while extracting information from the microfilm of the Gleaner. Once the Gleaner went on line I was able to find the notice myself.

So now I knew exactly where they were married, but more questions arose. Where did they meet? Was it in Jamaica? Did Alice go to Colon to get Leopold to marry her? I wondered if Alice’s pregnancy had become a scandal in Kingston and that marriage was the only option. The notice in the Gleaner might well have helped to stop some of the gossip. Again, who knows? Leopold was Jewish, Alice was Catholic, and marriage in a church must have been out of the question, hence they were married by the registrar. Unfortunately I have been unable to find a record of the marriage. At that time Panama would have been a colony of Colombia and I assume records of civil registration for Panama in the 19^th century must be somewhere in Colombia, but I have not been able to discover how to access them.

From what little information I could glean about my grandfather it appeared that he was a traveller of sorts. According to the family story, he was an optometrist, and I found the same information in my father’s entry in the Jamaica Who’s Who of 1941-46, keeping in mind, of course, that he would have given that information

However, I never found any evidence to support this. On the various records of birth and death for his children, I found Leopold’s occupation variously described as “merchant”, “book clerk”, “accountant”, “book-keeper”, and “clerk” – no mention whatsoever of “optometrist”. He married Alice in Colon in 1886, was still there when Daisy, the eldest child, was born. He was in Kingston for the birth of his second child, Lucien, but was listed as being in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, when Essie was born in 1891. He was back in Kingston for the birth of Gustave in 1894, and I have no idea where he was for the births of Leo and Joe in 1895 and 1900 respectively, as he was not the informant for either event. As I mentioned before in an earlier post, the family seems to have moved from one address to another in Kingston; in fact, they lived in seven different places in the span of fourteen years between 1886 and 1900.

Apart from the above the only other tangible record I had for Leopold was his signature on two documents – the birth of his son, Lucien in 1887:

and as a witness at the marriage in 1907 of his wife’s niece, Naomi Da Costa, to Gabriel Oppenheim Alexander.

So at least I knew that he was in Jamaica in 1907, but that was all. When did he die and where, and was it possible to find out when and where he had been born? In my next post I’ll write about the discoveries I did make as a result of finding a notice of Leopold’s death in the Gleaner.

The Ford Boys Make Good!

2010-12-31T16:03:00.000-05:00

I have not been able to find any evidence that James and Henry Ford had relatives in Jamaica who might have suggested that they emigrate. Most likely they were encouraged to do so through the efforts of the Jamaican government’s immigration policies. One question I had was what became of the Ford family in England. I could not find Thomas Ford in any census after 1851, so I assume he must have died. The name is a common one, but I believe he may be the Thomas Ford who was buried 24 December 1853 in Highgate Cemetery. His wife, Jessy Maria, had died in July 1846. Two of their children, Martha Cleland and Albert Charles, died in March 1843. I have been unable to find out what happened to the other two sons, Thomas Frederick and William, though there is a Thomas Ford, age 22 in the 1851 English census, whose age matches that of Thomas Frederick, who was born in 1829. This Thomas Ford is listed as a visitor at the house of one William Edwards, a journeyman carpenter in Camberwell. Thomas’s occupation is given as journeyman coach builder, so he may well have left home to find work elsewhere.

By chance, I found that the youngest daughter, Jessy Maria, came to Kingston, perhaps because her father and mother were dead, and Thomas was no longer living at home. It’s possible that James and Henry encouraged her to come to Jamaica to be with them. At any rate she died there, according to the Monumental Inscriptions of the British West Indies, by James Henry Lawrence-Archer, as excerpted on the Jamaican Family Search website on 23 March 1862 and was buried in the New West Ground “regretted by brothers”.

Family history research is more than just records of birth, marriage and death. We want to know more than just the bare facts about our ancestors –what they were like and how they lived. Without access to such materials as letters or diaries we have to depend on other sources, and one such is the local newspaper. Jamaican researchers are fortunate to have access to the online Jamaica Gleaner, a subscription website. Thanks to the Gleaner online I found several references to both James and Henry Ford and how they had prospered in Jamaica. Henry’s lengthy obituary gave me the date of their emigration to Jamaica, and other items and advertisement helped to portray a picture of both men. From Henry’s obituary, which ran to one and half columns, I learned that he had entered the office of Mr. J. Mais. where he was placed in the counting house under Mr. Newman. He then moved on to the Receiver General's office where he was appointed acting Receiver of Stamp Duties under Mr. Barclay. After some years in the public service he left to go into business with the said Barclay in St. Thomas-in-the-East. Barclay died in 1860 and Henry continued on in the business. He also bought out the business of Mr. Rouse of Rouse and Gall, becoming a partner in the business which had been carried on by the late James Gall. Henry had also served as a member of the Mayor and Council of Kingston. During the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865 his business was severely affected and he went there to serve as a captain of company of volunteers. He built up a business in the parish of St. Thomas but experienced some difficulty because he refused to sell liquor, being a teetotaler. He made an unsuccessful migration to Australia, returning to Jamaica, and by 1878 had assumed the position of Secretary to Jamaica Co-Operative Fire Insurance Company.

James’s obituary, unfortunately, was not as extensive. He died as a result of malarial fever in 1881, at age 56. The following brief notice appeared in the Gleaner of 16 June, 1881:

With deep regret we announce the death of Mr. James D. Ford, at his residence in

Duke Street

, at 3 o'clock this morning. Mr. Ford had been ill only a few days from malarial fever, but his strength gave way speedily. He was 53 [sic] years of age and at the time of death head of the Good Templars of Jamaica. We have been requested to state that in consequence of his death the Congregational Lodge, I.O.G.T., will not meet this evening. The funeral takes place at 5 p.m. today.

Nothing about his business endeavours or even his family! No doubt the obituary was written by a Masonic brother! Fortunately I found other items about James in the Gleaner. I knew from his marriage record that he was a bank clerk when he married Cordelia Henriques. He must have been incredibly industrious as he rose from that position to that of auditor for both the Jamaica Co-Operative Fire Insurance Company and the Jamaica Marine Insurance Company.

The advertisements appeared in the Gleaner in 1879. But other notices about James’s business endeavours were even more interesting. Along with his auditor’s work James ran a school at his home in Duke Street, the Kingston University School. It opened on 2 October 1871 and was described in the first advertisements as offering “a sound, practical and liberal education, based upon high moral and intellectual principles.”

The following is an example of one of the advertisements from the Gleaner of 12 November, 1872.

I was particularly intrigued by the mention of Hebrew as an extra subject. Did Cordelia help teach that course, or did James hire a Jewish acquaintance to teach the language? Another interesting point is that the school took boarders, which means James’s house at

118 Duke Street

must have been quite large.

Duke Street

would have been quite an attractive neighbourhood to live in, and a sign that James had indeed done quite well for himself.

The purpose of the school seems to have been to prepare young men for the professions, judging by the following advertisement in the Gleaner of 10 June, 1878:

Less than three years later James was dead and one wonders what happened to the school. Cordelia outlived him by a mere seven months. Perhaps Henry took over the operation of the school. According to an advertisement in the Gleaner of January 27, 1902, he had been living at 118 Duke Street when he died and creditors of the estate were instructed to send their claims to his wife. However, I could find no further references to the school in the Gleaner after James’s death and it appears that 118 Duke Street must have been sold and eventually converted to apartments.

James and Henry are examples of immigrants to Jamaica who did very well both in business and in life. Both married and had families. James and his wife, Cordelia Henriques, had ten children. Henry married Ellen Hannah Savage and they had one daughter, Edith. One of James’s sons, Edmund George, settled in Panama and raised a family there. My research into this branch of the Cunha family has been a fascinating one.

Finding Out About the Fords

2010-11-15T14:36:00.000-05:00

In my last post I mentioned that I had found evidence in the Gleaner that James Dearmer Ford and his brother, Henry, came to Jamaica in 1840. This information was in Henry’s obituary in 1901 and is really the only evidence I have that the Ford brothers came from elsewhere. I assumed that they had most likely come from England and so my next step was to see what I could find out about them. The International Genealogical Index, known as the IGI, is an excellent Internet resource to get one started in finding out more about one’s ancestors. It is part of the FamilySearch website from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, of which more in a moment. Since James Dearmer Ford had a rather unusual middle name I started with him. I knew, from the notice in the Gleaner, that he had died in 1881 at the age of 56, so armed with that information I searched the IGI and found his baptism, in 1825, in London, and that his parents were Thomas Ford and Jessey [sic] Maria. Further searching, using Thomas Ford and Jessey (or Jessy) as parents, brought up not only James but his brother Henry and other members of the family.

The IGI is only an index, created by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), aka Mormons, as an aid to their members to perform their obligation to research five generations of their family, as part of their religious duties. The IGI includes records extracted from parish registers as well as records submitted by members of the church. It is therefore a good place to start, but one is advised to search for the original record if possible as there might be errors in transcription. Fortunately for me, a great many parish records for London are available on the subscription website, Ancestry, and that’s where I went to find out more about the family of Thomas Ford and his wife Jessy Maria.

Thomas Ford was born in 1802 in Bideford, Devon, the son of a John Ford.

A view of Bideford showing the bridge over the River TorridgeCourtesy of Old UK Photos

At some point Thomas moved to London where he met Jessy Maria Dearmer, who was born about 1804 in Hackney. They were married at St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch, on 1 May 1824.

St. Leonard's, Shoreditch

Their first three children, James, 1825, Henry, 1826, and Thomas Frederick, 1829, were baptized at St. Leonard’s. After that the family moved to St. Marylebone where William, 1836, and Martha Cleland, 1838, were born. By 1841 the family was settled in Southwark, where Albert Charles, 1841 and Jessy Maria, 1844, were born.

Thomas Ford seems to have tried his hand at various occupations. On the baptismal records for James and Henry he is listed respectively as a carpenter and a sawyer. By the time William comes along he is a clerk, and on Martha’s record, in 1838, he calls himself a timber merchant. By the time Albert is born Thomas is describing himself as a gentleman, but on Jessy’s baptismal record he has become a traveler, presumably a traveling salesman. It’s hard, therefore, to get a picture of how well-off the family was, but there must have been some reason for the two eldest boys, then aged fifteen and fourteen, to leave London and travel to a strange new country to seek their fortunes.

Why

Jamaica

? It’s entirely possible that Thomas Ford had a relative living there, but I have not been able to find any evidence to support that, though it is the most likely reason for the two boys to have chosen to go there. Another reason, however, is that the Jamaican government at that time was actively encouraging immigration to the island. Slavery had been abolished in 1834 but, in order to appease the planters, a system of apprenticeship for the freed slaves was put in place, so that in fact real emancipation did not come into being until August 1, 1838. It goes without saying that the freed slaves had no desire to continue working for their former slave owners and overseers, and in fact were happy to work their own little plots of land, being so encouraged by the Baptists who helped to set up various villages where former slaves could own and cultivate their own land. The Jamaican government, therefore, was forced to encourage immigration to the island to take the place of the former slave labour. Many schemes were put in place at this time, as per various Immigration Acts passed by the Assembly. The Government appointed an agent to recruit settlers to the island and immigration was encouraged from England, Europe and even the former American colonies. There is an excellent report on this on the Jamaican Family Search website at http://jamaicanfamilysearch.com/Samples/immig.htm.

As the only evidence I had for the Fords coming to Jamaica in 1840 was Henry’s obituary in the Gleaner I did search to see whether the date was correct by searching for them in England. The earliest nominal British census was taken in 1841. I found the household of Thomas Ford in the 1841 census, in Christ Church, Southwark. With them were Thomas Frederick and Martha Cleland. There was no sign of either James or Henry, nor could I find them anywhere in the English census records. Nor could I find any trace of William who would have been five years old. He may have died, but I could not find a record to support that. However, childhood mortality was high in those days, and sadly, Martha Cleland Ford and her as yet unborn brother, Albert Charles, were both dead by March 1843.

Whether or not James Dearmer Ford and his brother, Henry, were recruited to Jamaica, or else came at the behest of a relative there, is not known, but once there they apparently made a success of it, not on any plantation that I know of, but in the city of Kingston.

Kingston, Duperly, 1850

In my next post I shall describe how the two brothers made a successful life in

Jamaica

Leaving London: the Ford Boys Come to Jamaica

2010-09-12T19:33:00.000-04:00

It’s been a busy summer and I’ve neglected My Jamaican Family, but I’m back now, carrying on the story of the Cunha family and their connection to the Fords. I knew nothing about the Fords, and my curiosity about them was stirred by the marriage of Percival Cunha to Marianne Bravo Ford in 1879. Here is a copy of their marriage record.

They were married 27th August 1879 in St George’s Anglican Church by Enos Nuttall, who later became Bishop of Jamaica. Both were listed as of full age, though their ages were given on the record, and the witnesses to the marriage were all from the Ford family – Jas D. Ford, Florence Louise Ford and Henry B. Ford.

So, who were these Fords anyway? The first task was to find out who Marianne’s parents were. Since Percival and Marianne were married in the Anglican Church I assumed that she must have been baptized in that church, since the Cunhas were certainly Methodists. I found Marianne’s baptism in the Church of England copy registers and saw that she was born 5th February 1858, daughter of James Dearmer Ford and his wife, Cordelia and that she was christened Marianne Bravo. So now I knew that the Jas. D. Ford who was a witness at her marriage had to be her father, James Dearmer Ford. My next step, then, was to search for the marriage of James Dearmer Ford to this Cordelia. I could not, however, find any trace of the marriage in the Anglican registers, so moved to the Dissenter Marriage Registers, on the off chance that they were married in another Protestant denomination, and sure enough, they were. I found that James Dearmer Ford and Cordelia Henriques were married by license on December 15, 1852 in St. Andrew’s United Presbyterian Church in Kingston by one James Watson. Here is their marriage record:

James was twenty-seven years old, a bank clerk, and Cordelia was twenty-one, so both were of full age to be married. The witnesses at this marriage were Henry Ford (again!), an M. Mais, Catherine Dean, Mary Ann Melhado and F. G DaCosta. Here is a recent photo of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, now known as Scots Kirk.

The names Melhado and DaCosta are Jewish, as is Henriques, which made me wonder if Cordelia had married outside of her faith. I therefore searched the Jewish records to see if I could find her birth, which, based on her age at marriage, would have been about 1831.

However, I could find no trace of Cordelia’s birth in the Jewish records, the originals of which are in the National Archives in Spanish Town, but which have been transcribed by Mrs. Phyllis Delisser and can also be found on the Jamaican Family Search website. According to Donald Lndo’s CD, Genealogy of Jamaica, Cordelia was the daughter of one Benjamin Quixano Henriques, who had married Abigail Mesquita, though no date for her birth was given. The source for this was First American Jewish Families, a compilation by the late Malcolm H. Stern, originally published in 1960, the third edition of which was published in 1991. It is also online at http://www.americanjewisharchives.org/FAJF/intro.php. Stern gave a list of children for Benjamin and Abigail, which included Cordelia (no birth date) and the notation that she had married “Ford”. I was able to find four of these children in the Sephardic records and noted that the last one listed, Nathaniel, was born in Spanish Town in 1927. It’s possible that the other children born after Nathaniel were also born there and that their births were not sent to the synagogue in Kingston and so have not survived in the records. One curious omission in Stern’s list was that of Amos Henriques, born in 1811, who later became a well-known physician and is written up in the Jewish Encyclopedia. In researching Amos I discovered the notice of his death in 1880 in the Jamaica Gleaner of July 7th of that year, which clearly stated his relationship to Cordelia, thus confirming her paternity.

Died

At 67 Upper Berkeley Street, London, of 5th June 1880, of Paralysis of the Heart, Dr. Amos Henriques, aged 72, formerly of Kingston, and deeply regretted by an affectionate wife and children, his sister here, Mrs. Jas. D. Ford, two brothers in Australia, and numerous relatives and friends here and in London.

So now I knew that James Dearmer Ford had married a Jewish girl, but who was he and where had he come from? Unable to find any information about him in the records I started searching the Gleaner for any stories about James Ford and his brother Henry, and it was through Henry, or rather his lengthy obituary published in the Gleaner on November 18, 1901, that I learned the origins of the Ford brothers.

There it was – James and Henry had come to Jamaica on February 14, 1840! It seemed to me that they had most likely come from England and so I changed course and began researching in English records to see what I could find. In my next post I will describe my research into the Ford family.

Some Thoughts on Violence and its Consequences

2010-06-27T14:49:00.000-04:00

It has been a long while since I updated this blog … overtaken by various duties and obligations I’ve neglected my posts, but lately I’ve been paying attention to events in two countries, my birthplace and my present home. As I write this the City of Toronto is reeling from the destruction caused by a small group of anarchists, calling themselves the Black Bloc, who have managed to hijack the peaceful protests against the current G20 meetings taking place in the city. Can such anarchist and nihilist behaviour ever be justified? Not always. I don’t deny the right of peaceful protest to those who disagree with the leaders of the G20, who think that they do not care for the average person, and who deplore the amount of money that has been spent on this summit and the security to protect the leaders themselves. They have the right to express their opinions peacefully, but what we have seen this weekend is not peaceful protest but anarchy.

At the same time, not too long ago, in Jamaica we saw a state of emergency declared and a police and army raid on Tivoli Gardens in downtown Kingston, all in order to arrest one man, Christopher “Dudus” Coke, a notorious gang leader, in order to turn him over to United States authorities. There was violence there too – much more serious than what we are seeing in Toronto at present – as more than 75 people were killed in the raids. “Dudus” has now been captured and extradited to the U. S.

Many of the comments I have seen about the violence in Toronto in the various online news sources are to the effect that this is not how Canadians behave – that it gives Canada a bad name, and so on. But this country has seen violence against authority in the past. As George Santayana said: “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The rebellions of 1837 are a case in point. William Lyon Mackenzie and his supporters rebelled against the government of the day, the Family Compact, in Upper Canada. For this he was forced to flee the country, many of his supporters were arrested, a few hanged and others transported to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania). The consequences of the 1837 rebellions was the appointment by Great Britain of Lord Durham

who was sent to investigate the situation in the Canadas and proposed changes to the status quo which led to the establishment of responsible government. Not only that, but Mackenzie himself, the Firebrand, became Mayor of Toronto and part of the establishment.

There have been many cases of violence in Jamaican history, some of which has brought changes for the better. I think particularly of the 1831-32 slave revolts, also called the Baptist war, in the western parishes, which was led by Sam Sharpe

and which were to lead eventually to the abolition of that pernicious institution, slavery, in the British colonies in 1834. Reviled as Sharpe was in his day – and he was hanged for his pains – he was declared a National Hero of Jamaica in 1975 and there is a statue commemorating him in the square in Montego Bay.

Nor should we forget the 1865 Rebellion in Morant Bay, led by Paul Bogle, which protested the treatment of a poor black man who had been put on trial for the crime of trespass on a long-abandoned plantation. Here there was violence on both sides but more so on the part of the Government under the leadership of Governor Edward John Eyre who put the rebellion down with the utmost brutality. Bogle and many of the rebels were hanged, some without a trial, and so was a member of the House of Assembly, George William Gordon, who had opposed Eyre but who had not taken part in the rebellion. And the consequences? Well, Eyre was recalled to England, the Jamaican House of Assembly renounced its charter and Jamaica became a Crown Colony. Clinton Black, in his book, The Story of Jamaica (London: Collins, 1965), sees this as a turning point in the island’s history as it gave the governors of this period the opportunity to push through various reforms and improvements. Both Bogle and Gordon were declared National Heroes of Jamaica.

I realize all this is very far from what I’ve been writing about in this blog, My Jamaican Family. One thing I’ve realized is that Jamaica, as it exists now, is not the Jamaica I grew up in. At the same time I feel it is important to remember the past, because we, and Jamaica, are products of that past. I cannot say what the end result will be of the raid on Tivoli Gardens, any more than I can say what may come from the violence in Toronto this weekend. That is probably very far in the future. For now I plan in my next post to return to the 1831 slave revolt and its consequences – the abolition of slavery and what it meant to the family I have been following, the Cunhas and a connected family, the Fords.

The Cunha Family -- Louis's Children

2010-02-20T17:03:00.027-05:00

Stephen Hopwood pointed me towards the website of the National Library of Jamaica where I found a picture of the Commercial Rooms, at Harbour and King Streets, where Louis Cunha had worked early in his career. Here it is:

The artist was Joseph Bartholomew Kidd, who was born in Edinburgh in 1808 and died at Greenwich in 1889. Between 1831 and 1833 Kidd was engaged by John James Audubon to copy many of his watercolours of birds, Audubon at that time being very involved in finding subscribers for his Birds of America. One such work by Kidd is The Baltimore Oriole.

Kidd also spent time in Jamaica between 1833 and 1840 where he painted many island scenes. Other examples of his work can be found on the website of the National Library of Jamaica, which is currently under construction.

After Louis Cunha dissolved his partnership with Casper Davis in 1879 he continued his operation of the Commercial Exchange. At some point it seems that the Commercial Exchange, or “Commercial Rooms” as they were also known, became the Merchants’ Exchange. In 1885 the Merchants’ Exchange was amalgamated with the newly formed Jamaica Society of Agriculture and Commerce, but by it’s probable that by this time Louis had retired.

Louis and his wife, Elizabeth had six children: Emmeline Isilda, Reginald Granville, Herbert Augustus, Clarence Louis, Percival Charles and Olive Mosse – four sons with two daughters as bookends! All seven were baptized in the Wesleyan Methodist Church, but only Herbert and Clarence were married in that church. They would have been members of Coke Chapel in Kingston.

Courtesy of The New York Public Library. http://www.nypl.org/

Coke Chapel was destroyed by the earthquake in 1907 and the current Coke Methodist Church was built on the same site.

Gleaner, Pieces of the Past www.jamaica-gleaner.com/pages/history/images/

Emmeline married Frederick Augustus Autey, a merchant and proprietor of Autey & Company, with operations in both Kingston and Port Antonio. When they married in 1871 Emmeline was twenty-four and Autey was forty-two and a widower, his first wife, Esther Ramos, having died in 1869 at age thirty-three. Autey and Emmeline might have met through Emmeline’s younger brother, Clarence who is listed in the 1878 Directory for Kingston as an accountant with the firm of Autey & Co. at 119 Luke Lane. Autey himself died “of old age” in 1905 and I haven’t so far found any further reference to his widow, Emmeline.

