Regular contributors Audrey Dewjee and John Ellis have been busy.
John continues his assiduous search of digitised newspaper archives for snippets of Black British history. Much of what he finds is fragmentary but each fragment adds another piece to the jigsaw. His task is a never-ending one as, of course, the digitisation process continues apace with thousands of new newspaper pages added to the archives at findmypast.co.uk every month. His latest snippets are here. As you will discover, they range widely geographically and across time:
https://www.historycalroots.com/fragments-18th-19th-century/#alexander
https://www.historycalroots.com/james-johnson-of-melton-mowbray-leicestershire-in-1914/
John has other discoveries in the pipeline, sometimes I can barely keep up!
Audrey, meanwhile, has brought her long-term research into the life of Joseph Almaze to a conclusion, for now. Historical research can rarely be said to be ‘finished’, new material is constantly emerging (see above) and sometimes a ‘conclusion’ turns out to have been merely a ‘provisional draft’ of history. If you have never heard of Joseph Almaze (I hadn’t) I venture to suggest that you and I should have done. His was one of many Black voices raised in Britain against slavery and was one of those who signed a letter to Granville Sharpe on 15th December 1787, thanking him for all that he had done to help the cause of abolition. Audrey’s fascinating article about this 18th-century Black Londoner is here:
https://www.historycalroots.com/joseph-almaze-a-late-18th-century-black-londoner/