| Notes |
- Attached is the will of Sarah Gordon, mother of Catherine Despard. Here's a partial transcript:
'To my dear daughter Catherine Gordon Despard now in London to declare in this last will and testament the following negroes for some time in my possession: negro man Jack, negro woman Maria little boy her child December and a negro woman Louisa belong unto her the said Catherine Gordon Despard'
She also left Catherine the co-executor of her estate:
'My daughter and best of friends Catherine Gordon Despard in city of London and my dear sister Catherine Pierce inker (?) in Kingston executors'
So - it seems Catherine owned four slaves in 1791! - though she may not have been aware of this, and if she was she may have freed them (as EMD did with slaves he inherited in the Bay of Honduras. There's no record of them following her to England. But it shows that she was a free black woman of Jamaica.
As I mention in my book, in the memoirs of EMD's nieces she's not acknowledged as his wife - they call her his 'black housekeeper' and 'the poor woman who called herself his wife'. So I don't know if she figures in the family tree!
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Name:Catherine GordonGender:FemaleParish:St CatherineBaptism Date:1758Baptism Place:St Catherine, JamaicaFather: Gordon Mother: Gordon FHL Film Number:1291724Page Number:268
Maybe the same catherine?
"her father was a most respected clergyman of the established church" Cliff D Conner
Conclusion
Catherine died in 1815. The announcement of her death was nestled among more
than twenty other death notices in the September 16, 1815, issue of the English
newspaper, Jackson’s Oxford Journal. It simply stated, “Mrs. Despard, widow of the
unfortunate Col. Despard” (“Deaths”). No age or exact date of death was listed. Readers
only learned that Mrs. Despard met her fate at Somers Town. Across the Atlantic nearly
five months later, readers of the New-England Palladium, in Boston, Massachusetts, may
have nearly missed the same notice listed among the deaths of local men, widows, and
babies and the drowning of three brothers aged twenty-two, twenty, and ten (“Died”).
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Our Family History
Abt 1758 - Abt 1815 (~ 57 years)