Reginald Granville, the eldest son, married Isabel Martinez Trincoso in Colombia, according to a brief notice in the Gleaner, and I know nothing further about him. Nor have I been able so far to find out what happened to Olive Mosse Cunha, the youngest of Louis’s children. I have been more successful in tracing the lives and careers of Herbert, Clarence and Percival, all of whom I hope to write about in this blog. I found a curious item in the Gleaner of June 20, 1866 about one of Louis’s sons, though which I’m not sure. It might be the youngest, Percival. Here it is:

Louis Cunha died on December 1, 1893 at his home, 136 Church Street, Kingston. Cause of death was chronic cerebritis -- inflammation of the brain. The Gleaner published a brief obituary about him.

His wife, Elizabeth, had already passed away on June 14th, 1884, most likely of uterine cancer.

In my next post I’ll continue the story of the Cunha family.

The Cunha Family -- How Did They Fit in?

2010-01-06T09:18:00.029-05:00

Some years ago I did a fair bit of research for a Trinidadian friend on his Cunha connections in Jamaica. This was a Jewish family, the name being Mendes Cunha, and it was of interest to me because family story had it that my mother's family was connected to Cunhas through the Browns. According to my Uncle Rodney (many of whose family stories turned out to be incorrect!), a daughter of my great-grandfather, Daniel Elias Brown, had married a Cunha. This was one Sarah Letitia Webster Brown, of whom I knew very little save that she was the third child of Daniel and his wife, Sarah Letitia, born 26 December 1863 and baptized in the Methodist Church on 3 March 1864. All I've been able to find out about her since is that she was the informant when her father, Daniel Elias, died in 1891 and that at the time she was living at 49 Rose Lane, Kingston and was single. I have not so far found a marriage for her nor a record of her death. So, where did the Cunha connection come from?

I have a cousin living in Jamaica whom I've known all my life, but it was some time before I figured out how we were connected. And here again was another Cunha connection, in that her grandmother's maiden name was Cunha! I knew her as Aunt Maud. My research led me to Maud’s parents, Clarence Louis Cunha who had married Marie Louise Sewell in the Wesleyan Methodist Church. And then the penny dropped! For I then discovered that Marie Louise was the daughter of one Augustus Robert Sewell, a policeman, and his wife, Sarah Saunders Brown, and Sarah was none other than the sister of my great-grandfather, Daniel Elias Brown! Augustus and Sarah had married in the Roman Catholic Church, and it was not until I was able to get a copy of the record that I could make the connection. Here is what it said:

On the 6th of January 1845 Revd. G. L. Duquesnay joined in lawful wedlock according to the rites of the R. Catholic Church, Augustus Robert Sewelle [sic], a native of Carlisle, Cumberland, England, and Sarah Saunders Brown, a native of Kingston, in presence of:

[Signatures]: Augustus R. Sewell
Sarah Brown
Christian Glaatz
Sarah Elizabeth Glaatz (her mark)
G. L. Duquesnay

I haven’t so far tried to track down Augustus Robert Sewell in Cumberland, as I’ve been concentrating on Sarah and her descendants. And if all this sounds as if it just fell into place I can tell you that it took me quite some time to get to the above conclusion.

Once I had the connection to Clarence Louis Cunha I decided to find out more about his family to see if they were part of the Mendes Cunha family. If there is a connection I haven’t so far found it. Clarence was one of the children of Louis Charles Cunha and his wife, Isabel (also known as Elizabeth) Ximenes (which was spelled Himenes in their marriage record.) They were married in the Wesleyan Methodist denomination in 1846 and the record gives very little information save their names, and that they were “of full age”, so I don’t know who their parents were. If Louis were the son of one of the Mendes Cunhas he was most likely illegitimate as he does not appear in the Sephardic Jewish records. Based on his age at death he was probably born about 1819. I should add here that during my research I corresponded with other family connections who were certain that Louis Charles Cunha must have been a Jew who converted and changed his Jewish name, but we have been unable to find any evidence for this.

Louis Cunha was from all accounts a highly respected person in the Kingston business community. On Clarence’s baptismal record he is listed as a gentleman and on another record as the manager of the Commercial Rooms. According to Stephen Hopwood, the Commercial Room was
…”rather like a Chamber of Commerce, but with more importance. It was located on Harbour Street (south side) near King Street. A tower over the building was used for sighting of incoming ships and the report given as to friend or foe and report if mail ships were approaching. Before the post office - it served as a mail drop, and had it own hand stamp for outgoing/incoming mail, and generally served as a post office as well. In other words it served a very important function!”
This illustration by James Hakewill, from his Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica, shows the corner of King and Harbour Streets as of 1825 and is the closest I can come to a picture of the area.

In researching Louis’s connection to this establishment I researched notices from the Gleaner and found that he eventually started up in a similar business with a partner. But before that I did find references to his employment at the Commercial Room in a Parliamentary Report on Governor Edward Eyre’s handling of the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion. In this report Louis was giving evidence in 1866 in a case regarding a charge of seditious libel printed in a newspaper, the “County Union”;

From reports in the Gleaner it seems Louis decided to go into business with a partner in an endeavor similar to his former position, as per this item in the Gleaner of January 29th, 1878:

The following month the Gleaner reported the opening of the Commercial Exchange:

Success was short-lived however and the partnership did not last. The following conflicting advertisements appeared in the Gleaner of September 26, 1879:

Shortly thereafter the Gleaner published the following notice on January 3, 1880:

According to the advertisements the dissolution was by mutual accord.

Casper Davies (also spelled Davis) was an observant Jew and this would explain his decision to close the Commercial Exchange for the High Holy Days. Apparently he did this without consulting his partner. Did Louis respond the way he did because he didn’t want the public to think he was Jewish, or was it because he had not had a part in the decision? Whatever the reason this was most likely why the partnership was dissolved.

In my next post I will continue the story of the Cunha family.

Hannah's Children -- Eugene Ca Costa

2009-12-09T17:02:00.035-05:00

Eugene Da Costa – he never used the middle name, Rodrigues – was born about 1873, the second child and first son of Joseph and Hannah Rodrigues Da Costa. I have not been able to find his baptismal record, but he was most likely baptized in the Catholic Church. I did not, of course, know him, but I imagine from what I’ve found about him, that he wasn’t much like his sister, Ida. Eugene was a character … a man of definite opinions, and involved in several pursuits chief among which was horse-racing. A great deal of what I’ve learned about him I found reported in the Gleaner, for Eugene was an inveterate writer of letters to the editor and did not mince his words.

As I had no pictures of Eugene I had to try and build a picture of him based on whatever information I could find in the Gleaner. Not long after I began searching for information about him I came across a letter of his to the editor of the Gleaner in which he mentioned that he had written a history of horse-racing in Jamaica. This intrigued me and I set about trying to find the book, without success. It then occurred to me that perhaps he had deposited a copy of the book in the National Library of Jamaica, and sure enough he had. I emailed their reference section, told them I was a relative of Eugene’s and asked if it were possible to get a copy of his book. The reference librarian I dealt with very kindly offered to photocopy it for me, for a modest cost, and there it was … a book written by my cousin, Eugene!

There was no cover, so I had to make do with the title page.

Eugene’s reminiscences about horse-racing in Jamaica covered the years 1874 to 1934, and described the early racing days at the Kingston Race Course and then the move to the racecourse at Knutsford Park in St. Andrew.

This area is now New Kingston and the racecourse is now Emancipation Park.

Eugene was very much involved in horse-racing, both as Secretary of the Jamaica Turf Club and as an owner and trainer himself. He was also, according to information I found in the Gleaner, employed by the Jamaica Railway Company (which, sadly, no longer exists) and had an ice cream business at Cross Roads, St. Andrew.

The earliest vital information I could find on him was his marriage on March 26, 1899, to Catherine Rebecca James. At the time he gave his address as Bog Walk, St. Catherine and his occupation as clerk. He and Catherine were married by Father Patrick F. X. Mulry at St. George’s College. They had no children and according to Eugene’s brief obituary in 1951 his wife had predeceased him. I have not been able to find a record of her death.

I found a story in the Gleaner of May 31, 1911, which stated that the City Council had granted Eugene an application for use of the site on the Kingston Race Course to hold a race meeting on two Coronation holidays, June 22nd and 23rd. There were several other stories concerning Eugene and horse-racing in general, as well as numerous letters written by him to the editor of the newspaper about the state of horse-racing in Jamaica. He was somewhat of a combative nature as he was involved in at least two lawsuits, both of which he won.

The closest I got to a picture of the man is this clipping from the Gleaner of June 22, 1939:

Eugene is at the right in front. Like many of the Da Costas he was not tall! To my mind he looks a lot like my father, his first cousin.

A brief story in the Gleaner of December 28, 1945 described Eugene’s visit to Trinidad. Here it is:

On his return from Trinidad Eugene was quoted in the Gleaner as follows:
“The pari-mutuel turn-over in Trinidad in a single day is better than we in Jamaica can do in a single year.”
He went on to say that Trinidad had the power behind it to become one of the best racing centres in the world. “’On the first day of the meeting”, said Mr. Da Costa, ‘the promoters made a net profit of 60,000 dollars’”.

Eugene died July 3, 1951. Here is his obituary from the Gleaner of July 5th:

I was surprised to see that he had attended Wolmer’s Boy’s School as I thought he would most likely have gone to St. George’s. His sister, Ida, must have taken care of the funeral arrangements. From what I’ve been told by Ida’s grandson, Timothy, Eugene was almost like a father figure to Ida’s children so brother and sister must have been quite close

There is no doubt that Eugene knew horse-racing inside out and had many years of experience with the sport in Jamaica. So I am very disappointed that Dr. Rebecca Tortello, in her piece on the history of horse-racing in Jamaica, in the Gleaner’s Pieces of the Past, does not mention Eugene at all.

I hope that this small piece about him helps to make up for that.

All in the Family -- Lay Delegate to Synod

2009-11-27T18:44:00.043-05:00

I recently attended the 135th Synod of the Anglican Diocese of Niagara, as a Lay Delegate representing my church, St. Luke’s, in Burlington.

The word “synod” is defined as “a local or special ecclesiastical council, esp. of a diocese, formally convened to discuss ecclesiastical affairs.” The word is derived from the Latin synodus, from the Greek sunodos, syn + hodos, “way” or “course”. The synod is called together by the bishop of the diocese and the attendees are the clergy from the diocese along with representatives from the laity, elected by the Parish.

The 135th Synod of the Anglican Diocese of Niagara took place November 20th and 21st at the Hamilton Convention Centre. This was my first experience representing my church as a lay delegate to Synod and I found it both educational and uplifting. It set me thinking about my family and the fact that I wasn’t the first of them to attend Synod as a lay delegate. In fact at least two of my uncles had done the same and so I set out to find out what I could about their experiences as lay delegates.

The Smedmores and Kingston Parish Church

My Smedmore family had a strong connection to the Kingston Parish Church. The state church, formally known as the Parish Church of St. Thomas the Apostle, is believed to have been built some time before 1699, the date of the oldest tomb in the church today. It is located south of the Parade, in the heart of Kingston.

The original church was destroyed in the earthquake of 1907. Here is how it looked before the earthquake:

The new church was constructed in 1911, as closely as possible on the foundations of the previous church, as a replica of the former church except for the original tower. Instead a new clock tower was erected as a memorial to the soldiers who died in the First World War.

My Smedmore family, who lived at 49 Beeston Street north of the Parade, all attended Kingston Parish Church and whenever I visited them I would go with there them. I was fascinated by the fact that many early burials had actually taken place inside the church, and one could walk over the tombstones with their inscriptions while going up the nave. I particularly remember seeing the tomb of Admiral John Benbow, near the High Altar.

Benbow had been stationed at Port Royal as commander of the King’s Ships in the West Indies in 1697, and again in 1702. During the War of the Spanish Succession he fought against the French under Admiral Du Casse, was wounded and as a result died two months later of his wounds and was buried in the parish church.

Here is a photo of the interior of Kingston Parish Church, showing the High Altar.

My Smedmore Uncles

But back to Synod and my uncles. I was vaguely aware that my uncle Julian had been a Synod delegate, but what about the others? I don’t know if the eldest of the boys, my uncle Victor, who was killed in the First World War, had taken part in Synod. I never heard that my uncle Owen had been a lay delegate. This might be because he was somewhat retiring in nature. He stammered rather badly and this may have been a drawback. That left my uncles Rodney, Lucius and Julian, and so I did a search in the Jamaica Gleaner online to see what I could find out about them.

Rodney

Rodney definitely was elected as a lay delegate to synod in the parish of Trelawny where he worked as a sugar technologist. He was present at the Synod at St. George’s Hall, Kingston, on February 12, 1947. This Synod was particularly significant as it saw the election of Canon Percival William Gibson as Suffragan Bishop of Kingston, the first Jamaican, and a black Jamaican at that, to be elevated to the bishopric. The article in the Gleaner reports that R. D. Smedmore was one of the delegates appointed to a committee to prepare the voting papers. I know that at the time Rodney was living in Trelawny so he would have been representing his home church, which was most likely St. Michael’s Church in Clarks Town.

Lucius

My uncle Lucius was never, as far as can see, a lay delegate, but he was very much involved in the life of the Parish Church, serving as Secretary and Treasurer. The one member of the family who served the longest as a lay delegate was the youngest, Julian.

Julian

I found several entries in the Gleaner which referred to Julian’s involvement as a lay delegate on behalf of the Parish Church. He was very active in the church and made sure everyone knew it!

So, I came to the conclusion that this was indeed all in the family. Mind you, I’ve come to this important duty somewhat late in life, but I rather think that if my Smedmore family knew of it they would probably be proud and perhaps a bit surprised as in their time there were probably no women in Jamaica elected as lay delegates to synod. In fact, it was not until 1994 that women were ordained as deacons, and only in 1997 were they ordained to the priesthood.

Hannah's Children: David Rodrigues Da Costa -- a Remembrance Day Tribute

2009-11-11T10:23:00.029-05:00

Tyne Cot Memorial, Belgium

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?

Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle

Can patter out their hasty orisons.

No mockeries for them; no prayers nor bells,

Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, --

The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;

And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

Anthem for Doomed Youth – Wilfred Owen

I had meant to write about Eugene Da Costa, the second child of Hannah and Joseph Rodrigues Da Costa, but here we are on yet another Remembrance Day and I find myself thinking about their youngest son, David, who was killed in the First World War.
David is the only one for whom I have baptismal information, thanks to Father Gerry McLaughlin, the Archivist for the Roman Catholic Church in Kingston, Jamaica. He was baptized by Father Joseph Dupont who wrote in the register:

"On the 6th of August 1876 I baptized David Rodrigues Dacosta, born 7th July last, son of Joseph Rodrigues Dacosta and Hannah Lindo. The sponsors were Charles H. Nunes & Josepha Duquesnay."

Apart from that I knew very little about David, discovering bits and pieces of information about him as I researched the family. In searching for information about his older sister, Ida, and her children, I came across an immigration record for young Ida Clementina, age 17, sailing from Liverpool to New York on May 26 1913, going to her mother, Mrs. Ida Couch, at 152nd Street, New York City. Ida gave her address in London as that of her uncle, D. R. Da Costa, 149 Strand. This is how I discovered that David was living in London. Again, when I was following the saga of Ida and Frederick Walter Couch, I discovered them on a passenger list travelling from Jamaica to England in 1892. Listed with them was their infant son, Frederick Joseph, along with a Master Da Costa, age 16, who must have been David. Perhaps he had decided to seek his fortune in England. Strangely enough, his father, Joseph, had named him along with Hannah, as an executor of his will made July 19, 1910, a few months before he died. I wonder why Joseph named David who was living in England, as his executor, rather than his other son, Eugene, who was right there in Jamaica.

Once the 1901 British census became available I went looking for David and found him lodging with one Alfred Collins, an engraver in gold and silver, living at 52 Bromar Road in Camberwell. David’s occupation was given as journalist and author. I was also able to find David on various passenger lists between England and New York as well as Jamaica. In November 1909 David sailed on the RMS Mauretania from Liverpool to New York. He was still lodging with Alfred Collins and his family, and indicated that he was in transit to Jamaica. I imagine that he was going to see his father, Joseph, who was most likely ill at this time, as he suffered from chronic heart disease. David then sailed from Jamaica aboard the ss Clyde on January 19, 1910 en route to New York, intending to return to England. However, he returned to Jamaica on August 6, 1910, sailing from Avonmouth to Kingston on board the Port Henderson. No doubt by this time his father Joseph’s health had deteriorated. Joseph died September 26, 1910.

David remained for some time in Jamaica to help settle his father’s estate because he does not show up in the 1911 census -- his landlord, Alfred Collins, is shown living with his family at 41 Larkhall Rise, Clapham. David himself returns to England on board the Elders & Fyffe ship, ss Nicoya, arriving in Manchester on May 8, 1911.

It was purely by chance that I discovered David’s name on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website. He is commemorated on the Tyne Cot Memorial, near Ieper, Belgium. It is one of the four memorials to the missing in Belgian Flanders, covering the area known as the Ypres Salient. David was killed on October 13, 1917. According to the information on the site he was a private with the 10th Battalion, Sherwood Foresters (Notts. And Derby Regiment). He was 41 years old. I immediately searched for his war record and was fortunate to find both his attestation papers as well as other documents, and also the war diaries of the Sherwood Foresters on the Documents Online section of The National Archives. Curiously, David did not join the Sherwood Foresters but the Royal Flying Corps, on July 31, 1916. He was forty years old and gave his address as 58 Danville Road, Camberwell, London, S.E. He listed his occupation as journalist, was not married and gave his mother’s name – Hannah Da Costa, 54 East Queen Street, Kingston Jamaica -- as next of kin. He was described as 5 ft. 9 inches (the Da Costas are not tall!).

This is the badge of the Royal Flying Corps. According to his statement of services, David remained in England from July 31 1916 till April 27 1917, and then was sent to France from April 28 1917 until his death on October 13, 1917. He was listed as a private, regimental number 41271, in the Royal Flying Corps, military wing, stationed at South Farnborough, as of July 31 1916, then on September 24, 1917, he was compulsorily transferred to the 10th Battalion, Nottingham and Derbyshire Regiment, retaining his present rate of pay, but with a new service number, 72329.

This is the badge of the 10th Battalion, Sherwood Foresters.

Another document in his records indicates that he belonged to Group 41 (Journalist) and had been attached to Balloon Party, and was also attached to 63rd R. N. Div. 1.B.D. for training as infantry personnel. It is not clear to me why he was transferred.

According to the war diaries I found on line the 10th Battalion was stationed in October 1917 outside of Hazebrouck, through which thousands of British soldiers passed en route for Ypres or the Somme. It became an Army Headquarters in October 1914. The war diary for the time of David’s death does not indicate any action on the 13th of October, but that there were casualties on October 12th

It reads as follows:
“The enemy continued their counterattack during the day – all of which were dispersed by M.G. (machine gun) fire and artillery fire. Congratulated on the information sent back to Div. and Brigade. Observation forts were established at CONDIE HQ & MILLERS HOUSES. Number of casualties during the day were officers killed 2, wounded 4, and O.R. (other ranks) killed approximately 15. Wounds 150.”

Perhaps David was among the wounded and died later, but based on the fact that he has no known grave it would seem that his body was not found and he would have been considered killed in action.

This has been a long post but I wanted on this day to remember David Rodrigues Da Costa and his ultimate sacrifice in 1917.

"They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;

Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn;

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We shall remember them. " – For the Fallen, Lawrence Binyon

Sarah Letitia Brown's Commonplace Book Revisited

2009-10-15T15:05:00.016-04:00

Back in 2008 I wrote about my great grandmother’s commonplace book, which was found among my mother’s effects after her death. As you will recall, the book was in poor condition, with no cover, torn pages, and acidic damage to the edges of the pages. Here’s what it looked like --

The spine was completely gone, as was much of the stitching, and in fact many pages had come away completely. This picture shows how fragile the edges of the pages had become.

I had become very concerned about the condition of this journal. It represented an important part of my life, a primary document of members of my mother’s maternal family which should be preserved for future generations. But how best to do this?

It so happened that some of the books in the Mississauga Library’s local history collection were in need of repair and preservation. The Library had dealt in the past with a well-known rare book binder, Keith Felton of Felton Bookbinding, in Georgetown. As Local History Librarian at the Mississauga Central Library I undertook the task of driving to Georgetown with the books which needed repair. (We had previously contacted Felton’s regarding these books and had sent them photos of their condition so that they could give us a quote on the type of repair needed and the cost involved.) As I was going to Felton’s I thought this would be an excellent opportunity to have some repair work done on a couple of my own books. My paperback copy of Inez Knibb Sibley’s Dictionary of Place Names in Jamaica (no longer in print) had come apart -- so much for so-called permanent binding – and I decided to bring along the commonplace book as well to see what could be done with it.

Keith Felton does amazing work and I can’t praise him too highly. The Sibley book was no trouble to repair, but the commonplace book was much more complex. It needed new covers and spine, plus repair to every page in the book by placing tissue paper along the edges of each page to prevent more damage. We decided on a beautiful leather cover with new endpapers. I’m not that knowledgeable about how this preservation work is done. All I can say is, judge for yourself from the following pictures of the finished work, now titled Brown Family Journal.

The photo above shows the journal with new endpapers.

If you need to have any type of preservation work done on your books then I definitely recommend that you get in touch with Keith Felton of Felton Bookbinding in Georgetown. You will not be disappointed.

