African Ancestry in Australia
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Location: Australia
Surnames/tags: African_Ancestry Africa
A location sub-project of the African Ancestry Project
Project Manager
Mission
The goals of this research project are:
- To collect in one place information and resources to assist in building and documenting the history and genealogies for those from Australia with African ancestry.
- To bring together WikiTreers interested in connecting African (heritage) families to the Global Family Tree, with particular reference to Australia
- To improve the profiles of the people with African ancestry. who were forced to emigrate and those who chose to emigrate to Australia, as well as improving profiles of their descendants.
- To provide and maintain a logical and organized structure, and create a method to link unconnected family trees in a way to help individuals identify their ancestors and celebrate their history.
About this Project
This sub project covers immigrants with whole or part African ancestry from no less than 11 global territories who were either
- transported to Australia as convicts in the 19th century.
- immigrants from Africa (or elsewhere) from the 19th century to the 21st.
Why African Ancestry in Australia?
This location project was originally called "Black Heritage in Australia" a title that was later abandoned.
- To give pre eminence to the First Nations Peoples of Australia, Being Black: Aboriginal cultures in 'settled' Australia by AIATSIS (Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies): Australia's only national institution focused exclusively on the diverse history, cultures and heritage of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australia.[1] [2]
- "African ancestry in Australia" does intersect with Black African ancestry of the Caribbean, Europe and United States Black Heritage. [1] [3] What underpins them all is the broad focus of genealogy from the continent of Africa. [3] [4][5]
Methods of Documentation
Dates
As the archived documents used originate from handwritten records of the early 19th century, and relate to a cohort of people whose legal rights were such that they did not have "birth certificates"; emphasis has been placed on the: Date of Conviction. This information was found for the most part to be consistently and precisely documented.
Location
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| Map of Caribbean Sea and its Islands |
Location is paramount to this project's aims to document history and aid genealogy. To this end, an emphasis on "Place of Conviction" of transported convicts is used (with notes of birth place where recorded). "Place of Conviction" was found for the most part to be precise and consistently recorded.
Identification of African Ancestry
The search function at Digital Panopticon.org search reads: "Please note that this information was only recorded in some of the documents and that the drop down menu uses artificial categories which have been created to summarise the highly varied language and abbreviations used. See the search results for the precise language used. To search for specific words, use the keyword search."
hair
- auburn, bald, black, woolly, brown, fair, flaxen, ginger, grey, red, sandy, white other. The first profile of African Ancestry connected to Australia that I found at was that of *William Buchanan at Jamaican Family Search Genealogy Research Library, Jamaican Convicts in Australia; where it reads: : "the following convicts were Natives of Jamaica, black, single, protestant with black eyes, woolly black hair sometimes tinged with grey" Using this description as a guide, which isolated the terms: black, black eyes, woolly black hair. I then used these distinguishers to guide me in identification of African Ancestry profiles.
complexion
- black, blotchy, brown, coloured, copper, dark, fair, fresh, florid, freckled, light, mulatto, olive, pale, pallid, ruddy, sallow, swarthy, other.
In the convict profiles that I reviewed, the most common terms I found for complexion were:
- 1. fresh, fair, sallow.
- 2. black, brown, copper, dark, mulatto.
Where the terms of list 2 were recorded on convict profiles (created in the 18th and 19th century) - I understood them to be more likely to indicate African ancestry.
An example profile is that of Edouard Rose from Mauritius
Sources to aid identification of transported Africans
- Cassandra Pybus (2006 UNSW Press) Black Founders: The Unknown Story of Australia's First Black Settlers Paperback – (0868408492) Distinguished historian and writer Cassandra Pybus reveals that black convicts were among our first fleet settlers – a fact which profoundly complicates our understanding of race relations in early colonial Australia. Most of these black founders were originally slaves from America who had sought freedom with the British during the American Revolution only to find themselves abandoned and unemployed in England when the war was over.
- Digital Panopticon.org A collaboration between the Universities of Liverpool, Oxford, Sheffield, Sussex and Tasmania, it is published by the Digital Humanities Institute. It traces London Convicts in Britain & Australia, from 1780-1925. It allows the search millions of records from around fifty datasets, relating to the lives of 90,000 convicts from the Old Bailey.
- convict records.com.au Site has data from the British Convict Transportation Register, courtesy of the State Library of Queensland. It includes Ships, Voyages, Crimes, Occupations. Has Community contributions.
- Founders and Survivors.org A partnership between historians, genealogists, demographers and population health researchers. It seeks to record and study the founding population of 73,000 men women and children who were transported to Tasmania
- National Archives.gov.uk Enslaved people and slave owners Enslaved people and slave owners. The National Archives, Kew, Richmond, England
- Old Bailey Online - The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913
The Old Bailey Proceedings Online makes available a fully searchable, digitised collection of all surviving editions of the Old Bailey Proceedings from 1674 to 1913, and of the Ordinary of Newgate’s Accounts between 1676 and 1772. The Old Bailey Proceedings Online is published by The Digital Humanities Institute at the University of Sheffield.
