My ancestors do the right thing
Today is my aunt's 96th birthday (and, I believe, a rather lower one for chickenfeet2003). Which seems like a good day to report a discovery that delighted me this week.
As some of you may remember, I'm involved in the Peterloo Memorial Campaign, in which I get a small amount of kudos for being a distant relative by marriage of Mary Fildes. Unfortunately the cousin who explained the link to me has died, and I don't have his papers, so I've been trying to reconstruct it, and I think she was married to my first cousin five times removed (meaning her father-in-law and my great-great-great-great-grandfather were brothers).
But in the course of this I discovered a fascinating website hosted by Parliament on the campaign to abolish the slave trade, which includes two petitions from Manchester presented to the Lords in May 1806, one opposing the Foreign Slave Trade Abolition Bill signed by about a hundred manufacturers and merchants, and one supporting it signed by about two thousand Mancunians. The bill passed later that month.
Anyway, the good news (and the reason why I stumbled on the site via Google) is that half a dozen men of the Fildes family signed the pro-abolition petition, one of whom seems likely to be my great-great-great-grandfather (and my aunt's great-great-grandfather) James Fildes. Someone's done a lot of research mapping each of the three James Fildes who signed on to the various James Fildes within the family (which seems to have had very few ideas for male names beyond James and Thomas) but, you know, with three of them my ggggf is unlikely to be missing.
I also had a look through the transcript of the much shorter list of anti-abolitionists, and was very relieved not to recognise any surnames connected with my family. There was one I was afraid might come up, because I know they had a cotton mill later in the century, but the only occurrence of that surname was on the pro-abolition list.
So well done the Fildes, and indeed all 2,000 of the abolitionists! And also thanks to the House of Lords for looking after the petition so I can now look at my ancestor's signatures.
As some of you may remember, I'm involved in the Peterloo Memorial Campaign, in which I get a small amount of kudos for being a distant relative by marriage of Mary Fildes. Unfortunately the cousin who explained the link to me has died, and I don't have his papers, so I've been trying to reconstruct it, and I think she was married to my first cousin five times removed (meaning her father-in-law and my great-great-great-great-grandfather were brothers).
But in the course of this I discovered a fascinating website hosted by Parliament on the campaign to abolish the slave trade, which includes two petitions from Manchester presented to the Lords in May 1806, one opposing the Foreign Slave Trade Abolition Bill signed by about a hundred manufacturers and merchants, and one supporting it signed by about two thousand Mancunians. The bill passed later that month.
Anyway, the good news (and the reason why I stumbled on the site via Google) is that half a dozen men of the Fildes family signed the pro-abolition petition, one of whom seems likely to be my great-great-great-grandfather (and my aunt's great-great-grandfather) James Fildes. Someone's done a lot of research mapping each of the three James Fildes who signed on to the various James Fildes within the family (which seems to have had very few ideas for male names beyond James and Thomas) but, you know, with three of them my ggggf is unlikely to be missing.
I also had a look through the transcript of the much shorter list of anti-abolitionists, and was very relieved not to recognise any surnames connected with my family. There was one I was afraid might come up, because I know they had a cotton mill later in the century, but the only occurrence of that surname was on the pro-abolition list.
So well done the Fildes, and indeed all 2,000 of the abolitionists! And also thanks to the House of Lords for looking after the petition so I can now look at my ancestor's signatures.