Frederick Walter Couch Redux

2009-08-30T16:41:00.008-04:00

I have just recently received information from someone researching the Couch family which sheds more light … and more confusion … on the mysterious and elusive Frederick Walter Couch. According to the newspaper, the Straits Times, of October 27, 1913, a “Mr. F. W. Couch, of John Little & Co., goes home on leave by the P. & O. Delta Friday next.” The Straits Times is an English language newspaper published in Singapore and was established in 1845 during British colonial rule. John Little & Co. is a chain of department stores located in Singapore, which was also established there in 1845. So, was Frederick Walter Couch employed by them in Singapore in 1913 as a master tailor? Although family story has him decamping to South America, did he perhaps set out for the Far East instead?

We know that Frederick Walter Couch shows up again in Kingston, in 1915, according to his advertisement in the Gleaner, claiming that he and his partner, H. H. Scott, have just returned from the American Military Camps. Where were these camps? I did a bit of searching on line and came up with the idea … which may be completely wrong … that perhaps Frederick made his way to the Philippines, as this was during the Philippine-American War, and there would have been American army camps there. If so, did he then leave there to return to Jamaica?

My correspondent also pointed out to me something I had missed – that Frederick traveled in October 1917 from Kingston to Liverpool on the ss Tortuguero, an Elders & Fyffe “banana boat”. He gave his occupation as “master tailor”.

The phrase “unmitigated gall” might have been invented for Frederick Walter Couch. Who would have thought that he would have returned to Jamaica, after deserting wife and family? And what eventually happened to him? That is something that still has to be researched

Hannah's Children -- Ida Clementina Da Costa

2009-07-27T07:00:00.015-04:00

I never knew the children of Joseph and Hannah Da Costa. What I do know about them I have managed to glean from various sources, including the Daily Gleaner, and such genealogy databases as Ancestry and Findmypast. The picture that emerges about Ida, the eldest, shows her to have been a particularly resilient person. She was one of the witnesses when her parents married and would have been about seventeen or eighteen at the time. As the eldest she must have been responsible for her younger brothers. Perhaps she worked with her parents in the Commercial Hotel. At any rate, at the age of twenty-one she married an Englishman, from Cornwall, Frederick Walter Couch.

Frederick Walter Couch, aged 28, arrived in Jamaica in 1886, according to a notice in the Gleaner of November 10th of that year. He left behind him three children and their mother, to come to Jamaica as a master tailor in the employ of Richard Recuero, whose business, El Fenix, was located at 117 Harbour Street.

The item in the Gleaner, which referred to Frederick as “Mr. Crouch, a celebrated Continental cutter”, stated that he had been engaged by the firm of Messrs. Recuero and Co. “for their outfitting establishment which has just been opened at the corner of Temple Lane and Harbour Street.”

We don’t know how and when Frederick met Ida. They were married 6 May 1891 at St. George’s College, then located at 26 North Street, by the Rev. Fr. Patrick J. Hogan, S.J. Frederick stated that he was a bachelor, a merchant, aged 31 … he was actually 33 … father, Frederick Couch, and gave his address as Lilias Cottage, Hope, St. Andrew. Ida was listed as a spinster, age 21, of 101 Harbour Street. No father was named on the record but Joseph Da Costa was one of the witnesses along with an Agnes Maud MacDonald.

Did Ida know that Frederick had been in a relationship in England with a woman named Emily Jane Prout, with whom he had fathered five children (two of whom had since died)? No marriage has ever been found for Frederick and Emily, although she claimed to be his wife on birth registrations of their children. I am sure that Ida as a devout Catholic, as was her mother Hannah, would not have knowingly entered into a bigamous marriage. At any rate, she traveled with Frederick and their first child, Frederick Joseph, born 9 November 1891, to England in June of 1892 and it appears that they stayed with Frederick’s father and mother, Frederick and Amelia, at 19 Westgate Street, Launceston, Cornwall, as that is where their second child, Eugene Adrian, was born on the 21st July 1893. What then does this say about Frederick’s relationship with Emily Jane Prout? Was Ida welcomed because she and Frederick were married?

Frederick had apparently parted company with Recuero and Company, a provisional order of bankruptcy having been filed against the company according to the Gleaner of October 20, 1891, and had entered into partnership with Octave Lay of 29 King Street.

Ida and her child, Frederick Joseph, must have returned to Jamaica about 1894, as her third child, Violet, was born there, on May 22, at “The Laurels”, St. Andrew. Ida was the one who registered the birth. We cannot be sure that Frederick had returned with them. He certainly sailed from Southampton on November 10, 1894, for New York, but he must have returned to Jamaica some time after that, as their fourth child, Ida Winifred, was born 15 February 1896, also at “The Laurels”. Once again the birth was registered by her mother, Ida. Frederick, meanwhile, was again on the move where his career was concerned. A new advertisement appeared in the Gleaner of April 5, 1895, in which there is no mention of Octave Lay.

The ad is hard to read but the text at the bottom states: “I the original F. W. Couch begs [sic] to notify the public in general that I have no connection whatever with any other firm in the Parade”.

What happened after that to the family is somewhat of a mystery. From what I’ve learned it appears that Frederick deserted Ida and her children and was not heard from for some time. He supposedly traveled to California and may well have been in San Francisco during the 1906 earthquake, as a result of which he returned to Jamaica and resumed his relationship with his wife. On 17 December 1907, their fifth and last child, Stanley Noel, was born at 34 Victoria Avenue, Kingston. Shortly after, according to what I have been told, Frederick once again deserted the family, supposedly sailing to South America. No other information about him could be found until the following notice appeared in the Gleaner in July and August of 1915.

This was very curious, as from what I’ve been told, no one ever stated that Frederick had returned to Jamaica and Ida certainly was no longer living with him. Her father, Joseph, had left her £300 in his will, which must have been a great help to her as her situation cannot have been easy. One by one the family left Jamaica. Her daughter, Ida Winifred, traveled to England and spent some time with her uncle, David, in London, and from there sailed to New York where Eugene, her older brother, was living, having gone to the United States in 1912. He became a naturalized citizen in 1922. Ida and Stanley must also have gone to New York at that time although I have not been able to find a record of their sailing, so they probably were not even in Jamaica when Frederick returned. Ida apparently traveled back and forth between New York and Jamaica. I found her in 1921, sailing with Violet and Stanley and by herself in 1924 again traveling to New York. On the 1924 manifest she indicated that she had been living in the U.S. between 1912 and 1924. She described herself on the ship’s manifests on both occasions as a widow … so was Frederick dead, or did Ida consider him to be as good as dead? Again, we don’t know. She and Stanley eventually returned to Jamaica, as did Frederick Joseph and Violet.

By a strange coincidence, Stanley worked for some time at Desnoes & Geddes, bottlers of Red Stripe Beer among other beverages, about the same time that my father, Michael Levy, worked there. Did they know that they were cousins? Who knows? It’s another one of the family mysteries that probably will never be solved.

To Canada From Jamaica, With Love

2009-07-01T16:43:00.006-04:00

Happy Birthday, Canada! You're looking pretty good for 142! Wish we all could age as well.

I speak as an expat Jamaican who has made her home here for the past forty-nine years, more than twice the years I spent in my birthplace. Canada is home to many Jamaicans, expats who came here for many reasons ... perhaps they went to school or university here and decided to stay; they may have married a Canadian, as I did, and thus made it their home. Many Jamaicans came here in the seventies, the unhappy times in Jamaica, when Canada seemed to offer a safe place, a better place to live and raise our children.

Whatever the reasons, many of us have lived here for a long time ... we have adapted, well sort of. I'll never get used to winter. Mon pays, ce n'est pas l'hiver ... give me spring, summer and fall ... but we survive. Sure, we miss the tropical weather, the sea breezes, the easy-going laid-back life ... soon come, mon! We miss the bright colours of the bouganvillea, the poinciana, the flame of the forest. We miss the food ... oh, we can replicate it, but is isn't quite the same. We miss the salt air of the sea, the soft white sand between our toes ...

But we're here, Canada is our home, and we are happy and safe and living in the best possible country on earth. So, Happy Birthday, Canada! And many more of them!

Joseph and Hannah Da Costa

2009-05-16T11:50:00.019-04:00

Once again I have been tardy in updating my blog. I feel that I have left Joseph and Hannah Rodrigues Da Costa in limbo while I dealt with other responsibilities. It's way past time to get back to their story -- a story I've managed to piece together using what records I could find about them and their family as well as stories in the Jamaica Gleaner. It's hard to put together a family history when you have no context, only names to go by, so I've been really lucky to find various bits of information in the Gleaner which have helped me enormously.

Joseph was the proprietor of the Commercial Rooms at 101 Harbour Street, as per an advertisement in the 1891 Kingston Directory, which appears on the Jamaican Family Search website as follows:

Commercial Rooms

101 Harbour Street (Upstsirs)

Bar & Billiard Saloon

Joseph DaCosta, Proprietor

N. B. Telegrams received daily, and can be read immediately on arrival. Also late English and American papers.

Telephone 167

Besides this ad he also advertised regularly in the Jamaica Gleaner. One of the earliest ads I found was this one in the February 15th, 1894 Gleaner:

Joseph seems to have imported all sorts of goodies for sale at the Commercial Rooms so he was quite the entrepreneur. Most of the ads I found were of this nature.

How did Joseph come to own the Commercial Rooms in the first place? Well, based on a brief article I found in the Gleaner of January 6, 1886, it appears that Hannah, his wife, was the original owner and Joseph was her manager. (At this time they were not married though they had had three children together.) The report in the Gleaner stated that Hannah, as proprietress of the Commercial Hotel, had appeared in District Court charged with keeping her hotel open later than eleven o'clock and also "unlawfully and knowingly permitting disorderly conduct in the same hotel on the night of the 9th December last." The defence was that on the night in question a large group of disorderly sailors, armed with marlin spikes, had entered the hotel "for the purpose of avenging an insult that one of their comrades had received the night before. Seeing that they meant mischief, Mr. Joseph DaCosta, the manager of the hotel, did his best to induce them to leave quietly." Fortunately the defence was accepted and his Honour decided in favour of the defendant.

Joseph's bravery did not go unrewarded as he and Hannah were married two years later on November 22, 1888, and from then on it is Joseph's name that is associated with the hotel and billiard rooms. Many ads appeared in the Gleaner extolling the various imported foods that Joseph had brought in. Joseph was also involved in horse racing. An ad in the Gleaner in 1891 for the Cumberland Penn Races stated that tickets for the grounds, stands and carriage enclosure could be purchased at the Commercial Hotel, at four shillings and ten shillings and sixpence respectively for the Grand Stand and Special Stand. An interesting sidelight to Joseph's career, particularly as his son, Eugene became quite the turfite and even wrote a book on the history of horse-racing in Jamaica.

Joseph died at the relatively young age of sixty-three in 1910 of chronic heart disease, certified by Dr. F. H. Saunders. His obituary in the Gleaner of September 27th, 1910, referred to him as "well known for his sterling character and his great business ability. All those who came in contact with him -- and his friends were legion -- admired his pleasant disposition, his quiet demeanour, and his charitable qualities."

Hannah outlived her husband for many years, dying at her home in Rae Town on 27 April 1925. Her obituary in the Gleaner spoke of her as charming in her manner and a pleasure to converse with.

Discovering Da Costas: And Joseph Makes Three

2009-03-22T12:41:00.029-04:00

Today is Mothering Sunday in the Anglican Church, a day when mothers are celebrated. Mothering Sunday has a long tradition in English customs as it was the day when those in service were given the day off to visit their family, and it was also the day when one returned to the mother church, such as the Cathedral in one's Diocese. Mothering Sunday falls in the middle of Lent and is a break from the abstinence of the season; the tradition is to serve Simnel Cake and give the ladies a flower to celebrate the day. I bring this up because I'm feeling rather guilty for neglecting the family blog I've been mothering these past several months ... so, once again, I'm returning belatedly to the Da Costa story.

In my last post I wrote about Melbourne and his family and how I found out about his parents, Jacob and Selina Rodrigues Da Costa, who were also, of course, the parents of my grandmother Alice. I knew that Melbourne and Alice had a brother, Joseph, but I had not so far done any research on him. I did have a photo of a tombstone in Calvary Roman Catholic Cemetery which was very likely that of my great uncle, Joseph Rodrigues Da Costa.

So I started doing some research on Joseph. I went looking first of all for a marriage record for a Joseph Rodrigues Da Costa, figuring that he would most likely have been married around the same time as Melbourne. I did find such a record, on 22 November 1888, which stated that Joseph Rodrigues Da Costa, a tavern keeper, age 41, son of Jacob Rodrigues Da Costa, had married Hannah Lindo, a spinster, age 38, daughter of Jacob Lindo, at 101 Harbour Street (which both had given on the record as their abode), by a William J. Brown, the witness being one Ada Clement Da Costa. It seemed very likely that Joseph was the brother of Melbourne and Alice, as his father was also Jacob Rodrigues Da Costa, so the next question was, did this couple have children?

With the assistance of Father Gerry McLaughlin at the Roman Catholic Archives in Kingston, I was able find out more about Joseph and Hannah. They did have children, three in fact, all of whom were born quite some time before the marriage of their parents! The children were Ida Clementina, born 1871, Eugene, born 1873 and David, born 1876. Father Gerry also found a record of Joseph's marriage in the register, in Latin, entered by the Rev. Fr. William Spillman, S.J., as follows:

"A. D. 1888, die 22 Novembris conjuncti sunt in Matrimonium Joseph R. Da Costa & Hannah Lindo a P. Guls. Burns, S. J. praesentibus testibus D. M. Leon, Ida Clement Da Costa. Ex reg. civili G. Spillmann, S. J."

The witness, Ada Clement Da Costa was in fact their eldest daughter, Ida Clementina, who would have been seventeen years old. Why did it take so long for Joseph and Hannah to get married? What was the impediment? That's probably something that we'll never know. Was Hannah Jewish, and was there some resistance on the part of her family to her marrying a Catholic? What evidence I've been able to find shows that Hannah was a devout Catholic, but it's possible that she might have been a convert to Catholicism.

My next step was to find Joseph's death record and see if he had left a will. Success on both counts! Joseph died at 57 East Queen Street on 26 September 1910 of chronic heart disease, as certified by Dr. F. H. Saunders. The informant on the death record was his youngest son, David, who had been living in England but had come to Jamaica during his father's illness. And Joseph did make a will, which was probated in the Supreme Court of Jamaica.

His will gives the definitive proof that he was indeed brother to Melbourne and Alice as in it he left "to my brother Melbourne DaCosta one hundred pounds and to my sister Alice Levy one hundred pounds." He appointed his wife, Hannah as joint executor with his younger son, David; he left £300 to each of his children, and the rest and residue of his estate to his wife, Hannah.

Knowing as little as I did about this part of the family, I wanted to find out more about Joseph and Hannah, and I was fortunate enough to learn more by researching in the pages of the Jamaica Gleaner on line. In my next post I'll describe what I found there.

And now for a little shameless self-promotion. I've just today received an email from Blog Jamaica who are featuring my blog this week! Naturally, I'm pleased!

Discovering Da Costas: Putting the Pieces Together

2009-02-08T14:57:00.023-05:00

It's been quite a while since my last post ... other stuff gets in the way ... At any rate I wanted to return to my research on the Da Costa family and talk about how I went in search of them and what I found. It wasn't at all straightforward. Sometimes genealogical research can be very fruitful -- other times not!

In my last post I wrote briefly about my great uncle, Melbourne Rodrigues Da Costa. As I said, I knew of his existence because my uncle Rodney had told me that my grandmother, Alice, had two brothers, Joseph and Melbourne. In my research I found a marriage record for a Melbourne Rodrigues Da Costa to an Abigail Henriques DeSouza. Here is a copy of that record:

The record states that Melbourne Da Costa, age 23, bachelor, small trader, son of Jacob Rodrigues Da Costa, married Abigail de Souza, spinster, dressmaker, age 22, daughter of Joseph Desouza, on the 24th of May, 1882, and that the marriage was performed in Kingston by Alexander Robb.The names of the two witnesses are almost illegible; one appears to be Wm. M. Holland. Further research on my part showed that Alexander Robb was a Presbyterian minister. Whether or not they were married in a church was not stated and I'm inclined to think that the marriage probably took place in a home, perhaps the bride's home. Certainly the bride wore a wedding dress. My cousin, Kay, Melbourne's great granddaughter, sent me this photo of Abigail.

Unfortunately, we don't have a photo of Melbourne.

I discovered that the DeSouza family was Jewish, and later on I was able to confirm the fact that Melbourne had been baptized in the Catholic church. Now, I have come across marriages between Catholics and non-Catholics that were performed in the Catholic church, so long as the non-Catholic partner promised to bring up the children as Catholic. But Abigail had no such intentions, and indeed all their children were brought up Jewish and named in the synagogue records.

In looking back at the notes I made at the time I see that I wasn't sure that Melbourne, the son of Jacob Rodrigues Da Costa, was my grandmother's brother, because I didn't know her father's name! Alice did not get married in Jamaica, but in Colon. I discovered that later when I was sent a copy of the Gleaner notice of the marriage. I naturally first concentrated on my grandmother's family and found the births of all her children, whose names I did know. An interesting fact started to appear in some of the registrations. (There were seven births, and three deaths.) Two of the births (those of Daisy and my father, Michael), and two deaths (Daisy and Lucien) were registered by Selina Rodrigues Da Costa who, on Lucien's death record in 1887, described herself as "grandmother".

So, now I had another name. Selina Rodrigues Da Costa who had also signed Daisy's birth registration as Mrs. J. R. Da Costa, was obviously Alice's mother. Was the J. R. Da Costa she was married to by any chance Jacob Rodrigues Da Costa, Melbourne's father? I then found a death record in 1892 for a Selina Da Costa, who had died at 225 Tower Street. The person registering her death was her son, Melbourne Rodrigues Da Costa, also of 225 Tower Street. Voila!

Selina DaCosta is described as a widow in this record, so the next step was to find out more about her late husband, Jacob Rodrigues Da Costa.

And here I'd like to digress and go into my favourite genealogy gripe or whine ... all this would have been so much easier if I had had access to census records in Jamaica! The census is a wonderful genealogy resource -- it places the whole family together in one place at one time. In England and Canada it was taken every ten years on the ones, beginning in 1841. (In Ontario the nominal census, where everyone in the household is named, begins in 1851.) In the United States censuses go back even further and are taken in years ending in zero. The U.S has released censuses up to 1930; in the United Kingdom they are available up to 1901 and in Canada up to 1911. There are no nominal censuses of this nature for Jamaica! A few censuses exist, mainly early ones, but mostly what censuses exist are purely statistical in nature. Madeleine Mitchell, in the revised editon of her book, Jamaican Ancestry: how to find out more (Heritage Books, 2008), reports that censuses were taken, but that the schedules with household names do not appear to exist. Jamaican genealogists would kill to have those censuses!

In the mean time I was fortunate enough, thanks to a good friend, Dr. Anthony MacFarlane, a convert to Judaism, to get hold of copies of the records of the two synagogues in Jamaica, the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue (Sephardic) and the English and German Jews synagogue (Ashkenazi). In searching through I found a Jacob Rodrigues Da Costa, son of Joseph Rodrigues Da Costa and his wife, Esther Lazarus, who was born 12 October 1821, and who died 19 November 1871. This Jacob was buried in the Jewish cemetery. Was he the husband of Selina Da Costa? I searched for a marriage but without success. Nothing showed up in the Jewish records, the Church of England parish records, nor in the Dissenter marriage records. That left one possibility. Since both Melbourne and Alice were apparently Catholic then maybe Jacob and Selina were married in the Catholic church. However, the Catholic records have not been microfilmed by the LDS, so my only recourse at that time was to seek the help of the Archivist of the Archdiocese in Kingston, Father Gerry McLaughlin.

In my next post I'll continue with the saga of the Da Costa reseach.

Discovering the Da Costa Family

2009-01-01T08:49:00.021-05:00

When I began researching my family history I knew little or nothing about my father's mother's family, the Da Costas. I knew that my grandmother's maiden name had been Da Costa. What little I knew about her family came from my Uncle Rodney, whose facts weren't always accurate. As I mentioned in one of my earlier posts, he claimed my grandparents, Leopold Levy and Alice Da Costa, had been married in Haiti. Thanks to Madeleine Mitchell, who found a notice of their marriage in microfilm of the Gleaner, they were married in Colon, Panama. Here is the notice from the Gleaner of July 23, 1886:

The reference to Haiti was not entirely without some validity. When Essie, their fourth child, was born in 1891 Leopold was listed on the birth record as being in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, his occupation being given as "accountant".

At the time I was hearing about my grandmother's family from Uncle Rodney I did not know her father's name ... that came much later ... and Rodney didn't know it either. He did know that Alice had two brothers, Joe and Melbourne, but nothing else about them. As for my father, Michael, he never spoke of his family and when I was younger I didn't ask the questions I should have of him. There seemd to have been some sort of estrangement between my mother and her mother-in-law. I gather there was resentment on my mother's part that she had had to wait quite a long time to marry my father as he was helping to pay off the mortgage on the house at 22 Beeston Street. I got the impression that my father's family was not well off. My grandfather, Leopold, was a travelling man, supposedly an oculist, but in all the records I found which mentioned him that occupation was never given. I found such occupations listed as "book clerk", "accountant", "book-keeper". I know that he went to Colon, Port-au-Prince, and Havana, and no doubt to other places in Central America and the Caribbean. He seems to have rarely been at home, though often enough to father seven children. Leopold died in Cuba in 1917 and my father's two brothers and his sister emigrated at various times to the United States, leaving my father as sole support of his mother.

When I finally did get around to working on my Da Costa family I had very little to go on but the names Joseph, Melbourne and Alice. I was fortunate enough to find a cousin here in Ontario, also from Jamaica, who turned out to be the great granddaughter of my great uncle, Melbourne Rodrigues Da Costa. She had done quite a bit of research herself, questioning family members and recording all she had found. Curiously, I knew nothing about her family, and she knew nothing about mine. My cousin, Kay, is Jewish, and it appears that Melbourne embraced the Jewish faith as a result of marrying Abigail Henriques DeSouza who was Jewish. They were married in 1882 by a Presbyterian minister, Alexander Robb. As Melbourne was Catholic and Abigail was Jewish, neither could have been married in the faith of the other.