- Transnational Histories of Penal Transportation: Punishment, Labour and Governance in the British Imperial World, 1788–1939, Australian Historical Studies, Clare Anderson (2016) Consulted (particularly for Mauritius)
Project Tasks
Here are the tasks that I am currently working on:
Genealogy Aid
- Identifying people of African Ancestry in the Australian newspapers of the 19th century. Sorting and listing in relevant Australian state - begun.
Topics
Genealogy Aid
Find your African ancestor in Australia
Woman of Colour in 19th Century Australia
Immigrants
African Immigrants to 19th Century Australia
African Immigrants to 20th Century Australia
Transported Convicts
First Fleet Africans
Africans convicted in Barbados
Africans convicted in the Caribbean
- Antigua and Barbuda
- Barbados
- Bermuda
- Dominica
- Dutch Guiana
- Grenada
- Jamaica
- Martinique
- St Kitts and Nevis
- Trinidad
Africans convicted in Great Britain
Africans convicted in Jamaica
Africans convicted in Mauritius
Africans convicted in South Africa
Africans convicted in St Kitts and Nevis
Notables and Bushrangers of African Ancestry
History of African Ancestry in Australia
Historically, African history within Australia has had wider scholarly attention since
- 1986 - Ian Duffield, ‘Naming Namoroa’, unpublished paper presented at Africans & Caribbeans in Britain: Writing, History & Society. A Conference in Celebration of Paul Edwards, University of Edinburgh 1994}}
- A widely respected book is: "Black Founders: The Unknown Story of Australia's First Black Settlers" by Cassandra Pybus [6] which studies the African diaspora sent to Australia in the earlier decades of the nation.
- Another scholarly researcher of this area is Professor Clare Anderson (2016) with her work "Transnational Histories of Penal Transportation: Punishment, Labour and Governance in the British Imperial World, 1788–1939, Australian Historical Studies."
There exists at least one individual of African descent who chose to emigrate to Australia before 1836, who was a Whaler, Mariner and Australia's only Pirate.
Because of Australia's convict history and 19th century connection to wider British history, this rersearch was initiated to uncover the Africans sent whose genealogies had not been documented.
Some Africans sent to Australia in the later half of the 18th century are descendants of African slaves brought to the North American continent between 1555 and 1865, and some from Africa via England. Records show, that in the earlier part of the 19th century Africans were sent from the Caribbean; these are included since they share a common history of West African plus Central and East African roots. A number were also transported from South West Africa, [7] others from Mauritius.
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| Convict Transportation in the British Empire, 1618–1874 |
A glance at many of the profiles will reflect the way the British recorded and viewed convicts or immigrants of African ancestry. As indicated above, the terms, "black";
or "person of colour" were used, and can also be found in newspaper reports, as can the term "Darkey". Examples can be seen in the following articles from Australian newspaper reports of the 19th century.
Leader, Melbourne, Victoria, 10th September 1864, AN ELOQUENT DARKEY [8]
The Queenslander, Sat 22nd March 1884, THE DARKEY'S ANNIVERSARY [9]
The Sydney Morning Herald (NSW 1942 -1954) 29th July 1871, NOTES OF THE WEEK which states "A negro man named Darkey ..." [10]
The Melbourne Leader (Mel 1861) 09 March 1861, CITY POLICE COURT, which begins "Timon Gray, a man of colour was charged with assaulting another "darkey" named Robert Arthur ..." [11]
Sources
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Wikipedia: Black People
- ↑ Aboriginal - term "blackfella" in SA, WA, VIC, NSW, TAS, QLD newspapers
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 sbs.com.au the feed did you know there were 12 africans on the first fleet?
- ↑ Aboriginal - Blackfella in SA, WA, VIC, NSW, TAS, QLD
- ↑ mediadiversified.org australia five black men at the centre of its history
- ↑ Pybus. Cassandra. 2006. Black Founders: The Unknown Story of Australia's First Black Settlers. Sydney, NSW, Australia: UNSW Press.
- ↑ South African Historical Journal Volume 17, 1985 - Issue 1: Khoikhoi and the Question of Convict Transportation from the Cape Colony, 1820–1842 by V. C. MALHERBE M.A.
- ↑ 1864 'AN ELOQUENT DARKEY.', Leader (Melbourne, Vic. : 1862 - 1918, 1935), 10 September, p. 4. , viewed 30 Apr 2022, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article197293202
- ↑ 1884 'THE DARKEY'S MARRIAGE ANNIVERSARY.', The Queenslander (Brisbane, Qld. : 1866 - 1939), 22 March, p. 451. , viewed 30 Apr 2022, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article23971495
- ↑ 1871 'NOTES OF THE WEEK.', The Sydney Morning Herald (NSW : 1842 - 1954), 29 July, p. 5. , viewed 30 Apr 2022, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article13242565
- ↑ 1861 'CITY POLICE COURT.', The Melbourne Leader (Vic. : 1861), 9 March, p. 15. , viewed 30 Apr 2022, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article197522266
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Emma (McBeth) MacBeath M.Ed MSM