This book began as Jean Stephenson's effort to validate the family tradition that her great-great-grandparents emigrated from Belfast to South Carolina under the leadership of Covenanter Presbyterian minister William Martin in 1772. The author was not only able to authenticate the crux of the story, but, in the process, to place nearly 500 Scotch-Irish families in South Carolina on the eve of the Revolutionary War.Genealogists will want to pore over the land evidences assembled by the author from entries found in the Council Journal, namely, authorizations, survey abstracts, wills, deeds and other records which demonstrate where each family settled, or was entitled to settle. The families, which are grouped under the vessel they traveled in, are identified by the name of the household head, names of spouse and children, number of acres surveyed, county, location of the nearest body of water and the names of abutting neighbor, and the source of the information.
Recently divorced, Dan is still fit and handsome and some might even describe him as having a roguish smile. But after a worrisome medical checkup, and learning that the beloved heritage house he once owned has met the wrecking ball, it feels like time for a change. He has to face up to the fact that he’s a rather lost and lonely divorced guy. So when his Aunt Mary calls to tell him there’s a family mystery she needs help solving, Dan gladly leaves behind chilly Vancouver for the sultry shores of Barbados where he grew up. And soon, with the help of family, friends, and a slightly annoying local historian, he embarks on a treasure hunt. Journeying into his family history takes him through the lush tropical paradise of Barbados, to the hushed archives of Charleston, South Carolina, and to the evergreen Gulf Islands off the west coast of Canada. But Dan and his family aren’t alone in this adventure. They soon find themselves in competition for the treasure with mysterious rivals ... who seem willing to stop at nothing to gain it. This meticulously researched adventure plumbs the history of sugar, slavery, and indentured servitude on Barbados sugar plantations to track a mystery down through the generations. A whirlwind tour through beautiful Barbados’s many attractions, Relics of a Saint builds conflicts, crises, romantic dalliances, and surprises that lead the hero on a journey into the past ... and into his own psyche.
This book traces the precise origin of the early English lexical and lexico-phonetic influences in Sranan, an English-based creole spoken in Suriname. Sranan contains "fossilised" linguistic remnants of an early English colonial period. The book discusses whether Sranan’s English influence(s) originated from a single dialect from the general London area, as proposed by Norval Smith in 1987, or whether we are dealing with a composite of dialectal features from all over England. The book introduces a novel replicable methodology for linguistic reconstructions, which combines statistics (in the form of binomial probability), English dialect geography (via use of Orton’s et. al., 1962–1971, Survey of English Dialects, which focuses on traditional regional English dialects across England and Wales), and 17th-century English migration history (compiled from The Complete Book of Emigrants: 1607–1660,The Bristol Registers of Servants Sent to Foreign Plantations, 1654–1686, Virtual Jamestown, Virginia Center for Digital History, and Colonial State Papers secured from the British History Online databases, among other relevant historical sources).
This history of the 'Torrid Zone' offers a comprehensive and powerfully rich exploration of the 17th century Anglophone Atlantic world, overturning British and American historiographies and offering instead a vernacular history that skillfully negotiates diverse locations, periodizations, and the fraught waters of ethnicity and gender.