It is an interesting picture. Joseph, Melbourne and Alice were all baptized in the Catholic faith, and the children of the former and the latter were brought up in the Catholic church, but Melbourne's nine children were brought up in the Jewish faith. Religion brings people together and it can also keep them apart. I am sure that the reason I know so little about my Da Costa relatives has a lot to do with that.

Musings and Memories of This and That

2008-12-20T11:22:00.045-05:00

It's been quite a while since my last post, which was way back in early November. Wow! How time flies when you're busy doing other things. What things, you may ask? Well for one thing, I have taken on a volunteer position with my local genealogical society, the Halton Peel Branch of the Ontario Genealogical Society. I've had various positions on the HP Executive for quite a while -- as Awards Co-ordinator, Chairperson, Past Chairperson, Programme Co-ordinator -- and now I'm Cemetery Co-ordinator. One of the aims of the Ontario Genealogical Society is to locate and transcribe all known cemeteries in Ontario. Transcribing cemeteries is done by a team of volunteers who painstakingly record what is inscribed on the tombstones. With the advent of digital photography many branches are now compiling both a visual and written record of the cemeteries in their area. More that 6,000 cemeteries have been located in this province, and over 5,700 have been transcribed by the thirty branches of the OGS. Halton Peel Branch still has some cemeteries to be recorded, as well as recorded cemeteries to be published.

Why transcribe cemeteries anyway? Well, not only is it one way to preserve our heritage, but it is also extremely helpful to people engaged in genealogical research. Quite often a cemetery transcription may be the only record one finds of an early ancestor. Unfortunately, with a few exceptions, there appears to be no genealogical group in Jamaica doing this. There are all sorts of cemeteries in the island, many of which have fallen into disrepair and neglect, and few that have been entirely recorded. I am proud to say that much has been done to record our Jewish cemeteries on the island. I refer to the work of the late Jacob A. P. M. Andrade, whose book, A Record of the Jews in Jamaica from the English Conquest to the Present Time, contains transcriptions of the various Jewish cemeteries in the island. Unfortunately, the book, published in 1941, is out of print, but the cemetery records can be found on a subscription website, Jamaican Family Search. Another excellent book is that of Richard Barnett and Philip Wright -- The Jews of Jamaica: tombstone inscriptions, 1663-1880, which incorporates much of Andrade's work. And a new book has just been published, on the Hunt's Bay Cemetery, the oldest Jewish cemetery in Jamaica. This is The Knell of Parting Day, by Marilyn Delevante, who worked diligently to preserve this neglected cemetery.

It's a beautifully illustrated book and you can find out more about it at the Jews of Jamaica website.

Would that we had done more for the church and public cemeteries in Jamaica! Some work has been done by individuals on early monumental inscriptions, such as that by James Henry Lawrence-Archer in his book, Monumental Inscriptions of the British West Indies from the earliest date (1875) This has been transcribed by Patricia Jackson and is posted on her subscription website Jamaican Family Search. Another work is that of Philip Wright, Monumental Inscriptions of Jamaica (1966). Both of these books are currently out of print but have also been microfilmed by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), aka Mormons and can be found in their library catalogue on the FamilySearch website. Most of the inscriptions recorded are mainly of Anglican churches. I know of no efforts made to record Catholic or public cemeteries.

One of the largest nondenominational cemeteries is the May Pen Cemetery, in Kingston, pictured below.

This cemetery, one of the oldest public cemeteries, has become very rundown and neglected, but efforts have been made within the past two years at cleaning it up. As far as I know this cemetery has not been recorded.

Madeleine Mitchell, in her book, Jamaican Ancestry: how to find out more (2008) comments on how dilapidated the various cemeteries of the island have become. Stones are almost illegible, cemetery plots are overgrown, and it's not unusual for people to take up residence in the cemetery or to allow their animals to graze there! Such, I understand, has been the case with the cemetery of the Kingston Parish Church

where higglers have set up shop. Similarly, I am told one should not wander through the churchyard of St. Andrew Parish Church, Half-way Tree without an escort!

Donald Lindo has collected over 7000 burial records of St. Andrew Parish Church covering 1657 to 2000, and these can be found on his CD, Genealogy of Jamaica, 2006. Thanks also to Donald I have a photograph of the grave of my Great uncle, Joseph Rodrigues Da Costa, who is buried in Calvary Roman Catholic Cemetery.

I wish there was a genealogical society in Jamaica which would take on the job of recording our cemeteries before they are all completely lost!

Before I close, I would like to mention that my blog has received an award from another blogger, Jacqueline Smith, who also writes a Jamaican blog, Jack Mandora's, a book-lover's nook. The award is the Arte y Pico Award, and I display it here with pride! Thanks, Jacqueline!

Lest We Forget -- A Tribute to Those Who Served in the Great War

2008-11-08T10:55:00.059-05:00

"They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn;
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We shall remember them. " -- Lawrence Binyon

The last item in Sarah Letitia Brown's Commonplace Book is a poem of three stanzas, written in my mother's handwriting, and headed "A Tribute to the memory of Victor Dey Smedmore, 1st Life Guards. Killed in action, Jan 29th 1918". At the top of the page she wrote "copy", so I do not believe she is the author of the poem, and I have no idea who that might have been.

The poem begins:

"We lift the voice lamenting from afar, while memory backward wends through buried years ..."

In my last post I had mentioned that I would comment on the contributions made by my grandfather to the commonplace book, but as November 11th comes closer I felt it was more appropriate to write about my uncle Victor and his sacrifice in the First World War, as well as the sacrifices of other Jamaican men who served in that conflict.

The very first post I did for this blog was about Victor. He was the eldest son of William Dey Smedmore and his wife, Amanda. He was born in 1886 in Port Royal, moved with the family to Kingston, and worked at D. Henderson and Company. He went to England in 1915, joined the First Life Guards, went overseas to France where he was wounded twice, and was killed in action January 1918. I often wondered why he decided to go to England to enlist when he could have enlisted in the West India Regiment but apparently there was a contingent of Jamaican men who did go to England for this purpose. The Gleaner reported on some of them on June 7, 1915:The men listed in the above Roll of Honour were members of the Kingston Parish Church, but there were apparently many more who went to England to join up. My curiosity was aroused as to when Victor sailed for England and thanks to new data on the subscription genealogy database, Ancestry, I found his name on a ship's manifest, that of the ss Coronado, sailing from Kingston to Bristol, arriving at that port on August 15th, 1915.

The names are a bit small to read so here they are:

-- Lester Cecil Jacobs; Karl Everard Laidman; L. Cochrane Shackleton; Huntley Hearne; Maurice Hearne; Victor Dey Smedmore; Alfred George Ayers.

Now, these names mean nothing to me, except for Victor's. It was apparent that they had all seven travelled together on the same ship with the same intent in mind. My question was, had they all enlisted when they got to England? I therefore began a search for the other six. The first source I checked was the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, in the assumption that some of them might, like Victor, have been killed in the War.

The first one I searched for and found there was Karl Everard Laidman, the son of Herbert Edmund and Mary Jane Armstrong Laidman of 65 Norman Road, Kingston, Jamaica. Karl was a private in the Royal Fusilliers, aged 19, and he was killed on March 31st, 1916, a bare eight months after he arrived in England to enlist. He is buried in Lapugnoy Military Cemetery, Bethune, France.

Karl was not the only casualty of that group besides Victor. I also found an A. G. Ayers on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website, a trooper in the 2nd Life Guards, who died 26 February 1917 and is buried in St. Sever Cemetery Extension, Rouen, France. What then of the other four?

I then searched the online edition of the Jamaica Gleaner to see if I could find any trace of them and I managed to find two more -- Lester Jacobs and Huntley Hearne. Both items were obituaries. Lester Jacobs died March 25th, 1971, at age 83, so I assume he was the Lester Cecil Jacobs listed on the ship's passenger list, though his war record was not mentioned. The obituary, which is brief, mentioned that he was the retired manager of Jamaica Retreading Company and that he was survived by a brother, Caryl, of Miami, Florida and other relatives. Huntley Hearne died April 13, 1964 and his obituary states that he was a "70-year old hero of the 1914 war and an acknowledged artist in the American advertising field". Huntley Hearne had been attached to the Royal Fusilliers and had been awarded the Military Medal for destroying a German pillbox.

I found a few references to Maurice Hearne, who I assume was Huntley's brother, mainly to do with his career as a cricketer. It would seem, then, that he also returned safely from the war. The only one that I could find nothing definitive about was L... Cochrane Shackleton. My searches in the Gleaner brought up articles on a Dr. T. F. Shackleton but this didn't seem to match the Shackleton on the passenger list ... then I noticed that his age was given as 42, whereas the other six men were all younger, between 18 and 29. Was this the doctor? It doesn't explain the differences in first names yet the Gleaner of September 25th 1916 noted that Dr. T. F. Shackleton had been posted to England to the Royal Army Medical Corps. I'm afraid this will remain a mystery!

"But where our desires are and our hopes profound,
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known,
As the stars are known to the Night;
As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain;
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end, they remain." -- Lawrence Binyon

The Commonplace Book -- the Contributors

2008-10-19T13:20:00.030-04:00

It's been some time since my last post and I still want to continue with the story of my great-grandmother's commonplace book. However, first of all I want to mention a rather unpleasant comment I received on one of my earlier posts, in which I described going back to 5 Holborn Road in Jamaica. The person who left the comment did not identify themselves. Here it is:

"Where are all the black people?! Are you too good for them huh woman!! your despicable you old saggy lady!! "

Apart from the offensive nature of the comment I'm particularly incensed by the suggestion that I'm a racist. What Anonymous doesn't want to admit is that we Jamaicans are a mixture of all races and colours. Surely this is what the Jamaican coat of arms represents!
Out of many, one people ... I myself am a mixture ... Take my father's family for example! His father was a French Jew from Bas-Rhin, Alsace; his mother, though Catholic, was the daughter of a Sephardic Jew whose family, the Rodrigues Da Costas, I have managed to trace back to 1740. On my mother's side I am the product, I am sure, of both slaves and slave-owners, though it has been difficult for me to go back far enough to find the records that document this. Jamaica is home to people from all over the world and of all shades. Those of us whose families have lived there for a long while are the products of slavery, whether we wish to admit it or not. Thus I take exception to the above comment. I write about my family as I know it, based on my research.

Now, back to Sarah Letitia Brown's commonplace book. My great aunt, Susan Saunders Brown, the eldest of Sarah Letitia Brown's children, wrote four love poems in her mother's book. I have not been able to find their derivation, so for all I know they may be original. Here is one, titled " Love and Physic", and in brackets, "Leep[sic] Year", signed SSB, and dated 1.11.80.

Susan married a widower, John Cassis, on October 17th, 1883. John's first wife, Christiana Augusta Breckenridge, had died of cancer in 1880. Another of Susan's poems, also dated 1.11.80, is titled "Sympathy" and I wonder if it was directed to John. Did her commiseration for his loss eventually lead to love and then marriage? He was much older than her, aged 44 at their marriage while she was only 23. John already had a family of five children by his first wife. The eldest, Catherine, was a year older than Susan. Susan and John between them had four children, two of whom died young, and it seems that Susan did not get over the loss of her youngest, Laura, who died at five weeks, in 1891. Susan died in the Lunatic Asylum, now known as Bellevue Hospital, in November 1899. She may well have been suffering from depression as a result of the loss of her youngest child.

Susan and John's second son, John Madison Cassis, emigrated to Toronto, Canada where he married Fanny Stevens, of Todmorden, Ontario. They had seven children. Here is a picture of John in his garden in Toronto, with his next-door neighbour. John is on the left.

In my next post I'll mention a few other contributors to the commonplace book, one of them my grandfather, William Dey Smedmore.

The Commonplace Book -- a Forensic Analysis

2008-09-13T14:54:00.041-04:00

I've spent the past few weeks examining Sarah Letitia Brown's Commonplace Book. It's very fragile and I'm wondering how best to preserve it. As I wrote in my last post, the covers are gone, the stitching is coming loose as are several of the pages, and the pages themselves are very fragile and show signs of acidification. I'm thinking of taking it to a conservator in the hope that it can be preserved. My first choice would be Felton Bookbinding in Georgetown. Keith Felton has done excellent work with books from the Canadiana Collection at the Mississauga Library System.

In the mean time I'm considering both scanning and transcribing the pages which will be an awesome task! But first, let me describe the book and its contents. The pages are numbered and I wonder if the entries are in chronological order. If so, the first page with an actual date is page 13, a poem titled "Future -- in Darkness", of four verses, each four lines, dated 9th Sept. 1867 and signed "Robt. Raw, Port Royal." This, as I mentioned previously, was the Reverend Robert Raw, a Methodist minister who was known to be stationed in Port Royal between 1863 and 1868, and who had baptized some of the Brown children. The question I ask myself, then, is this: are pages 1 to 12 written prior to 1867? Unfortunately, they are not signed and I have been able to identify only two of the poems in this section, thanks to Google! One on page 10 is titled "Love" and begins:

"Why should I blush to own I love
'Tis love that rules the realms above;
Why should I blush to own to all
That virtue holds my heart in thrall?"

This poem, "To Love", I discovered is by Henry Kirke White,a Nottingham poet born in 1785 who died in 1806. Here is his portrait.

The other poem I was able to identify is titled "Italian Song", and is five stanzas of ten lines each. It comes from a book by William Henry Giles Kingston,(1814-1880) titled The Pirate of the Mediterranean, and is actually headed "Nina's Song". Kingston was born in London and wrote tales for boys, and spent most of his youth in Oporto, Portugal. To be honest, I never heard of either of these writers and one would have to guess that their fame has long since died out, but they must have been still popular when these poems were written in the commonplace book.

The next poem that I identified was actually written by an author whose name I recognized, Felicia Hemans, and was so indicated in the book. It was "The Bride's Lament" and is actually titled "The Bride of the Greek Isles", originally published in 1825 in New Monthly Magazine.

Felicia Hemans (1793-1835), born Felicia Dorothea Brown, was an English poet no longer in vogue. Her one famous poem which many may remember is "Casabianca", the first line of which is:

"The boy stood on the burning deck"

This entry is actually signed, but here again is a mystery. At the bottom of the poem is "Julia, Kingston". Who was Julia? I wish I knew! I'm intrigued by the fact that she clearly indicates she wasn't from Port Royal. Perhaps she was visiting the Brown family.

The entries in the commonplace book are representative of people who knew, understood and loved the literature of their period, some of it well known today, the rest not so much. On page 16 is an excerpt from "The Excursion" by William Wordsworth, followed by four lines of a poem from Drifted Snow Flakes, or Poetical Gatherings from Many Authors by Jane Hamilton Thomas on whom I can find nothing! This short excerpt is signed "Anna". Again, who is Anna? She indicated that the poem was by that prolific author, Anonymous.

Further on I found two verses from "The Corsair" by Byron, then on page 22 a poem in three stanzas, titled "Flora's Feast", which comes from Reunido, and Fugitive Pieces, 1864, by Anna Telluz. I can find nothing on line about Anna Telluz. I wonder if Anne Michaels got the idea for the title of her 1996 novel from the subtitle of this book?

This entry is initialled HDCM, and dated 22/2/71, February 22nd, 1871. On the preceding page is a beautiful illustration by the said HDCM.

I was able to find out something about this contributor. He was Henry DeClondesley Mitchell, and in the 1878 Kingston Directory he is listed as cashier at the Island Treasury. He was married to Susan Madeline Gully and in 1871 was living at 3 East Street.

I was surprised to find on page 30 an excerpt "from the Russian of Dershavin, translated by Dr. Bowring". From my research I discovered that it was written by Gavrila Romanovich Derzhavin, 1743-1816,

considered the greatest Russian poet before Pushkin. His works were translated by Sir John Bowring, 1792-1872, the fourth Governor of Hong Kong.

All in all, this commonplace book is an eclectic mix of poetry and prose which will keep me occupied for a good long time. In my next post I'll write about some of the people who contributed to the book and whom I've been able to identify.

Sarah Letitia Brown's Commonplace Book

2008-08-19T13:14:00.025-04:00

The last time I saw my mother was in April 1976 when we all went to Jamaica to help celebrate my parents' 50th wedding anniversary. They were married April 27, 1926 at the Kingston Parish Church and had wedding pictures taken at my mother's home at 49 Beeston Street. Here is a picture of their wedding party:

My mother is seated in front, with my father at her right. Benind her is her bridesmaid, Vera Cox (who married Errol Henriques), and beside Vera is the best man, Julian Smedmore, my mother's youngest brother. The little boy at the left of the picture is Jack Duffus, who was the ring bearer.

All the parties who took part in my parents' wedding were at the fiftieth anniversary and posed for this photo:

From the left they are Vera Henriques, my mother, my father, Julian Smedmore and Jack Duffus. Sadly they are now all gone. My mother has planned to visit us in Ontario in early 1978 but died suddenly in her sleep on December 14, 1977. I made the trip down to Jamaica for her funeral and brought back with me various of her belongings such as photographs, jewellry, some letters, and a rather battered looking book, with no cover. The book meant nothing to me at the time ... it appeared to be full of handwritten verse and some prose, with the occasional illustration of a flower. There were different coloured pages, though rather acidified and the spine, such as it was, was falling apart. One could see that it had been sewn and that there had been a cover at one point.

It was some time before I really began to look carefully at this book. I discovered that some of the entries had initials beside them and with some effort I have been able to identify most of the people who wrote these entries. Only two entries have actual names beside them: one is "Julia", the other "Anna". (I think I know who Anna was.) A few have dates, and these are quite old. The earliest is 1867, and appears on page 13 ... the pages are numbered ... so for all we know the entries on the pages before this may be even earlier. Since the book was in my mother's possession ... though I never saw it in her lifetime ... it must have come down to her from one of her parents. I have no solid evidence to prove this but I believe the book may have belonged to my mother's grandmother, Sarah Letitia Brown. I shall try to explain why I believe this.

My mother never spoke of her grandparents, probably because she didn't know them. Her grandfather, Daniel Elias Brown, died before she was born and she would have been only four years old when her grandmother, Sarah, died. What little I know about Sarah comes only from the research I have done. When I first began the research I questioned my uncle, Rodney Smedmore, about the family. He knew that his grandfather was Daniel Elias Brown but he thought that his grandmother had been a Miss Williamson who had married a McDonald, and then married Daniel on the death of her husband. He knew this because his family knew Daniel's step-daughter, Elizabeth McDonald who married George Christopher Baylis, who like my grandfather, William Dey Smedmdore, was employed at the Port Royal Dockyard. So I searched for the record of Sarah's first marriage and found that her maiden name was Huggins, not Williamson. (I have no idea where Rodney got that name ... A cautionary warning to anyone doing research: check the family stories carefully. Quite often there are mistakes in people's memory!)

I found Sarah's baptism in the Port Royal Copy Register. It's difficult to reproduce the image here. According to the record she was born in Port Royal on August 21, 1832 and baptized by the Rev. T. Alves on October 28th. Her parents were James and Mary Huggins of Port Royal and she is described as being "of colour". She married Donald McDonald, a shoemaker of Port Royal and they had two daughters, Elizabeth and Mary. Donald apparently died shortly after the birth of the second child and Sarah remarried to my grandfather, Daniel Elias Brown. They had seven children, all born in Port Royal. Sarah died in 1898 in Kingston. Daniel had died seven years earlier.

Not much to go on, so why do I think that the book I found was hers? Well, based on one entry, by Robert Raw, dated 9th September 1867, I think it has to belong to her. Robert Raw was the Methodist minister in Port Royal between 1863 and 1868. He baptized three of Sarah's children: Sarah Letitia Webster in 1863, Richard Elias in 1866, and Bertha Rose (who was actually baptized Bertha Raw but seems to have changed her middle name) in 1868. At the time that Robert Raw wrote his verse in the book Sarah Letitia Brown was then pregnant with Bertha.

Why do I call it a commonplace book? Wikipedia defines "commonplace book" as "a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books... Each commonplace book was unique in its creator's particular interests". In a way this little book reminds me of the autograph books I grew up with, where one would invite one's friends to write little verses or comments. The contents of this book reflect the literary interests of the Brown family and their friends and is a window into their lives.

In my next post I will go into more detail about the commonplace book and the people who wrote in it.

My Maternal Family -- Browns, Huggins, Vashons

2008-08-11T17:00:00.030-04:00

I've been remiss in updating my blog for the past month. I've been spending time working on a presentation for a recent conference, African Roots in Canada, organized by the Toronto Branch of the Ontario Genealogical Society in cooperation with the Ontario Black History Society and the Toronto Public Library. The conference took place last Saturday, August 9th, 2008, at the North York Central Library, and was well attended with about 75 people registered. My part in this first-time conference was a presentation on Researching Your Jamaican Ancestry from Canada. At the end of my presentation I showed slides of a few records from my Brown ancestry. It occurs to me that I wrote one post, back on April 1st, 2008, about the Browns, but never followed up on them even though I indicated I would. So I thought I might expand on the Brown family to the best of my ability, showing some of the records I've come across in my research.

As I wrote in the earlier post, the Brown family came from Port Royal. I do not know for sure exactly where they lived there, but it could have been on a street similar to this one.

As I have already written, my great-grandfather, Daniel Elias Brown, was a shipwright, employed at the Port Royal Dockyard. I have not, so far, been able to find out much about his parents. He was born in Kingston 25 February 1827, on King Street, the son of Edward and Sarah Brown, and baptized on 3 May 1827. I have no further information on his parents, except that they had three other children, that I've found -- a daughter, Sarah Saunders Brown, born 24 December 1828 in Pink Lane, Kingston,and baptized in April 1828; another daughter, Eliza, born 9 May 1832 in Princes Street, Kingston, and a son, Jonas, born 25 August 1834, also in Princes Street. Both Eliza and Jonas were baptized 8 January 1837.

