This scarce work pulls together much important information on early settlers of Jamaica, including seventy pedigrees of early Jamaicans, a table showing the starting date for baptismal, marriage, and burial records as found in all Jamaican parishes, and an early census of 700 Jamaican landowners.
At the end of the 17th century, driven by terrible persecution in France, thousands of Huguenots fled their country in search of religious freedom. A large number found what they sought in the fledgling colony of (South) Carolina in the New World Here these noblemen, craftsmen and artisans took up axes and guns and struggled to build their homes and survive in the wilderness with their wives and children. Nowhere was this more evident than on the banks of the Santee River where a group of French and Swiss Protestant refugees arrived in 1687 and where, "a sail from a boat was our first house and the earth our bed. A cabin like that of savages...was our second house" Through their letters and tantalizing bits and pieces of recorded history they left behind, their struggles and triumphs to forge a new settlement are revealed. At French Santee, they established a wealthy plantation society until time and fate returned the land they had conquered to wilderness once more. This is an in-depth study of the 17th century Huguenot settlement on the Santee River in South Carolina, with biographical sketches of the more than 100 French Protestant families who lived there. Detailed maps, photographs and copies of old plats show the changes in the area as the settlement grew and evolved into the 18th century. The book includes translations of two letters written from Carolina prior to 1700 explanatory notes and footnotes. You may begin by reading about your own family, but you will soon find yourself checking out their neighbors and friends tracing land sales and untangling relationships.
"This edited volume contains ... papers that were presented at the 1997 international symposium 'Out of New Babylon: The Huguenots and their Diaspora', held at the College of Charleston, South Carolina"-- Library of Congress.
Drawing comparisons with the broader Huguenot diaspora, this book reassesses the prevailing view that Huguenots in North America quickly conformed to Anglicanism and abandoned the French language and other distinctive characteristics in order to assimilate into Anglo-American culture. Although the standard interpretation may still be true for Huguenots in heterogeneous urban communities, it should be modified for Huguenots in ethnically and religiously homogeneous rural settlements like New Paltz and New Rochelle, where the process was more akin to a gradual acculturation.
In From a Far Country Catharine Randall examines Huguenots and their less-known cousins the Camisards, offering a fresh perspective on the important role these French Protestants played in settling the New World. The Camisard religion was marked by more ecstatic expression than that of the Huguenots, not unlike differences between Pentecostals and Protestants. Both groups were persecuted and emigrated in large numbers, becoming participants in the broad circulation of ideas that characterized the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Randall vividly portrays this French Protestant diaspora through the lives of three figures: Gabriel Bernon, who led a Huguenot exodus to Massachusetts and moved among the commercial elite; Ezéchiel Carré, a Camisard who influenced Cotton Mather’s theology; and Elie Neau, a Camisard-influenced writer and escaped galley slave who established North America’s first school for blacks. Like other French Protestants, these men were adaptable in their religious views, a quality Randall points out as quintessentially American. In anthropological terms they acted as code shifters who manipulated multiple cultures. While this malleability ensured that French Protestant culture would not survive in externally recognizable terms in the Americas, Randall shows that the culture’s impact was nonetheless considerable.
There is a subtle but significant French heritage in North Carolina. Towns such as Bath, Beaufort, New Bern, and La Grange are testimony to the settlements of French Huguenots in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The city of Fayetteville is named after the Marquis de Lafayette, a French ally during the American Revolution. The first European explorers to the North Carolina region were, in fact, French (1524). French Huguenots migrated to the state as early as 1690 and many North Carolinians have last names of French origin. North Carolina has many other place names and remnants of French presence since the early colonial period. This book traces the historical presence of the French in NC from the state's origins to the present and tells the story of a little-known part of the state's cultural heritage. (Color photos and images).
This extensively-researched two-volume series offers a detailed account of "the coming of the persecuted Protestants of France to the New World, and their establishment, particularly in the seaboard provinces [New England] now comprehended within the United States....The volumes now submitted to the public treat first of these antecedent movements, and then take up the narrative of the events that led to the more considerable and more effective emigration, in the latter years of the seventeenth century." This very readable narrative history is rich with details about persons, places and events. Much of the information preserved on these pages was gleaned from unpublished documents found in the United States, France and England: "Manuscripts in the possession of the descendants of refugees; memorials, petitions, wills, and other papers on file in public offices;" as well as numerous church records and other original documents. Volume I includes: Attempted Settlements in Brazil and Florida, Under the Edict: Acadia and Canada, New Netherland, The Antilles, Approach of the Revocation, and The Revocation: Flight from La Rochelle and Aunis. Illustrations, maps, and an appendix enhance the text. An index to full-names, places and subjects for both volumes is contained in Volume II.
Winner of the National Huguenot Society's 2022 Scholarly Works Award The Huguenots and their struggle for freedom of conscience and freedom of worship are largely unknown outside of France. The entrance of the sixteenth-century Reformation in France, first through the teachings of Luther, then of Calvin, brought three centuries of religious wars before Protestants were considered fully French and obtained the freedom to worship God without repression and persecution from the established church and the tyrannical state. From the first martyrs early in the sixteenth century to the last martyrs at the end of the eighteenth century, Protestants suffered from the intolerance of church and state, the former refusing genuine reform and unwilling to relinquish privileges, the latter rejecting any threats to the absolute monarchy. The rights gained with one treaty or edict of pacification were snatched away with another royal decree declaring Protestants heretics and outlaws. Political and religious intrigues, conspiracies, assassinations, and broken promises contributed to the turmoil and tens of thousands were exiled or fled to places of refuge. Others spent decades as slaves on the king's galleys or imprisoned. They lost their possessions; they lost their lives. They did not lose their faith in a sovereign God.
In 1700, King William III assigned Charles de Sailly to accompany Huguenot refugees to Manakin Town on the Virginia frontier. The existing explanation for why this migration was necessary is overly simplistic and seriously conflated. Based largely on English-language sources with an English Atlantic focus, it contends that King William III, grateful to the French Protestant refugees who helped him invade England during the Glorious Revolution (1688) and win victory in Ireland (1691), rewarded these refugees by granting them 10,000 acres in Virginia on which to settle. Using French-language sources and a wider, more European focus than existing interpretations, this book offers an alternative explanation. It delineates a Huguenot refugee resettlement network within a «Protestant International», highlighting the patronage of both King William himself and his valued Huguenot associate, Henri de Ruvigny (Lord Galway). By 1700, King William was politically battered by the interwoven pressures of an English reaction against his high-profile foreign favorites (Galway among them) and the Irish land grants he had awarded to close colleagues (to Galway and others). This book asserts that King William and Lord Galway sponsored the Manakin Town migration to provide an alternate location for Huguenot military refugees in the worst-case scenario that they might lose their Irish refuge.