So, as I've indicated in my title, this is not just the story of the Brown family. Unable to find out more about Daniel's parents' origins, I moved to his wife's family. Daniel married a widow, Sarah Letitia McDonald. Sarah had married one Donald McDonald, a shoemaker in Port Royal, in 1851 in Port Royal. They were married in the Wesleyan Methodist Church by the Rev. William Tyson. This marriage record, part of the Dissenter Marriage Registers microfilmed by the Mormons, does not give the ages or names of parents of the parties, though it does indicate that permission was given for the bride to be married by her mother, "Mary Smith, surviving parent", whereas the groom was listed as being of "full age". By that we can deduce that Donald was over 21 and Sarah was not. Sarah's full name was given as Sarah Letitia Huggins, and I discovered in my research that her parents were James Vashon Huggins and Mary Goldson, both of Port Royal. By this time James Huggins was dead and Mary Huggins had remarried in 1845 to George Pitblade Smith.

Donald and Sarah had two daughters, Elizabeth Huggins McDonald, born 1852, and Mary Noel, born 1854. I have so far been unable to find a burial record in Port Royal for Donald McDonald, who must have died prior to 1858 when Sarah married Daniel Elias Brown. Here is the record of their marriage, from the Dissenter Marriage Registers for Port Royal:

This marriage also took place in the Wesleyan Methodist denomination; the officiating minister was the Rev. James Cox, another person who fits into my family research, though again, I have been unable to find out much about him except for a small entry in Philip Wright's Monumental Inscriptions of Jamaica, published by the Society of Genealogists in 1966. According to a mural tablet in the Wesley Church, Tower Street, "the Rev. James Cox died at Morant Bay, 30 May 1859, aged 55", apparently not too long after he married Daniel and Sarah. In corresponding with another Cox researcher I have learned that James Cox may have been born in Bermuda. He settled in Jamaica, married and fathered two sons that I know of: Theophilus Pugh Cox, born about 1844, who became the Headmaster of the Government Training College, Spanish Town, and Henry Martyn Hill Cox, born about 1845, who also became a Methodist minister. These brothers married two sisters, Mary Ann Barned and Lucinda Baker Barned, respectively.

Daniel, in marrying Sarah, took on her two daughters who would have been six and four years old, and not long after began a family of his own, seven children in all, six daughters and a son. All were born in Port Royal and baptized there in the Wesleyan Methodist church. I have written about some of them in previous posts -- Susan Saunders Brown who married John Cassis; my grandmother, Amanda, who married William Dey Smedmore; Bertha Rose who married Charles Percival Esterine and emigrated to New York; and Theresa Eugenie, who never married. It appears that, like the Smedmore family, the Brown family also left Port Royal at some point to settle in Kingston, since Daniel Elias Brown died there 7 April 1891, at 115 East Street. His death was registered by his daughter, Sarah Letitia Webster Brown, whose address was given as 49 Rose Lane, and that is where Sarah, Daniel's widow, died 25 July 1898. Perhaps Daniel and Sarah had lived at 115 East Street and after he died she went to live with her unmarried daughter, Sarah, who had been named after her.

In my next post I will pursue the story of Sarah Letitia Brown, my great-grandmother and her family history.

Coming to America -- Uncle Joe and Candid Camera

2008-07-07T15:32:00.022-04:00

Do you remember this catchy little theme song?

When it's least expected - you're elected. You're the star today
Smile! You're on Candid Camera!
With a hocus-pocus - you're in focus. It's your lucky day
Smile! You're on Candid Camera!

It's fun to laugh at yourself. It's a tonic, tried and true.
It's fun to laugh at yourself as other people do.

How's your sense of humor? There's a rumor: Laughter's on its way.
Smile! You're on Candid Camera! Smile! You're on Candid Camera!

Candid Camera was a really popular show, one of the earliest reality shows, the premise of which was to catch people off guard "in the act of being themselves", as the show's creator, Allen Funt, claimed.

You may also remember Allen Funt's sidekick, Durward Kirby.

Durward Kirby appeared on Candid Camera between 1961 and 1966. I also remember him on the Garry Moore Show and the Carol Burnett Show.

I used to watch Candid Camera while we lived in Winnipeg. We had settled there in 1960 after leaving Trinidad and Jamaica. As I mentioned in my last post, we visited Uncle Joe for a few days en route from Jamaica to Canada. I didn't expect to see Uncle Joe again for quite some time, if at all, until one afternoon in 1964 when I saw him on Candid Camera. There were four vignettes on the half-hour show, and the last one was the one Uncle Joe was on. The set-up was this: Uncle Joe, whose job at the time apparently was to run errands, was called to an office in Manhattan. There, behind a screen, was a man who asked Joe to take his pants to the cleaners, and a pair of shoes to be shined. The trick to this sequence was that the pants had three legs. What Candid Camera wanted to elicit was Joe's reaction to this odd pair of pants.

Well, he looked the pants over carefully. The man behind the screen asked him to check the pockets to make sure nothing was left in them,

and that was when Uncle Joe realized that the pants not only had three back pockets, but had three legs! Uncle Joe, however, did not react right away. In answer to the comments by the man behind the screen he admired the cut and material of the pants, and even the colour, but he did comment that there were too many back pockets. Next the man asked Joe to take his shoes to be cleaned, and proceeded to pass three shoes over the top of the screen -- a left shoe, a right shoe and a middle shoe. Once again, Joe did not react. Then he was asked to call a number to speak to the man's wife, and of course, was connected to Candid Camera. He didn't seem to catch on then, until the man came from behind the screen and told him he was on Candid Camera.

Joe took it well. He laughed and said: "You know what the problem was? You had too many pockets!" And he smiled into the camera.

After I saw the show I wrote to Uncle Joe to ask him if it really was him on Candid Camera. He wrote back to assure me that it was indeed him, but he had a different take on his reaction to the skit, in comparison to comments made by Allen Funt. Funt stated that Joe just didn't want to believe what he was seeing, hence showed no reaction. According to Uncle Joe, he didn't want to embarrass the man who apparently had a pair of pants with three legs.

The last time we saw Uncle Joe was when he visited us in 1973. We were living in Burlington, Ontario by then and my parents had come up to visit us. Joe and Alice took a bus from New York to spend a few days in Burlington and so the brothers were united for the last time. Here they are, with Alice. You can see the strong family resemblance between my Dad and Uncle Joe.

The Watergate scandal was in the news while Joe and Alice were visiting us. I asked Uncle Joe what he thought of the affair and he got very excited about it. I don't know whether or not Uncle Joe was a Democrat, of if he had any political leanings, but he was highly incensed about Watergate and the part played by H. R. Haldenman and John Erlichman.

"Ehrlichman", he said. "Do you know what the name means in German? 'Ehrlich' means 'honest, honourable' ... 'Ehrlichman' means 'honourable man'!"

Uncle Joe died the next year in 1974 of liver failure. Alice, who was eleven years younger than Joe, lived for another thirty years, dying in April 2004 in a nursing home.

Coming to America -- Visiting Uncle Joe

2008-06-08T14:32:00.019-04:00

In April 1960 we left Trinidad to return to Canada, via Jamaica. We flew from Piarco Airport, near Port-of-Spain
and arrived at Palisadoes Airport, near Kingston,
where we planned to stay with family for a week or so before going to Canada. The plan was that we would fly to Toronto via New York and visit my Uncle Joe for about three days. In order to stay even for that space of time we had to get visas from the US consulate.

We flew to New York from Palisadoes on BOAC, British Overseas Airway Corporation, now known as British Air. (The acronym was sometimes humourously rendered as "Better on a Camel", much the same way that BWIA (British West Indian Airways) was known colloquially as "But Will it Arrive" or Better Walk if Able".) I remember that we flew first class, which entailed excellent food served on fine china and complimentary wine and liquor! Ah, those were the days of air travel. We shall not see their like again.

We landed at LaGuardia Airport and were met by Uncle Joe and his wife, Alice. We went by cab to their apartment at 1575 Theriot Avenue in the Bronx.As we had only three days I really wanted to see as much of New York City as I could. Uncle Joe, however, was not that keen on the idea. When I expressed the desire to visit the Empire State Building, his response, in his best Bronx accent, was: "The Empire State Building? That's for hicks!" It turned out that Uncle Joe had never gone there nor had he visited the Rockefeller Centre, the United Nations, or any of those other place the average tourist wants to see. Nevertheless he complied and we travelled by subway and managed to pack in quite a few places of interest.

I had hoped to see my Uncle Leo as well, but that Joe adamantly refused to arrange. He was, apparently, estranged from his brother and would have nothing to do with him. Alice said that Leo had "done something" to Joe which he could not forgive. I had the impression it had something to do with money. Uncle Leo, it appeared, was inclined to frequent the track where he bet whatever money he had on the horses, not always successfully. The impression I got was that Leo, whose occupation was that of master house painter, would work at various jobs in order to make enough money to go to the races. I am sorry now that I did not insist on knowing more about him because I have found Leo to be quite elusive. I cannot find when and how he got to New York, nor can I find him in any census. My searches on Ancestry have turned up only one record for him ... his draft card from the World War II Draft Registration, 1942, known as the "old man's registration" for those born between 1877 and 1897. Here is the front of Leo's card:

On the other side of the card he is described as five ft. 3 1/2 inches tall, 145 lbs., with blue eyes, grey hair and a ruddy complexion, and with a scar on his right wrist. He was then 47 years old, and according to the front of the card, was unemployed. And that's all I know about him.

At the end of our three day visit we left Joe and Alice. Here I am with Alice in the lobby of the apartment building on Theriot Avenue.I should point out that I was then expecting our second child. And here are Joe and Alice at the airport, seeing us off to Toronto.

This wasn't the last time we saw Uncle Joe, but more of that in my next post.

Coming to America -- My Surprising Uncle Joe

2008-05-09T12:40:00.000-04:00

Joseph Dudley Levy was the youngest of the Levy family. He may have been the first one to leave Jamaica and go to New York, but I cannot be sure of this, as I have not so far been able to find any record of his brother, Leo's emigration, also to New York. As I mentioned in a previous post, Joe sailed from Port Antonio on board the ss Catherine Cuneo, on August 28th, 1917, and arrived at the Port of New York on September 4th. According to the ship's manifest he was age seventeen, and going to a Mrs. Warner, a friend, at 346 Summer Avenue, Brooklyn, New York. I have no idea who this Mrs. Warner might have been. Under the column "Name and complete address of nearest relative or friend in country whence alien came", Joe listed his mother, Mrs. Alice Levy, 22 Beeston Street, Kingston, Jamaica. Also on the first page of the manifest is a column headed "Race or People". It is typical of the mindset of the American authorities at that time that anyone coming from Jamaica was immediately labelled "African Black". Thus was my Uncle Joe labelled, yet at the same time he was described as fair complexion, with brown eyes and brown hair, and with a deformed right thumb.

What happened to him immediately after his arrival in New York is a mystery, as I have been unable to find him in the 1920 census. However, he does show up in the 1930 census for Manhattan, District 787, as a boarder in a household on 113th Street, headed by one Harry Petrous. It appears to have been some kind of tenement, and also in the same household were two of Joe's cousins, Adwin and Aaron Da Costa, the eldest and youngest sons of Alice's brother, Melbourne Rodrigues Da Costa. But now comes the curious part! For Joe is no longer Joseph Levy, but instead is calling himself Joseph Lavell, and in the column for birthplace he gives the information that he was born in Pennsylvania!

Here I must digress for a moment. I knew that Uncle Joe had changed his name to Lavell -- though whether or not he did it officially is not known. His rationale for doing this was that he would have faced discrimination in New York with a Jewish name, even though he was not Jewish but Catholic. I have a sneaky feeling that the name change may have had something to do with his eventual marriage, though at the time of the 1930 census he was listed as single, and in fact did not get married until 5 June 1937, but it's possible that he had already met his future wife, Alice Savitski, who interestingly enough, was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Was this why Joe claimed from then on to have been born there?

Joe applied for and received United States citizenship in November 1924. I am very grateful to a researcher in New York, David Priever, who searched for me and found Joe's Declaration of Intention, in which his name is definitely given as Joseph Dudley Levy.

It appears, then, that Joe changed his name some time between his declaration of intention to become a US citizen and 1930 when he was calling himself Joseph Lavell.

I first met my Uncle Joe in person in 1955 when he came to Jamaica for a visit. It had been a very long time since he had seen my father, his brother. I imagine that he knew my mother, since the Smedmores lived across the street from the Levy family on Beeston Street. In fact, when my uncle, Norman Dey Smedmore, emigrated to New York in 1918 he gave Joe's name on the manifest as the person he was going to in New York City. Joe's address at the time was 1121 Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn. Although by now Joe was married he did not bring Alice with him, as she apparently did not like the idea of flying. I remember my Uncle Joe as being very American indeed in accent and behaviour. I know that my father was extremely happy to see him again after all that time.

In my next post I'll write about my visit to New York with my family, when we stayed for three days with Uncle Joe and Alice and got to know him better.

Father Joseph Dupont's Statue

2008-05-03T12:12:00.010-04:00

It's been a while since my last post. A little over two weeks ago I had surgery -- total knee replacement, and so it's slowed me down a bit.

I want to return briefly to the 1907 Earthquake and one of the stories of the quake, the damage to the statue of Father Joseph Dupont. You may remember that this is what it looked like after the earthquake:

The statue was quite badly damaged as you can see. You may also remember that I showed another photo, taken about 1940, showing the statue after it had been repaired.

I didn't give much thought to what had happened in between, such as when was the repair done and how it was accomplished, until, while browsing through Father Francis X. Delaney's History of the Catholic Church in Jamaica, B.W.I., 1494 to 1929 (New York: Jesuit Mission Press, 1930) I came across the story behind the repair of the statue. On page 256, Father Delaney writes:

"Since the day of the great earthquake, January 14, 1907, the pedestal that supported the statue of Father Dupont, had stood empty in the Kingston Parade. It had become a spectacle of the great disaster, as well as of civic neglect and ingratitude. In the course of the year 1924, Mr. Alexander Falla started a movement to have the monument restored. A public-spirited citizen, Mr. S. J. Streadwick, opened the fund, and Mr. James Dunn contributed the substantial sum of fifty pounds. The editors of Catholic Opinion and of the daily Gleaner took up the cause and the result was that about two hundred and twenty pounds were collected from people of every class and creed. The statue was publicly unveiled by the Governor of Jamaica, Sir Edward Stubbs, and presented to the city of Kingston, represented by the Mayor, Honorable A. E. DaCosta, on Sunday, September 11, 1927, the year which marks the eightieth anniversary of Father Dupont's coming to Jamaica and the very day which marks the fortieth anniversary of Father Dupont's leaving his adopted Jamaica for his home in Heaven".

This was indeed an ecumnical effort to restore Father Dupont's statue. S. J. Streadwick, for example, was a staunch Anglican, yet, as Father Delaney writes, people of all classes and creeds moved together to subscribe to the statue's repair.

I'm interested in Father Dupont because he baptized some of the children of my great grandparents, Jacob Rodrigues Da Costa and his wife, Selina Jane Roberts. Here, from Father Delaney's book, is a picture of Father Dupont.

According to a brief story in the Gleaner of January 28, 2007, Father Dupont was born in Savoy, France in 1809, and came to Jamaica as a priest in 1847 where he remained for forty years ministering to the poor and establishing missions all over the island. The original statue to his memory was erected in 1892, by public subscription and the Gleaner notes that Father Dupont was the only clergyman to have a statue erected in his honour in Jamaica, so he must have been universally loved and respected.

Remembering My Brother, Micky

2008-04-02T19:36:00.017-04:00

If he had lived, my brother Micky would have been eighty-one years old today. Sadly, he died far too young, at thirty-six, leaving a wife and three very young children. This post is dedicated to his memory.

My parents, Michael Leopold Levy and Maud Dey Smedmore, were married April 27, 1926. A year later, April 2, 1927, their eldest child, a son, was born and christened Michael Owen Dey Levy, but known by everyone as Micky. He was the first nephew and grandchild in the family. Although my mother was one of nine Smedmore children, and my father, Michael, was one of seven, their generation had not proved as fruitful. Only two of the Smedmores were married by 1927 -- my uncle Lucius, who had two daughters, and my mother. Two Smedmore men, Rodney and Julian would marry eventually but they had no children. Micky, therefore, occupied a unique place as the first boy in that generation. Here he is with his mother, probably at their first house on Anderson Road:

My mother kept his hair long till he was about two years old, a fact he hated to be reminded of. Here he is again, sitting on the steps of the house at Anderson Road.

My mother did not get pregnant again until Micky was about six, so he was the only child for quite a while and, according to my mother, quite spoilt by his aunts and uncles. My mother had a miscarriage, which was a great disappointment to her, and then shortly after became pregnant with me and I was born at the end of May in 1935, by which time Micky was eight years old. He had been the favourite of my great aunt, Tess, but when I came along Aunt Tess turned all her attention to the new baby and "Micky's nose was out of joint", as my mother put it. This was her explanation for why we were not close as brother and sister, but I think the difference in age had a lot to do with it.

Micky went to school at Jamaica College when Reginald Murray, known as "Reggie", was Headmaster.

I believe he sat the Senior Cambridge Exam but left school without going on to the Cambridge Higher Schools Examination. With the help of a family friend, Cyril Tame, Micky went to work at Barclays Bank in Kingston, where he worked for many years. Men who joined the Bank at that time could expect to be sent all over the island and even to other islands where the Bank had branches, so I did not see much of Micky in this time period. One of his postings was to Trinidad so he was away for some time and there was little chance for us to develop a relationship. In fact, I would have to say that our relationship consisted of a certain amount of hero worship on my part and bare tolerance on his. He was a dreadful tease and would make my life quite miserable at times, so we just weren't that close.

Micky was incredibly popular, however, with his friends both male and female. He was very involved in rifle and pistol shooting and competed in the sport and was also a motor car enthusiast and took part in motor rallies.

One of his favourite sports was hunting alligators,(actually crocodiles), which are now an endangered species in Jamaica, but were fair game back in the forties and fifties. He would tell the story of how, on one of his alligator hunting expeditions, his life was saved by the gristle in his mother's roast beef sandwich. Micky was squatting by the shore, eating his sandwich, and turned to spit out a piece of gristle. There, aproaching him, was an alligator with its jaws wide open. He just had time to grab his rifle and shoot it.

At a time when I was older and we could have developed a closer relationship we were once again separated by circumstances. Micky got married and emigrated to Canada where his eldest child was born. Here he is, with his son, Michael, reading one of his favourite magazines.

By the time he and his family returned to Jamaica it was I who was getting married and leaving the island. We would see each other whenever I returned home for a visit. In 1963, when he died of a cerebral haemorrhage, I was living in Winnipeg. We had never really gotten to know each other as adults, and that is what I regret most of all.

The Levy Family -- Coming to America

2008-03-07T06:55:00.022-05:00

Of the four surviving children of Leopold and Alice Levy three went to the United States. My father, Michael, was the only one who remained in Jamaica, to take care of his mother who had been widowed in 1917. Michael joined the Civil Service in 1908 at the age of nineteen and remained there until his retirement at age sixty. Here is a view of the Governernment Buildings as they would have been in his time there.

Michael worked in the Administrator General's office, eventually becoming Trustee in Bankruptcy in 1948. This photo of him was taken inside the government offices.

After my father retired from the Civil Service he took another job, as his pension was not large enough to support the family, but that's another story ... For now I want to write about my aunt and uncles who did not remain in Jamaica but made a life for themselves in America.

The story of Jamaicans is one of movement away from Jamaica ... to other islands, to Central and South America, to the United States, to Britain and to Canada, always on the lookout for a better life, a better job, or perhaps just to get away. Just as Jamaica attracted all sorts of people from various parts of the world so too Jamaicans have left the island and settled elsewhere. In the 1900s they flocked to the United States, most of them to live in New York. On pages of the 1930 U.S. Federal Census one finds Jamaicans living together in groups in such boroughs as Manhattan.

The Ellis Island database is a wonderful source for this movement of people to the U.S. Another great source is the subscription website, Ancestry. I have used both to try to find information on my father's siblings. I have found his sister, Essie and his brother, Joseph, travelling to New York, but Leo, the other brother, continues to elude me. More of him later.

At this point I must explain that I did know Uncle Joe, who visited Jamaica in the 1950s and whom I visited with my family in 1960 when we left Jamaica to go to Canada. Unfortunately, at that time I wasn't particularly interested in family history research and didn't ask the questions I should have, so much of what I now know about my uncle Joe has been through research carried out some time after his death.

The same year that my grandfather Leopold died Joe left Jamaica to go to the U.S. The story I was told about why my father's siblings left Jamaica was this: my grandmother, Alice, was afraid that the younger boys would have to join up to fight in the first World War. (My father, apparently, was not eligible to join up because of some medical reason.) She wanted them to go the U.S. because America wasn't in the war. Joe arrived in New York in September 1917, but the U.S. had entered the war on April 6, 1917, so this story doesn't really make sense to me. At any rate, I found Joe in the Ellis Island database, travelling to New York on board the ss Catherine Cuneo, leaving Port Antonio on August 28th and arriving on September 5th. Here is what the first page of the ship's manifest looks like.

Under the column "Name and complete address of nearest relative of friend in country whence alien came" Joe gave his mother's name and this is how I knew that by 1917 she was living at 22 Beeston Street. On page two of the manifest, under the heading "Whether going to join a relative or frined...", Joe gave the name, "Mrs. Warner (friend), 346 Summer Avenue, Brooklyn, N.Y." I have no idea who this Mrs. Warner could be! So often the records we find produce more questions than answers.

In my next post I'll write about some of the other surprising things I learned about my uncle Joe.

Falling Walls -- the 1907 Earthquake -- part 2

2008-02-10T14:14:00.000-05:00

It is not known exactly how many people perished in the 1907 earthquake and subsequent fire that ravaged the city of Kingston on January 14th, 1907. Estimates range from 600 to 1000. Lists of the dead and injured can be found on line: on the Jamaican Family Search website, as reported in the Gleaner of January 18, 1907 and a further list of victims in the paper of January 21, 1907. The Genealogy of Jamaica webpage also lists victims of the earthquake, extracted from the Gleaner of March 2, 1907. I have spent some time going through the death registrations for 1907 for Kingston. There are names that appear on the death lists for whom there is no registration, and conversely, death registrations for some whose names are not on the lists. For the majority of those killed on January 14th the cause of death given is "Killed by falling walls". Not everyone died instantly; many died later in hospitals as a result of their injuries or of tetanus from amputation of a limb or limbs. The Mayor of Kingston, Charles Walter Tait, was one who died later -- on 10 February 1907, of "concussion of the spine".

The downtown business area of Kingston was most affected by the quake. Some places of business lost a number of workers. Nine staff members at the Myrtle Bank Hotel were killed. Here are two postcards of the Myrtle Bank Hotel, before and after the earthquake:

I found death registrations for six members of the staff of Emanuel Lyons and Sons Ltd. at the corner of King and Harbour Streets. This postcard of what was left of the building shows how devastating the damage must have been.

As I read through the records I found a variety of comments under cause of death. One woman, Lucinda Allen of 4 James Steet, married, age 40, died "apparently from fright -- no injury". Thomas Bernard Philpotts, cigar maker, age 57, died of "heart disease and fright due to the earthquake". Another woman, Henrietta Pinnock, "died after premature delivery brought on by shock received from the earthquake". One of the saddest I found was the record for a little girl, Emily Letitia Jopp, age 6. On her record this note was added: "This little girl was found dead with a slate beside her on which she had just written 'God is Love'".

It would be too easy to say that people died because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time -- that sentiment could refer to all those who lost their lives, but some deaths stand out, such as that of Marcus Moses Delgado. Thanks to Stephen Delgado Porter I know something of Marcus' history. He was the son of Edwin Delgado and had married Miriam Brandon, daugher of Nathaniel Brandon. They had six children. In December 1904 Marcus emigrated to Cartagena, Colombia, to improve his fortune, leaving his wife and children in Kingston. He returned to his family at Christmas 1906 and on January 14th, 1907, went downtown to buy his daughter, Sybil, a birthday present -- that day was her eleventh birthday. Marcus was killed by falling walls, at the corner of Harbour and Duke Streets. He was 48 years old.

Another casualty,somewhat closer to me. was that of Bertie Bold Vendryes, the wife of Philip Camille Vendryes. Bertie was the daughter of George Christopher Baylis and his wife, Elizabeth McDonald. Elizabeth was the step-daughter of my great grandfather, Daniel Elias Brown who had married her mother, the widow of Donald McDonald. Not only were the Brown and the Baylis families close but George Baylis worked at the Dock Yard in Port Royal along with my grandfather, William Dey Smedmore. Bertie, who was pregnant at the time, died on January 23rd at Winchester Hospital,as a result of premature delivery brought on by the earthquake,as well as puerperal fever and heart failure. The child, a boy, Joseph, did not survive. Also killed on January 14th was Bertie's and Philip's daughter, Vida, who was nine years old. So Philip lost his wife, his daughter and his newly born son.

Many well-known buildings in Kingston and elsewhere in the island were damaged or totally destroyed. The Kingston Parish Church lost its steeple and its clock.

The tower and clock were restored but without the steeple.

Some odd things happened as a result of the earthquake; for example, the statue of Queen Victoria at the Parade was turned completely around,

and the statue of Father Joseph Dupont, one of the longest-serving Jesuit priests in Jamaica, was knocked completely off its pedestal.

It is no wonder that there are so many postcards of the damage wrought by this earthquake, the worst that Jamaica had experienced since the 1692 quake which destroyed the town of Port Royal. In a matter of a minute or two so many buildings in the city were reduced to rubble and so many people died. Yet the people of Kingston would come back from this devastation. As the Gleaner of January 18, 1907, put it:

"Just when we were talking of returning prosperity the hand of adversity has again touched us, and once more we are called upon to fight our way forward. We will do so. We will not allow ourselves to be terrified. We will build Kingston again and, with God's help, will build it better."

When the Earth Moves -- the 1907 Earthquake

2008-01-17T07:50:00.000-05:00

I'm leaving the Levy Family story for a while to write about the 1907 earthquake which happened 101 years ago on January 14th. This event fascinates me, not just because my family experienced it, but because it became more personal when I discovered that some family members had perished in the earthquake. I am fortunate to have several postcards showing the devastation after the event. This postcard shows a burnt out streetcar on King Street.

Growing up in Jamaica meant living with the dangers of two natural disasters -- hurricanes and earthquakes. I was less afraid of hurricanes because at least you could see them coming, whereas earthquakes give no warning of their arrival. I lived through Hurricane Charlie in August 1951 and I remember all the preparations we made at 5 Holborn Road to withstand that event. It was very scary while it lasted but we survived with some water damage and the loss of trees which, fortunately, did not damage the house in their fall. Charlie was the worst disaster to hit Jamaica since the 1907 earthquake and did a great deal of damage. You can read more about in on the website of the Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management. Here is a photo of the United Fruit Company in the aftermath of Hurricane Charlie.

In March 1957 Jamaica experienced an earthquake of some magnitude, the epicentre of which was located in the western part of the island where most of the damage was done. It was about 7:30 in the evening and I was outside playing badminton next door with my friend, Sheila Bewley, when the earthquake struck. We could literally see the earth moving in waves while the electrical wires sparked and flashed. It was terrifying for the brief time it lasted. I had felt other earthquakes but none as strong as that. Frightening as this earthquake was to me it could never equal what the inhabitants of Kingston must have felt that afternoon on January 14, 1907. I will not try to describe the earthquake -- there are many excellent accounts by eyewitnesses and others. I recommend the article from the Jamaica Gleaner Pieces of the Past. Another excellent source is the book, The Cruise of the Port Kingston, by W. R. Hall Caine (London: Collier, 1908) which includes an eyewitness account of the damage which amounted to £2,000,000 as a result of the earthquake and subsequent fires. Over 800 people lost their lives, mainly from falling walls during the earthquake.

Prior to the 1907 earthquake Jamaica had experienced one other devastating quake -- the Great Earthquake of 1692 which destroyed more than half of Port Royal. This event had such an effect on the Jamaican psyche that the event was commemorated until well into the 19th century every year on that day, June 7th, "as a perpetual anniversary fast", as per the The Great Earthquake: Acts of William and Mary,A.D. 1693, . By this statute all places of commerce were closed and the day was to be spent in the churches "with prayers, preaching and singing of psalms". The following police notice to this effect appeared as late as June of 1866:

Over the years merchants and shop-keepers complained about having to close their stores on that day and in 1866 the Gleaner reported that several merchants had been fined 24 shillings and costs for not closing their businesses on the day. By 1867 the Government passed Law 4 by which the Act was no longer to be read as obligatory but as permissive. However, well into the 1890s banks and government offices were closed on June 7th and services were held in the churches.

The earthquake of January 14, 1907, struck without warning. Hall Caine compares the noise of the quake as follows:
"The heightening roar is of eternal memory -- it was as though some vast herd of tigers, with warm blood already on their tongues, had been suddenly robbed of their prey".

His first view of the city of Kingston after the quake is devastating:

"At 3:32 Kingston was happy and well. At 3:33 the city was a hopeless wreck, with the very sun itself obscured from our vision. All man's handiwork of a generation, nay a whole century or more, was instantly flouted. A whole community lay in ruins and in tears, in suffering and in death."

The Gleaner published lists of the dead and injured but many more were killed whose names were never published nor were there death records for them. Many victims were buried in common graves. I have spent much time going through the 1907 death indexes and found whole sections labelled "Earthquake Book" which do not appear to have been microfilmed as I have been unable to find the actual registrations. Most of the dead seem to have been killed by falling walls -- this was a constantly recorded cause of death. When one looks at pictures of the wreckage it is hard to believe that anyone could survive such devastation. This postcard shows the damage at the corner of King and Harbour Streets.

My mother's family, living north of the Parade, were fortunate in that the house at 49 Beeston Street did not sustain serious damage, however the wall around the garden collapsed. By a strange accident of fate, my Uncle Rodney, who would have been eleven at the time, was outside playing in the garden when he was ordered by his father to go upstairs to practise the piano. He grumbled about going but did not disobey. Had he remained where he was he would have been killed by the falling wall.

Many others were not as fortunate. In my next post I'll write about some of the victims of the earthquake.

Looking for Levys -- a moveable family

2007-12-18T19:20:00.000-05:00

My first foray into genealogical research on my father's family was to find and confirm the births and deaths of all the children of Leopold Levy, the mystery man from Alsace, and his wife, my grandmother, Alice Rodrigues Da Costa. I had been given the names of some of the children. I knew that there had been a daughter, Daisy, who died in infancy and a son, Gustave, who also died young. I knew that my father was the eldest surviving and that he had a sister, Essie, and two brothers, Leo and Joe, and that all three were in the United States. We would hear occasionally from Joe, whereas nothing was ever heard from Leo. Essie did keep in touch with my mother, and I know that my Mom and Dad visited her and her husband, Erich, in Fort Worth where they lived. (They had also lived in Muskogee, Oklahoma). Later this correspondence would cease as a result of Essie's descent into dementia, though my mother did continue to keep in touch with the wife of their only son, Walter, my first cousin, also known as Bunky. I never met him nor did we ever correspond.

But to return to the Levy children. In my last post I mentioned that the eldest child, Daisy, was born a scant two months after the marriage of Leopold and Alice in Colon, Panama. Alice returned to Jamaica and Daisy was born 23 September 1886 at 106 King Street, and, as I mentioned, the informant on the birth register was a Mrs. Jacob Rodrigues Da Costa. The father's name on the record is Leopold Levy, occupation "merchant", abode "Colon", so Leopold was not present at his daughter's birth.

As I found the births of the other children, and the deaths of Daisy, Lucien and Gustave, I noticed two things: first, Leopold was the informant on only two of the ten events I found: the birth of Lucien, the second child, and the birth of Gustave, the fifth child. The second thing I noticed was that the addresses where these events took place kept changing. In a span of fourteen years the Levy family lived at seven different addresses in Kingston!

What was the significance of the fact that Leopold was the informant on only two events? Did it mean that he wasn't there? I've done a lot of research in Jamaica and looked at a great many birth records and generally speaking the father is usually the informant when the child's birth is registered. I'd be interested in hearing from other Jamaican researchers regarding this. Yet, with the Levy children the two people whose names show up on six of the ten events are those of Alice, their mother, and Selina Rodrigues Da Costa, Alice's mother. More about her in another post. Certainly on Essie's birth registration Leopold's address is given as Port-au-Prince, Haiti. On the other records it appears that Leopold is in Kingston, so why is he not the informant? In fact, the birth of the youngest, Joseph Dudley, was registered by a Cathy D'Costa who, I finally figured out, was most likely the wife of Eugene Da Costa, Alice's nephew, the son of her older brother, Joseph.

Then there's the moving around! Here is a list of events which shows the various addresses the family lived at:

-- Daisy is born in 1886 at 106 King Street

-- Lucien is born in November 1887 at 83 Church Street

-- Daisy dies in December 1887 at 83 Church Street

-- Michael is born in 1889 at 127 King Street

-- Lucien dies in 1890 at 125 Tower Street

-- Essie is born in 1891 at 125 Tower Street

-- Gustave is born in 1894 at 121 Orange Street

-- Leo is born in 1895 at 13 Rosemary Lane

-- Gustave dies in 1899 at 68 Duke Street

-- Joseph is born in 1900 at 68 Duke Street

Here is a section of Stark's 1897 map of Kingston showing the area where the family would have been.

Why did the family move around so much? Again, this is not usual. My research has found that families usually seemed to stay in one spot, so it was quite common to see children being born at the same address over the years. This would, of course,indicate that the family in question owned their home. I believe that the Levy family must have been renters and more than likely were not financially secure. Certainly if Leopold was away a great deal money may have been tight. Eventually my grandmother Alice would own a home, at 22 Beeston Street, but I do not know when this was purchased. When Joe emigrated to the United States in 1917 he gave his mother as next of kin and that was the address that was listed for her on the ship's manifest. I know that my father helped her to pay the mortgage on the house before he was married.

Sometimes finding vital records about the family one is researching can lead to more questions than answers. I'll continue with this in my next post.

Looking for the Levy Family

2007-11-18T06:39:00.000-05:00

Some time after I started researching my family I realized that I knew far more about my mother's family than I did about my father's. My Dad did not talk about his family very much. My mother told me what little she knew and my Uncle Rodney contributed information as well. As I've mentioned before, I did know my Grandmother Levy as a child. She lived across from my mother's family, the Smedmores, at 22 Beeston Street, on the south-west corner of Beeston Street and Love Lane.

I remember visiting her as a young child with my parents, but I don't think we went there very often. We seemed to spend more time with my mother's family. I don't know the reason for this, but I suspect my mother was somewhat resentful of her mother-in-law. The story I was told was that she and my father had been engaged for seven years before they could get married because my father had to support his mother and help pay the mortgage on her house. My grandmother was a widow. Her husband had died a long time ago and my father's three siblings had taken off for the United States so he was the only one left to take care of her. Another possible reason for this lack of closeness was that my grandmother was Catholic and my mother was a staunch Anglican, and though it seems strange in these days of ecumenicism, back then there was separation between denominations of the Christian religion. In fact, there were even differences of opinion between high-church and low-church Anglicans!

The stories I was told about my grandfather were that he was a Jew from Alsace, an oculist by trade, and that he travelled throughout the Caribbean and Central and South America. He is supposed to have brought back a gold nugget from Brazil which was made into two signet rings, one each for my brother and myself. This is a picture of my ring --

It is engraved with three of my four initials, D M L, intertwined. Did the gold nugget really come from Brazil? I have no evidence that he was ever in South America. The few records that I have for him show him in Port-au-Prince, Haiti; Colon, Panama; and Cuba, where he died. My grandfather was indeed a mystery.

Here's what I was told about him by my mother, who, by the way, never knew him as he had died some years before my parents married. His name was Leopold Levy and my father was given the name, Leopold, as a middle name. Leopold could speak seven languages ... again I wonder about this. Certainly he would have spoken French and most likely German, coming as he did from Alsace, a country which has bounced back and forth between France and Germany. He certainly would have spoken English and no doubt Spanish as he spent a great deal of his time in Spanish-speaking countries. I assume that as a Jew he may have spoken Yiddish ... that makes five languages and I've no idea what the other two would have been. I was told also that he was an oculist, and in fact that is stated in my father's entry in Who's Who Jamaica. Yet, in the few records I found that name Leopold his occupation is invariably given as "clerk", "bookkeeper", or "merchant".

How and where did he meet my grandmother? Well, that was another story, this time from my Uncle Rodney who told me that they had married in Haiti. What was my grandmother, Alice Rodrigues Da Costa, doing in Haiti? According once more to Rodney, she was operating a ferry service between Kingston and Haiti! I have not so far found any evidence of this. How many children did they have? Seven, I was told, but three had died young. And then there was this fanciful tale that Leopold had insisted the first child be brought up Jewish, but she died so he stated that the rest might as well be brought up Catholic! It sounded feasible, except that certain questions kept popping up in my mind. First of all, my grandmother was Catholic and Leopold was Jewish, so who would have married them? At that time I didn't think either the Jews or the Catholics would have done so. Secondly, if they were married in the Catholic Church then wouldn't Leopold have had to agree to bring up the children as Catholics? Finally, no child of this marriage would have been named in the synagogue as the mother was not Jewish. And the tale was pretty well disproved after I discovered a baptism, performed by Father William Spillman, S. J., in Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Kingston for the eldest child, Daisy Agatha.

So, here's what I knew so far. My grandfather, Leopold Levy, came from Alsace; met my grandmother in Haiti and married her; they had seven children and he died in Cuba. As for the children the names I had were Daisy, Lucien and Gustave, all of whom died in infancy, and the remaining four were my father, Michael, and his siblings, Essie, Leo and Joe, all three of whom moved to the United States. When I began researching the family I started with birth records for the children, all of whom were born in Kingston, between 1886 and 1900, and it was not difficult to find registrations of their births in the microfilm records of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), aka Mormons. I have spent a great deal of time at an LDS Family History Centre and I am grateful to the Mormons for microfilming many Jamaican records, including Church of England parish records as well as the civil registration of births, marriages and deaths. I found birth records for all seven children and was therefore able to sort out their birth order: Daisy, born September 1886, died December 1887; Lucien, born November 1887, died April 1890, my father, Michael, born August 1889; Essie, born March 1891; Gustave, born May 1894, died December 1899; Leo, born July 1895; and Joe, born January 1900.

Whenver anyone asks me how to begin doing their family history I always repeat the well-known axiom: "Start with yourself and work back". Another one is: "Talk to your relatives and ask them questions." Good advice! I certainly did. But the next good piece of advice is: "Look for the records which should confirm that what you have been told is true". (I should make one thing clear ... I didn't really get started on the research until many years after I was told the "facts", so was unable to share the results of my research with my family as they were no longer alive.)

I was somewhat stumped by the fact that my grandparents had got married in Haiti. I had no idea where in Haiti they were married -- Port au Prince was a possibility, but how to get the record? I assumed that the marriage must have taken place around 1885 as Daisy was born in September 1886, but for the longest time I had no proof of this particular fact, and then I had an email from Madeleine Mitchell, an indefatigable Jamaican researcher who is also the co-ordinator for the Jamaican Genealogy page on Rootsweb. Madeleine had been going through microfilm of the Jamaica Gleaner and had come across something of interest to me in the paper for 1886. (I also for a while went through the early issues of the Gleaner on microfilm, which I got on interlibrary loan from the Library of Congress, but at the time that I heard from Madeleine I had not yet got to that year. Now that the Gleaner is digitized and on line it is less onerous to search.) Madeleine had found evidence of the marriage of my grandparents, and it wasn't what I was told! They had not married in Haiti; in fact, the marriage took place in Colon, Panama, and not in 1885, but in July 1886! Here is a copy of the notice as it appeared in the Gleaner of July 23, 1886:

So, there was one "fact" proved wrong. I now had what appeared to be something of a scandal in the family, in that my grandmother was some seven months pregnant when she got married! Which brings up another question, namely, when and where did Alice meet Leopold? Was he living in Jamaica and then took off for Colon, as a result of which Alice went after him? She did return to Jamaica as Daisy was born there at 106 King Street. A Mrs. Jacob Rodrigues Da Costa was the informant on the birth record and Leopold's occupation was given as "merchant of Colon".

So it turns out that finding that piece of information brought up more questions than I had previously, such as, who was Mrs. Jacob Rodrigues Da Costa? The answer to this would lead me to a whole new family that I knew nothing of previously, but before that I would investigate the Levy family more thoroughly.

A Month in the Country -- part 2

2007-10-24T08:13:00.000-04:00

My summer holiday would start the moment the car climbed the hill from Vale Royal up to the house at Friendship. Actually, there were two houses at Friendship. Uncle Rodney's house was at the top of the hill, and at the bottom of the hill was the Nash's house, where Len Nash, his wife Daphne (formerly Newman) and their three children, Dennis, Richard and Arlene, lived. Len Nash was an engineer at Vale Royal and first cousin of my Aunt Marjorie, Rodney's wife. I wish I had pictures of the two houses, because I find my memory is not as clear about what they were like inside as I would wish. Uncle Rodney's house was built up off the ground so that there was a sort of above-ground basement underneath where he had his office and made his various liqueurs (more of that later), as well as where the generator was installed. This was known merely as the Delco, and in fact I went through life for the longest time thinking that was what all generators were called. The Delco provided power when the electricity went off, as it often did.

I have a painting, given to me as a wedding present, and painted by yet another Nash, Sylvia Nash the artist, which immediately brings to mind the end of the property where I used to go and walk away over the rolling countryside, accompanied by the two dogs, Jill, a black Lab, and Bessie, a cairn terrier. Here is the picture.

In my imagination just over that hill I would go off with Jill (Bessie being more of a house dog wouldn't go that far with us), and the two of us would walk along the paths by the cow ponds, where I would skip stones and Jill would go in for a swim. Finally, I would go back home ... Jill didn't always come with me, but would return at her leisure.

I remember a guinep tree on the property. The guinep tree (Melicoccus bijugatus) according to Olive Senior's Encyclopedia of Jamaican Heritage, is a large tree bearing small, round, green-skinned fruit which grow in clusters like grapes. Here is a picture of the fruit of the guinep:

The fruit is sweet and juicy with a seed in the middle and I remember, on one my visits to Friendship, gorging on them one day. That night I awoke feeling quite ill and proceeded to be very sick indeed, much to the disgust of my brother, Mickey, who was sharing a room with me at the time. (I don't recall why, but I guess my parents were also there and we had a full house.) I learned my lesson about eating too many guineps!

The highlight of my holiday at Friendship was going to the beach to swim. Not that I was a good swimmer, and it didn't help that Mickey used to duck me in the water. We went to Derby Beach (pronounced Darby), not far from Duncans. This was a lovely white sand beach with a gradual slope out into the sea. Here is a photo of my Aunt Marjorie at Derby Beach.

and one of Rodney, with the Burke family.

Derby Beach is now the famous resort, Silver Sands, and now looks like this:

My Uncle Rodney was a sugar technologist at Vale Royal Estate and as a hobby he made the most wonderful liqueurs. He made a creme de cafe, a creme de cacao, and incredible orange liqueur and best of all, a pimento dram to die for! Pimento dram is made from the fruit of the Pimento or allspice (Pimenta dioca). Olive Senior in her Encyclopedia of Jamaican Heritage notes that the pimento is Jamaica's only indigenous spice. He never made a commercial venture of this hobby, but rather would bottle enough to give away each year as Christmas presents to friends and family. On one occasion he told me that he had been approached by Dr. Kenneth Evans who was also experimenting with a coffee liqueur, to invest in Dr. Evans's project. Rodney declined and Ken Evans went on to develop Tia Maria, and the rest is history!

Another one of my memories of Friendship is of Rodney's collection of books of Punch cartoons. He had bought them, I believe, from a bookseller on a trip to England, and I would spend hours going through them and reading all the cartoons by famous illustrators such as George DuMaurier. One of my all-time favourites is DuMaurier's cartoon, "True Humility", also known as The Curate's Egg. Who can forget the wonderful caption:

Right Reverend Host: "I'm afraid you've got a bad egg, Mr. Jones"

The Curate: "Oh no, My Lord, I assure you! Parts of it are excellent"

Sadly, Rodney had to get rid of all his Punch books due to an infestation of insects which ate their way through the books. To use an old Jamaican expression: "Chi-chi nyam it"

A Month in the Country

2007-10-05T14:25:00.000-04:00

One of the pleasures that I looked forward to each summer holiday was going to spend a few weeks at Duncans, Trelawny, with my Uncle Rodney and Aunt Marjorie. They lived at a house on a hill, not far from Duncans, called "Friendship". My uncle, Rodney Smedmore, was a sugar technologist who had worked at various sugar estates in Jamaica. Some time after he got married he went to work for Arnold Muschett at Georgia and Vale Royal Estates in Trelawny.

Arnold Muschett was born St. Elizabeth in 1882 and married Amy Houchen in 1909. Although they had no children they were both very involved in several charitable bequests for the children of the area including several scholarships, and they donated 25 acres of land for the erection of a school in Wakefield. My thanks to Donald Lindo for the photo and information about Mr. Muschett.

According to Inez Knibb Sibley's book, Dictionary of Place-Names in Jamaica (Kingston: Institue of Jamaica, 1978), Vale Royal in Trelawny consisted of a number of small estates including Georgia, as well as others that I'm not familiar with.

This old postcard of Vale Royal Estate probably dates from between 1910 and 1913. Uncle Rodney would also go quite often to Long Pond Estate, as well as Vale Royal and Georgia. The Great House at Georgia was very beautiful and we would often go to visit the Muschetts there.

My memories of how I actually travelled to Trelawny from St. Andrew are somewhat vague. Sometimes we went by car when Uncle Rodney came up to town to fetch me and we would drive the route from Kingston through Spanish Town and Bog Walk (over the scary Flat Bridge),

on to Linstead and Ewarton, over Mount Diablo... a steep, winding, narrow road over the mountain... then down through the green pastures of St. Ann through Moneague and Walkers Wood, towards Ocho Rios, then along the coast road through St. Ann's Bay, Runaway Bay, Rio Bueno,and then to Duncans. From there we climbed a hill on a marl road which eventually took us to "Friendship".

Once or twice, though, I would travel by train, probably accompanied by my mother. We would board the train in Kingston at the railway station

and then begin the exciting trip going through places with strange and exotic names -- Balaclava ... Maggotty ... Catadupa ... Montpelier ... Anchovy ... ending up at the station in Montego Bay. The train would probably have looked something like this:

Olive Senior, in her excellent book, The Encyclopedia of Jamaican Heritage (Red Hills: Twin Guinep, 2003), reports that early travel on the train one way from Kingston to Montego Bay could take an entire day. I know that we always packed a lunch! By 1952 diesel rail service was instituted and the round trip between Kingston and Montego Bay could be done in a day. In September 1957 a horrendous accident on the railway line at Kendal caused the deaths of 175 people with 400 people injured. You can read about it at the Jamaica Gleaner's Pieces of the Past. Rail service was ended in 1992, after running for 150 years.

More often than not, however, we would travel by car. Going over Mount Diablo was the highlight of the trip. Since one could not see around the hairpin bends it was necessary to blow the horn loudly at every curve. All along the way we would pass vendors selling fruit

and we would stop to buy oranges and mangoes in season. I remember that my poor mother suffered terribly from car sickness and we had to stop a few times along the route when she felt ill.

But at last we would arrive at "Friendship" and the holiday would begin. Next time I'll write about what it was like to be in "the country" ... so different from my life at 5 Holborn Road.

About My Uncles -- part 3

2007-09-17T07:37:00.000-04:00

And now to the two youngest Smedmore boys, my uncles Lucius and Julian. My Uncle Lucius was born at 49 Beeston Street on 18 November 1899, the eighth child of William Dey Smedmore and his wife, Amanda. I have only one photograph of my Uncle Lucius, not a very good one ... probably a passport photo. Here it is:

He had apparently sent the photo to his cousin, John Cassis in Toronto, as on the back of the picture he had written:

"This is a recent snap but I don't think the photographer has done me justice. You know, John, I was never half as ugly. Best love to Fanny, yourself and the family, from Maysie and self, Lucius".

Maysie was his wife ... more of that in a moment. My grandfather would have been sixty-three when Lucius was born, and sixty-seven when Julian, the youngest, was born four years later in 1902. It boggles the mind to think how difficult it must have been for these younger brothers to have a father who was old enough to be their grandfather. And when he died in 1914, Lucius would have been fifteen and Julian just eleven. I think they were probably brought up more by their older sisters and mother as my grandfather was not a well man in his latter years, suffering with serious migraine headaches which may well have been the pre-cursor of the cerebral haemorrhage which killed him. I remember my Uncle Rodney relating how they had to keep quiet most of the time because of his father's headaches. Rodney, apparently, loved to build things and was hammering together a chicken coop when told to stop because his father couldn't stand the noise. He was somewhat resentful about that, I remember.

But back to Lucius. Like other members of his family he was a Freemason, a member of St. John's Lodge, and he also worked for Henderson & Company, eventually becoming secretary of two of their sugar estates Orange Valley and Georges Valley in Trelawny. (When I visited Jamaica in 2003 I spent an afternoon at Orange Valley and saw the ruins of the old sugar factory and slave hospital. I also saw the paw-paw grove at Georges Valley. Paw-paw, aka papaya is now a popular export fruit.) Here is a picture of a section of the grove:

Lucius married quite young by Smedmore standards, when he was twenty-four, to Carrie May Burke, the daughter of Aubrey May Burke and his wife, Amy Ann Depass. Maysie was three years younger than Lucius. From what I've been told there was some opposition to the marriage from Lucius's mother and two older sisters but he was determined to get married. The marriage was written up in the Jamaica Gleaner and was apparently considered quite the event of the season. Rodney was best man and Lucius's brothers, Owen and Julian, were ushers. The ceremony was performed by the then Bishop of Jamaica ... not surprising as Lucius, like all the Smedmores, was a pillar of the Kingston Parish Church and in fact was a member of the Parish Church Committee.

Lucius and Maysie had two daughters, Marjorie and Gloria, both of whom were quite a bit older than me so we were not very close as cousins. Unfortunately, the marriage ended in divorce in 1956, though they remained friendly and Lucius went to live with Marjorie and her husband, Eric Crawford on Trafalgar Road. It was there, in May of 1963, that Lucius was brutally murdered by a thief. He was alone at the time, as Eric and Marjorie had gone on a holiday to Mexico. The murderer was eventually caught, confessed, was tried and found guilty, and hanged. This event was a tragic one in the family. At the time my parents were visiting me and my family in Winnipeg where we were living, and it was a tremendous shock to them. Worse was to come later that year when my brother, Micky, died of a cerebral haemorrhage in October.

And now to my Uncle Julian, the youngest of the family, the apple of his eldest sister's eye, as I was told. He was different from the others, a very volatile person, someone who had strong likes and dislikes, and in fact, the only uncle that I ever had a falling-out with. He was quite the sportsman. He played cricket and was a member of several clubs. Unlike the others to the best of my knowledge, he did not become a Freemason, but he was a staunch member of the Kingston Parish Church and was a lay delegate to Synod for many years. He was always perfectly turned out in his dress and affected a very British accent, though he would, at times, lapse into Jamaican patois. He was known, affectionately, by family and friends as "The Count".

He married, somewhat late in life at age fifty, Enid Neilson, the daughter of the Reverend Christopher Charles Neilson, a Methodist minister. They were married in Lyndhurst Methodist Church in 1953 and the reception was held by my parents at 5 Holborn Road. To the best of my knowledge Julian continued to attend Kingston Parish Church while Enid remained a Methodist.

I mentioned having a falling-out with Julian. It was some months before my wedding in 1957. I had had an emergency appendectomy and was at home on sick leave, feeling rather sorry for myself, as my mother was in Toronto at the time visiting my brother and his wife and their new baby. I was invited by Julian's sister-in-law, Ruby, to visit her family in Morant Bay. Unfortunately, Julian had quarrelled with Ruby's husband, Edward, and he informed me that "no niece of mine will visit these people, since I have quarrelled with them". I wasn't about to take this interference in my life and we had a fierce quarrel and did not speak for almost six months. I seriously considered uninviting him to my wedding but cooler heads prevailed ... my mother told my I could not do that! ... and we made it up. For all his peculiarities he was a very affectionate uncle. He and Enid had a volatile relationship, but when she was struck with a massive stroke which left her unable to speak, he was devastated, even more so when she died shortly afterwards.

This is a photo of the two of them taken in happier times:

About My Uncles -- part 2

2007-09-03T08:22:00.001-04:00

I have just returned from a wonderful twelve days in Newfoundland. I felt a real sense of belonging while I was in that rugged island. Perhaps it was the fact that I too came from an island and was going to another island, a unique place in this vast country. But, more than that, Jamaica and Newfoundland have much in common ... they gave us the cod which we make into our salt fish, and we gave them the rum, which they made into their Screech. The cod fishery in Newfoundland is no more, but that connection still remains.

But back to my uncles. The younger three, Rodney, Lucius and Julian, unlike their three older brothers, all married, two of them somewhat later in life. My Uncle Rodney was born in 1896, a little less than two years after my mother, and the two of them were very close. Rodney was both my godfather and my favourite uncle.

He was a sugar technologist by profession and this took him to various sugar estates on the island. Here is his entry from the 1940-46 Who's Who Jamaica:

Before Rodney married Marjorie Nash he was engaged to be married to Olive May, a teacher at St. Hilda's Diocesan High School in Brown's Town. I remember meeting her once when she came with Rodney to our home at 5 Holborn Road , and I distinctly remember that she told my mother that she should send me to St. Hilda's when I was old enough to go to high school (I was then at the Cunningham's Preparatory School on Surbiton Road). The realization that this would mean leaving my home and my parents to go as a boarder far away in Brown's Town terrified me. Some time after that Rodney informed the family that his engagement had been broken off. My mother was quite upset about this for a while, whereas I felt an overwhelming sense of relief that I wouldn't be heading off to parts unknown to boarding school.

Looking back now, I see was that I was somewhat unfair to Olive May.Thanks to Donald Lindo I now know more about her and also have a couple pictures of her. She was born in Portsmouth, England, in 1917 and received her B.Sc in Mathematics from London University, as well as a Diploma in Education from the University of Hull. She came to Jamaica in the late 1930s and began her teaching career there at St. Hilda's.

I don't know how she met Rodney ... he was probably working in the area at the time. It is unfortunate that their engagement did not last, and I never knew the reason why, but I rather think that the disparity in their ages and temperament may have had something to do with it. From what I've been told Olive was a lively and adventurous woman with a brilliant mathematical mind, but she was also twenty-one years younger than Rodney. I hope that they parted amicably. At any rate, Rodney married Marjorie Nash in September of 1941 in Sav-la Mar. I was a train-bearer at this event. Marjorie's sister, Hazel, was bridesmaid and my Uncle Owen was bestman.

Here I am standing in front in the middle. I must say we all looked pretty solemn, except for the bride and groom who are looking lovingly at each other.

Olive May married Leslie Kensett, a British Army officer, in 1945. They returned to England, but the marriage was not a success and Olive came back to Jamaica where she resided until her death in 2000. She taught at St. Hugh's High School in Kingston, where she was much loved and was Head of the Math Department, until she left to go to Queen's High School for Girls in 1958 as Head of the Math Department there. She was universally loved by all her pupils and renowned as an excellent teacher. Looking back now I feel that she had my best interests at heart when she suggested I be sent to St. Hilda's, but I was only six at the time and didn't want to leave my family.

Rodney and Marjore were happily married for twenty-eight years until her premature death at age 59 in 1969. She had been a diabetic from her early twenties, as a result of which they had no children. I loved her dearly and still miss her. I plan to write more about both of them in future posts.

In my next post I'll write about my remaining Smedmore uncles, Lucius and Julian.

About My Uncles

2007-08-16T07:35:00.000-04:00

In my last post I mentioned a picture which hung in the dining room of 5 Holborn Road, of the Princes in the Tower. Our picture was a black and white print, not colour like the one above, and below the picture were these lines from Richard III, as spoken by Queen Elizabeth:

"Pity, you ancient stones, those tender babes

Whom envy hath immured within your walls!"

'Envy', in this case, personifies Richard III, the quintessential wicked uncle, at least as Shakespeare portrayed him. Personally, I belong to the revisionist school of thought which believes that Richard received a bum rap. Read Josephine Tey's wonderful novel, The Daughter of Time, and check out the Richard III Society of Canada, who each year on August 22nd, place an In Memoriam notice for Richard in the Globe and Mail. In case you're wondering why I'm mentioning this, it's because my daughter asked when I was going to write about "the wicked uncles". Well, I had no wicked uncles. They were all regular uncles ... each with his own foibles and peculiarities, but nothing out of the ordinary, except, perhaps, that the eldest three never married.

My very first post was about my Uncle Victor, the eldest of the Smedmore boys, who went to England in 1915 and joined the Life Guards of the Household Cavalry, was sent to France with the combined battalion of the Reds and the Blues which made up the Household Battalion of the British Expeditionary Force, and was killed in action in 1918. I never knew him of course, only what my mother would tell me about him, and what little information I found about him in the online Daily Gleaner, which reported on his joining up and on memorial services held after his death. The only picture I have of him is a large framed painting , which may have been a photograph which was colorized, showing him in his Lifeguard uniform.

I remember another picture of him, at 49 Beeston Street, one of a group of three soldiers in their khaki uniforms, but I have no idea where that picture ended up.
Victor was born in February 1886, and the next son, Norman, was born the end of November 1887. He is another uncle that I never knew, and in a way he's the real mystery man of the family. He doesn't seem to have been as popular with his sisters as was his older brother ... but then, getting killed in the war does give one a certain cachet. Norman, known by the family as Normy, also left Jamaica, but not to fight. Like many other Jamaicans he headed off to New York in June 1918, on board the ss Zacapa. On the ship's manifest he gave his next of kin as his mother at 49 Beeston Street, and stated he was going to stay in New York with a friend, Joseph Levy. Joseph Levy was the youngest brother of my father and had himself left Jamaica for New York in August 1917. Norman claimed on the manifest that he was going to the U.S. for six months but he certainly never returned to Jamaica. He lived there until his death in July 1953. I have no photographs of him and all I know of him is what I've been told by my mother, and what I've been able to find out through research. He settled first in Brooklyn where he worked as a traffic checker for the Public Service Railroad Company, and in September 1918 he filled out a registration card for the draft. After that he appears to have worked for the rest of his life in New York for Swift & Company, meat packers. Thanks to David Priever, a researcher in New York, I was able to get a copy of the administration of his estate from the Surrogate Court of New York ... like many of the Smedmores, he left no will ... and what ever else I know about him comes from this brief obituary in the Gleaner of August 8, 1953. That Norman was a Freemason doesn't surprise me as my grandfather and my Uncles Rodney and Owen also belonged to the Scottish Rite. I had not known that, like Victor, he attended Wolmer's Boy School, nor that he had worked for the lumber companies in question. I do know, from what my mother told me, that he would send money home for his mother and sisters, and I know, from a brief notice in The Gleaner that Elma went to New York on vacation in June 1951,so I imagine she must have visited Norman. One thing I do remember is how surprised the family was at how small his estate was -- according to the lawyer, Albert Stark, a mere $4,400. Considering that Norman never married, lived in lodgings and had worked steadily since arriving in New York, this small amount to be divided between his siblings, after all expenses had been paid, came as quite a shock.

I come now to the Smedmore uncles that I did know. The next one in the family was my Uncle Owen, born in November 1891 in Port Royal. To my mind he was the best looking one of the family and it always puzzled me that he never married.

I think one reason may have been that he had a speech impediment, a stammer, as did Rodney and Lucius, though I remember that Owen's seemed to be the worst of the bunch. There are probably all sorts of scientific reasons for speech impediments, but I feel pretty sure, from what my mother told me, that this was exacerbated by my grandfather's treatment of his sons. He had no patience when they stuttered and would tell them to speak up without stammering. I think Owen was probably shy. He worked all his life at D. Henderson and Company at the corner of King and Harbour Streets.

I remember him as gentle and generous. I could always touch him up for money at Christmas time when all the family gathered at 5 Holborn Road -- two shillings and sixpence or even five shillings, and then, of course, I would go to the other uncles and tell them how much I got from Owen, and they, not wanting to be outdone, would shell out as well.

I guess Owen felt he had an obligation to take care of his mother and sisters, once Victor had left for the war and Norman had emigrated to the States, consequently he lived at home with them, first at Beeston Street, and then later he moved with my aunts to 11 Dunrobin Avenue when the Beeston Street house was sold. I would say he had a very powerful sense of duty to his unmarried sisters and I know that he was a loving brother and brother-in-law. Sadly, he was on holiday when he died. The family had gone to White River for a vacation when Owen suffered a heart attack or a stroke while swimming.

In my next post I'll write about my other uncles, Rodney, Lucius and Julian. It may be a while as I'll be off line while on vacation for two weeks.

Going Home ... 5 Holborn Road

2007-08-02T18:02:00.000-04:00

Ah ... going home. It means so many different things to each of us. Think of the quotations you've heard about "home". Well, I have already quoted Thomas Wolfe ... "You can't go home again." But there's also "There's no place like home" (John Howard Payne); "Any place I hang my hat is home" (Arlen and Mercer); "Home is where, when you go there, they have to take you in" (Robert Frost). As for my feelings about home ... well, 5 Holborn Road was the place I spent the first twenty-two years of my life, from the time I was six months old, so I knew no other place as home.

In 2003 when I went to Jamaica after an absence of more than twenty years, I had the opportunity to visit 5 Holborn Road which I had not seen for many years. My parents had sold the house in the sixties and moved, first to 11 Dunrobin Avenue and later to 4 Carvalho Drive. One of the last times I saw 5 Holborn Road was probably in 1960 and it looked like this.

There were two gates opening on an unpaved circular driveway, around which were beds of gerberas (African daisies) which my mother loved, and two huge bushes of pink oleander framed the front verandah.

I was staying with my cousin, Rosemary, near Montego Bay in 2003, and we decided to come to Kingston ... I should say New Kingston ... for the weekend to visit family and friends. We wanted to stay at a moderately priced hotel and, knowing that 5 Holborn Road was now the Indies Hotel, I suggested we stay there. So we did the long drive from Montego Bay to Kingston and finally arrived at 5 Holborn Road. I must admit to feelings both of anticipation and some trepidation at seeing my home again. I had seen a photograph of it some time before, but the actual view was indeed a surprise.

My first reaction was: "Good Lord! They've paved over the lawn and the gerberas". But, of course they had to, in order to provide parking for their guests, and different as the outside of the house looked, I was pleasantly surprised on entering it to discover that, apart from renovations to the interior, I could recognize the house itself. It could so easily have been demolished in order to build a hotel there, but instead the owners had built an extension on the existing house and kept the character of the original building. The extension was built around the property to connect with the original outbuildings and garage and excellent use has been made of them. The rooms are on two levels behind the house with a courtyard in the middle, and if indeed the flowers in front were gone, it was more than made up for with the masses of tropical plants in the courtyard.
Here is a view of the upper level of the guest rooms, built around the original house. I stayed in number 12.

The added building extends to the old outbuildings and the detached garage is now part of the entire structure.

Along with the palms and ferns one finds a riot of colour with ginger liles and other tropical flowers. The former garage is the dining room and bar,where I enjoyed a typical Jamaican breakfast of salt fish and ackee.

The interior of the house has changed and yet I could still see traces of my old home. Here is a picture I took in 1960 of our dining room.

At the left rear one can see the door to the pantry, and at the rear the entrance to the latticed in back verandah. (I remember a picture that used to hang on the wall to the right of the window looking out on the back verandah. It was a black and white print of Millais's "Princes in the Tower".). The dining room is now the lobby of the hotel and looks like this.

As you can see, the entrance to the pantry has been blocked off; the back verandah now forms part of the lobby and office and is no longer latticed in, and the windows have been changed. The floors are still the gleaming mahogany that they were when I was growing up here and it was kept that way with a coconut brush and great amounts of elbow grease.

What were my thoughts on seeing my old home again? I was pleased that it had not been changed out of all recognition, and that in fact the renovations made were appropriate to the character of the house itself. It was, of course, no longer home, but it was welcoming and familiar, and strangely enough, seemed quite a bit smaller to me than it had been when I was growing up there.

One last thing ... occasionally I dream of home and family now gone, and when I do it is 5 Holborn Road that I see in my dreams.

Holborn Road Families

2007-07-12T09:27:00.000-04:00

What I mostly remember about Holborn Road were the families who lived there while I was growing up. Next door to us, at number 3 Holborn Road were the Bewleys, Arthur and Enid. They had three children: Dawn, who married a sergeant in the British Army who was stationed at Up Park Camp; Sheila, who was about my age, and Richard. Sheila and I were best buds, though we attended different schools. She went to St. Hugh's and I went to St. Andrew's. We played together a lot. The Bewley had a badminton court on the front lawn, with lights, so we played a lot of badminton. We also used to go to the movies together ... the Saturday morning serials at the Carib Theatre. We also used to go swimming at Courtleigh Manor Hotel, where for the princely sum of two shilling and sixpence we were allowed to frolic in the hotel pool.

Tourism wasn't that big in Jamaica in those days and the hotel was very welcoming to local people. We had great times swimming there. And this reminds me that in my last post I mentioned the Skyline Hotel and wondered what had happened to it. Well, thanks to a couple of people in the know, the Skyline was bought out by the Hendrickson family and renamed the Courtleigh, and Courtleigh Manor itself, also owned by the Hendricksons was, sadly, demolished a couple years ago.

When I went back to Jamaica in 2003 Holborn Road had changed drastically from a residential street to a very commercial one, and No. 3 Holborn Road, where the Bewleys had lived, is now a guest house, Holborn Manor.

In fact the street looks quite different. Here is a view of it looking towards Trafalgar Road, with no. 5 and no. 3 Holborn Road on the left.

I do not recognize the large buildings on the left, past the Bewley's house. In my time no. 1 Holborn Road was where the Atkinsons lived, and next to them going towards Trafalgar Road, was the home of Eric and June Clark, whose house address was actually on Ruthven Road behind Holborn Road. Their property was contained between both roads, with gates at either end, and with their permission I used to ride my bike through there as a shortcut to go to school

On the even-numbered side of the road were the Tames. I don't recall their house number. They were very close friends of my Mom and Dad. Captain Frederick Tame had been in the British Army and had settled in Jamaica with his wife, May. They had four grownup children, two girls and two boys. Lily and Violet were unmarried and lived with their parents; Cyril was married and worked at Barclays Bank in Kingston, and Horace the youngest, also married, worked at the Cement Company.

That's Vi on the left with Captain Tame. She's holding one of their Pekingese dogs. I remember they had two, at different times.

This is Lily, the eldest. Lily was secretary to Mr. Bertram, the rather august manager of Barclays Bank. Thanks to Cyril both my brother, Micky, and I worked at Barclays. Micky was probably there longer and moved around to various branches. I worked there after leaving school between 1953 and 1957, when I got married and went to Trinidad.

Other families who lived across the road from us were the Parchments, Lal and Cissie, next door to the Tames, and next to them the Evanses, Fred and Sybil with their three children, Bev, Phyllis and Richard. On the corner of Dumfries Road and Holborn Road at no. 10 were first the Williamses, Baba and Verna and their children, (Verna was the sister of my Aunt Maisie who married my Uncle Lucius.), and later on after the Williams family moved, the McCullochs. On our side of the road, next door at us at no. 7 there were the DeMercados, Roy and Rose, sister and brother, and later the Dadds. My mother was very fond of Roy who was quite a character. The funny thing is that in a way our families were connected through marriages between Da Costas and DeMercados, but I don't think any of us were really aware of that. It's something I found out much later when I began to do family history research.

The Evans home is now the Indies Pub, and that section of Holborn Road, looking towards Chelsea Avenue, is much different to what I remember as a child.

In fact, no. 7, next door to no. 5, is now a financial institution, Dehring, Bunting & Golding Ltd.

In my next post I'll describe how it felt to return after twenty years to my old home and experience the changes that time has wrought.

Going Back ... Holborn Road Then and Now

2007-07-11T18:02:00.001-04:00

In April 2003 I returned to Jamaica for a visit after an absence of twenty years. My cousin, Rosemary, had invited me to stay with her and her husband, Norrie, for a few weeks at their home outside of Montego Bay in Coral Gardens. It was quite a trip, going back after all that time. Things were the same, and things were different. My plane landed at Sir Donald Sangster Airport in a hot and humid afternoon. When I arrived at Immigration the officer welcomed me back to Jamaica. It was almost like coming home!

I'll write more about that trip to Jamaica but what I really want to talk about is our weekend in Kingston, or I should say, New Kingston. We discussed where to stay while there and I suggested that we stay at my old home, 5 Holborn Road, which is now the Indies Hotel. But, before I describe my experiences there, let me tell you something about Holborn Road, then and now.

The above map is a recent one and the terrain I'm going to describe was probably a bit different from the present. As you can see, Holborn Road runs off of Trafalgar Road (which in turn runs off of Hope Road). Presently Holborn Road runs into Chelsea Avenue, which in turn ends at Half-way Tree Road, but when I was a child living on Holborn Road it didn't run right through ... that came later. I remember that Renfrew Road ran off of Holborn Road, just south of Trafalgar Road, and then lower down there was Dumfries Road which dead-ended at a gully, past which was Knutsford Park Race Course.

When the races were on we could hear the noise from the race track at our house on Holborn Road. I remember going to the races with my cousin and her family and even placing a bet.

The race course is gone now ... Knutsford Park became New Kingston with hotels, stores and businesses, and horse-racing is now carried on at Caymanas Park. The postcard below shows the Skyline Hotel, New Kingston, probably from the sixties or early seventies, one of the first hotels built there.

This is where the late Perry Henzell filmed The Harder They Come (1972). The postcard from which this picture comes is unused, but someone has written on the back:

"This is one of our best hotel [sic] the Skyline and in the background is another hotel it is called the Sherton [sic] hotel I can stay at my school and see the top of Skyline"

What happened to the Skyline? Did it morph into one of the other hotels, the Pegasus for example? If anyone knows, please leave a comment. In my next post I'll write about some of the other families who lived on Holborn Road.

You Can't Go Home Again

2007-07-02T16:02:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, July 1st, was Canada Day, the 140th anniversary of Confederation. I spent the day at the Highland Games at Embro, near Stratford, and sang our national anthem, "O Canada" with everyone there. The first line of that anthem always gives me pause:

"O Canada, our home and native land" .... well, like the thousands of Jamaicans who have made their home in this wonderful country, Canada is indeed our home. I have spent two-thirds of my life here ... I'm a proud Canadian citizen, and my children and grandchildren are Canadians, but home? That's a tough one. After forty-seven years, yes it's home, but I still feel a connection to my "native" land. (It's too bad that they can't come up with a better word than native in the national anthem for those of us who chose to make Canada home.)

I'm looking at a certified copy of my birth registration, number BM 8896, in the District of Cross Roads, Saint Andrew. It's too long to scan on my little 8 1/2 x 11 scanner. I was born at Nuttall Memorial Hospital, 31 May 1935. My father was Michael Leopold Levy, civil service clerk of 7 Anderson Road, Woodford Park, Saint Andrew, and my mother was Maud Dey Levy, formerly Smedmore. My father registered my birth on July 3, 1935. Well, I don't remember Anderson Road in Woodford Park, because when I was about six months old, my parents bought a house at 5 Holborn Road, St. Andrew from a Mr. Garsia, and moved there, and that house was the only home that I knew for my life in Jamaica, until I left there in 1957.
This is the house I remember ... 5 Holborn Road. It was situated off of Trafalgar Road. At one point Holborn Road ended in a dead end, which later was developed as Chelsea Avenue, which in turn ran out to Half-way Tree Road. Holborn Road ran south of Trafalgar Road, and there were two side roads off of it ... Renfrew Road and Dumphries Road, before it ran into Chelsea Avenue. In my childhood Dumphries Road was a dead end which ended at Knutsford Park, the major horse-racing venue at the time. Now it's all gone and the area I lived in is known as New Kingston, but more of that later.

Here I am as a child with my brother, Micky, with our nurse, in front of the house at 5 Holborn Road.

The house, as I remember it, was quite large. There was a large front verandah with four large pillars supporting a gable roof. Off of the front verandah were four French doors. The two in front opened into the dining room. One on the left opened into the drawing room, and the one on the right opened into my parents' bedroom. On the left side of the house, behind the drawing room, was a bedroom with a full bathroom. This was my brother's but I also remember that during the war it was occupied by a boarder, a mysterious Mr. Wellard. Moving back, on this side of the house were the pantry and kitchen. On the right side of the house, was my parents' bedroom. Off of it was a dressing room with a sink, the bathroom which contained the bath only, and there was a separate room for the toilet. Behind this was my bedroom, and behind that, a spare bedroom which was occupied for some time by my Aunt Tess when she lived with us. In the middle of all this was the dining room, off which the other rooms were situated, and at the back an enclosed latticed verandah. To me the house was quite large. It sat on a quarter acre of land. In the front there were two gates and a grassy driveway connecting them, and a lawn enclosed by a privet hedge. (It was not really privet, as I discovered later, but a type of barberry.) My mother's pride and joy were the garden beds in which she grew flowers. The ones I mainly remember were gerberas, also called African Daisies.

We had a detached garage, though for a long time we had no car. This sat at the end of the driveway leading from the south gate entrance.
By the time this photo was taken we did have a car. These photos aren't that great. They were taken with a Brownie 120 camera, but hopefully you get the idea. Though it's a bit hard to make out, on the right side of the photo you can see that there was a separate entrance to the bedroom on the left side of the house (Micky's bedroom aka the spare bedroom).

In the backyard we had all sorts of trees: a huge breadfruit tree which my brother climbed and claimed he could see Kingston Harbour from it -- a grapefruit tree, a Valencia orange tree, mango trees (Bombay, Julie, Number Eleven, Hairy), an ackee tree ... and we also had a chicken coop and kept a few chickens who came to a sticky end so we could have chicken dinner.

These are my memories and I think this photo of me with my parents is one of my favourites.

On either side of the verandah were planted pink oleander. I remember also that we had pointsettias and euphorbia which were a riot of colour, red and white, come Christmas.

These are my memories of the house at 5 Holborn Road. My parents sold the house after I left home. By then my brother was married and the place was too big for them. They sold the house to a Canadian from Guelph who turned it into a hotel ... more of this later ... and moved to 11 Dunrobin Avenue. Later they moved with my Uncle Rodney to 4 Carvalho Drive.

The house at 5 Holborn Road still lives in my memory as my home till I was 22 years old and left Jamaica. It has changed dramatically, and those changes will be the subject of my next post. But still ... the memories are there and they are what I see when I think of "home".

More About My Aunts

2007-06-21T15:17:00.000-04:00

Since my last post I've been doing some more thinking about my aunts Sylvia and Elma. My Aunt Elma never seemed happy. I don't have one photo of her smiling. For example, here's a photo I found among my mother's effects, after her death. It's of my Aunt Elma, my Uncle Rodney, my Uncle Julian, my mother and my father. I'm not sure where the picture was taken ... it may have been at Julian's house on Dumphries Road, or perhaps at 11 Dunrobin Avenue.

The thing that strikes me is how serious everyone is, except my mother! She's smiling, and that's how I remember her ... cheerful and happy. And, as you can see, no smile from Elma! I remember her as being somewhat stern, with very little sense of humour.

There's a family story about Elma and a higgler who came to 49 Beeston Street to sell fish. (The term, "higgler", an archaic one as Olive Senior describes it in her Encyclopedia of Jamaican Heritage, is used in Jamaica to denote market or street vendors of various products, agricultural and otherwise.) This event probably took place during the war or shortly thereafter. Elma was particularly abrupt with the fish man and he looked at her and said: "But what a way yu eye blue! Yu is a German?"

And that reminds me of another story about higglers, this time about my grandfather, William Dey Smedmore. When a higgler came to the house selling lobsters my grandfather was not content just to make sure that the lobster was alive and kicking. Oh no! He got the higgler to take out all the lobsters, put them on the piazza, and the one that moved the fastest was the one he bought!

But to go back to my aunts. My Aunt Sylvie always seemed a bit of an invalid. She was tall and thin and sort of tottered around. Most of the time she just sat while Elma took care of the running of the house, dealing with the maids, the shopping, the meals, and so on. Maybe it was because of having the responsibility of running 49 Beeston Street that made Elma unhappy. She probably did it while my grandmother was still alive, and no doubt afterwards, until they moved away to Dunrobin Avenue.

As for Aunt Sylvie, well she eventually just faded away, gave up walking and took to her bed ... a sad way to end one's life. Sadly too, Elma developed dementia in her old age. Dementia is a terrifying thing to contemplate in one's family. Besides my Aunt Elma, dementia affected my great-aunt, Aunt Tess who lived with our family at 5 Holborn Road and who eventually had to be hospitalized because she was apt to wander.

The sad part about it is that my Aunt Tess had a responsible position as Postmistress at Montego Bay for many years, where she made many friends.

I found a few references to her in the Jamaica Gleaner online over several years. Apparently she had also been postmistress in Sav-la-Mar, Westmoreland, as a brief notice in the Gleaner of August 23, 1915 stated she was being transferred and that she was presented "with an address and purse by some of the leading residents of Westmoreland, among them being the Hon. W. A. S. Vickers, His Honour Mr. C. M. Calder and Mr. C. Lister Clarke."

Another item from the Gleaner of July 11, 1917, datelined Bog Walk, St. Catherine, mentioned that she had resumed her duties as local postmistress after an absence of five months. By 1928 she was in Montego Bay where she hosted a reception after the wedding of Miss Enid Sylvia Williams to Mr. Dudley Feith Wynter, at St. James Catholic Church. (I note that Father J. J. Becker, S.J. officiated at the ceremony and he was a very good friend of my Aunt Tess, who, though baptized in the Methodist church in Port Royal by William Parke Murray in 1874, had converted to Roman Catholicism in adulthood).

Finally, I found an item in the Gleaner of January 12, 1943, reporting that Aunt Tess had arranged a "splendid concert" in aid of the Montego Bay Christmas Poor Dole Fund. Contributors to the programme included Dr. E. Gideon, Mr. Shand, Mr. P. Collymore, Ken Coy, Lawrence Davidson, Daphne Davidson, Hyacinth Mallett, and Hope Davis.

About My Aunts

2007-06-14T10:57:00.000-04:00

Aunts. We have aunts by blood (the sisters of our father or mother) and aunts by family (those who marry our uncles). In Jamaica we had a third kind of aunt and uncle ... any older couple who were good friends of the family, perhaps even distantly related. It was too formal to call them Mr. or Mrs. and we would never have dreamed of calling them their first names, and so we called them "Aunt" and "Uncle"

This post is about my real aunts, sisters of my father and mother. I had three: my aunts Sylvia and Elma Smedmore, my mother's older sisters, and my aunt Essie Levy, my father's sister, whom I never knew and of whom I'll write another time. My aunts Sylvia and Elma never married and lived at 49 Beeston Street until the house was sold in the fifties, at which time they moved with my Uncle Rodney and his wife, Marjorie, to 11 Dunrobin Avenue. As far as I was concerned, Sylvia and Elma were pretty old when I knew them. This picture of Elma, Sylvia and Rodney, must have been taken in the fifties or sixties.

I imagine that looking into the bright sun is the reason they look rather grim!

It's hard, sometimes, to imagine one's elderly relatives as having been young themselves, so we're lucky when we find photographs of them when they were young. Here is a photo of a much younger Elma.

Elma was the fourth child in the family, born November 8, 1889, at 11 Fishers Row, Port Royal. While in Port Royal the Smedmores also lived at No. 2 Fishers Row, and No. 2 Sime Street. Now, I have been fortunate enough to obtain a postcard in Gardner's Series, of A Street in Port Royal, which I imagine is probably very much like the streets that the Smedmores lived on.

The houses on the left show the same Georgian style of architecture as the house at 49 Beeston Street.

Elma was always somewhat serious and somewhat strict as I remember her. My mother claimed that she did have at least one suitor who wanted to marry her but she refused him. I have no idea who that might have been.

Sylvia was the eldest child, born January 20, 1884, at No. 2 Sime Street in Port Royal. I never found any early photographs of her among the family pictures, but some time ago I made contact with the granddaughter of my father's sister, Essie. Cheryl lives in Oklahoma and she sent me a package of photos, many of which, unfortunately, neither of us could identify. There is one which might be of Sylvia as a young woman. The picture was definitely taken in Kingston, Jamaica. On the front left corner of the picture is the word "Cleary's", and on the right corner "Fine Art Studio, Kingston, Ja." On the back is the photographer's name, "J. W. Cleary, Kingston, Jamaica". I sent a scan of the photo with the stamps to Donald Lindo in Jamaica and he forwarded it to David Boxer, Director Emeritus and Chief Curator of the National Gallery of Jamaica. He very kindly wrote me to say that he would date the photo between 1900 and 1910, before the firm became Cleary and Elliott, one of the best known photography studios in Jamaica.

So, is it my Aunt Sylvia? I don't know ... it could be, and it's a nice picture. I like to think that it is her photo, as my actual memories of her are of an elderly, tall, thin, somewhat tottery old lady who never seemed to be in very good health. Perhaps that's the reason she looks somewhat unhappy in later pictures. She died July 19, 1970, at Dunrobin Avenue. She was eighty-six years old. Her sister, Elma, died eight years later,at the age of eighty-nine.

School Days ...

2007-05-31T16:03:00.000-04:00

Remembering my mother's schooling and teaching career got me thinking about Jamaican schools and school days in general and what I know about the various members of my family and what schools they attended.

The following is the entry for my father in the Jamaica Who's Who, 1941-1946:

I'm not familiar with the Kingston Board School ... perhaps someone knows more about it, but I did know that he went to St. George's College, and was nineteen years old when he joined the Civil Service. Here again is a picture of St. George's College, courtesy of the website of the St. George's College Old Boys Association, Toronto Chapter.

In his book, History of the Catholic Church in Jamaica (Chicago: Loyola Press, 1988), Father Francis J. Osborne describes the founding of St. George's in 1850 by a group of Colombian Jesuits who were newly arrived from South America, having been ejected from Colombia by the president Jose Lopez. There were objections on religious grounds from Protestant citizens, but the school went ahead offering the following curriculum: Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, English, Rhetoric, History, Mathematics, Logic, Metaphysics, Ethics, Drawing, and Calligraphy

Thanks to the Jamaica Gleaner online I've actually found a few items about my father's school days! The Gleaner of December 18, 1905 reports that St. George's College held an elocution contest at Gordon Hall on December 15th, at which "the large hall was packed, not only with the Roman Catholic community, but also a large number of citizens of other denominations". The article went on to report that Master Michael Levy of the junior division opened with "'Mary Queen of Scots' which was very nicely rendered'. Among the other contestants from the junior division were Master Harold Brodhurst, Master John Cassis, and Master Brian Sicard. The Gleaner stated that "the names of the successful competitors would be announced at the annual distribution of prizes to take place at the Theatre Royal on the 21st instant"

This was indeed the case, but unfortunately my father did not win the elocution contest. In the junior division the gold medal went to Vernon Purdon, with John Cassis, Jnr. and Brian Sicard getting honorable mention. However my father won honorable mention in several subjects at the prizegiving, including Academic, French, Arithmetic and Christian Doctrine.

This is my father's younger sister, Essie Gertrude Levy.

I don't know for sure what school Essie attended, but most likely it would have been the Convent of Mercy, St. Mary's, known as Alpha, named for the property on which the orphanage and girls' school was founded in 1880.

The above photo of the present Alpha Academy is from the website, Network for Mercy Education.

I assume that my father's younger brothers, Leo and Joe, would have also gone to St. George's. These two schools, along with Immaculate Conception Academy, founded in 1858 and first located on property at East Queen Street, a gift of Henry Vendryes, would have been the schools that children of Catholic families would have attended in Kingston.

All About My Mother .-- Part 2

2007-05-25T14:40:00.000-04:00

Why did I call my mother a feminist, a description she probably wouldn't have agreed with? Mainly because she went out to work, in spite of the objections of her mother and her two older sisters. She worked as a teacher ... and this is where I wish I had asked more questions! My mother was taught by Miss L. McDougal and later became a teacher at Miss McDougal's school. I have never been able to discover Miss McDougal's first name ... yet I actually met her, after I was married and had returned to Jamaica for one of our regular visits. My mother and I were shopping downtown and ran into Miss McDougal. I vaguely remember a very elderly lady and could not now for the life of me describe her, but what absolutely struck me was the love and respect my mother showed to her. I think each of us has at least one teacher from our school days who made an impression on us and it was obvious that Miss McDougal meant a great deal to my mother.

It has not been easy trying to find out about this period in my mother's life. Thinking about it now I have to confess I don't even know what schools my two aunts went to. I was, however, able to find out the name of the school my mother attended ... it was called Victoria Girls' School and was located at 28 Victoria Avenue, and its Headmistress was Miss McDougal. I found this information through research in the online edition of the Jamaica Gleaner, which has been a tremendous resource.

Among my mother's possessions is a photograph of her in an attractive costume, holding a tambourine, and it was this photo that prompted me to delve more into her school days.

There is nothing on the photo to say where it was taken or what the occasion was, but I think I may have discovered that! After numerous searches in the Gleaner on the name "McDougal" I came across a couple of stories about prize giving functions at Victoria Girls' Secondary School. One in particular may hold the answer to the mystery of the photograph. This is from the Gleaner of December 20, 1912, and begins:

"The breaking-up of the Victoria Girls' School, No. 28 Victoria Avenue, conducted by Miss McDougal, came off sucessfully at St. George's Schoolroom by kind permission of the Rev. J. L. Ramson on Tuesday night last; His Grace the Archbishop presided during a portion of the function and, on retiring, his place was taken by Mr. McFarlane, Principal of the Mico College".

The story goes on to relate that Miss McDougal, after giving a report on the school, announced that she was closing it and taking the position, offered to her by Sister Madeline, of Headmistress of the Deaconess Home School. This new school would become Arcadia School ... more of that later ... but to return to my mother ... further on in the story is the following:

"The programme was then proceeded with and the children acquitted themselves remarkably well. The Ribbon and Tamboureen [sic] Drills, which were admirably executed, were highly appreciated, as was testified to by the prolonged applause of the audience".

Surely this photograph has to be of my mother doing the Ribbon and Tambourine Drill! She would have been about eighteen at the time.

After she left school my mother taught under Miss McDougal at the Arcadia School which was located at 13 West Avenue, Kingston Gardens. In the Gleaner of May 22, 1922, I found a report on the Prize Giving at Arcadia School. The pupils had recently presented an operetta at the Ward Theatre, the proceeds of which were donated to the Wortley Home Orphanage at Constant Spring. In her report on the work of the school Miss McDougal thanked "her assistants, viz: Misses Berry, Noad and Smedmore for the whole-hearted interest and careful training of the pupils to which alone the success of the entertainment was undoubtedly due". In the prize list is the following: Form IVb prize, awarded to Muriel Dias by Miss Smedmore; Form IIIb prize, awarded to Olga Holtz by Miss Smedmore.

My mother got married April 27, 1926, but she seems to have kept a connection to the school even though she did not work after marriage. The Gleaner reports on May 19, 1927 on yet another Arcadia School Prize Giving at which my mother, now referred to as Mrs. Levy, awarded the prize for Cambridge Senior Exam to Geraldine Bodden. By now, however, she was the mother of a young child, my brother Micky, who was born April 2, 1927, and her teaching career was over.