I’m still working on Catherine’s papers. Her great-grandfather married an English girl named Ellen WINT. I study, sheet after sheet, I grade, make plans and throw myself. It’s late, I have to postpone until tomorrow.
Always the same monotony, the days follow and leave me little time to devote to my work. I’m not hungry tonight, I need a little toilet and I’ll sit at my table. I noted that before her marriage to Georges LE PETIT, Ellen was married to an Englishman and lived in England in London and then in Ilford a few kilometres away. Her husband Francis Beckett BELLEW came from a military family originally from Ireland. Francis died at sea at 39. A year later, Ellen married Georges.
She lived a few years in France in the small town of Boulay in Indre and Loire with her mother, her father-in-law Dederick CHARLLESON and their two children. What place does Ellen have in this blended family? Is it integrated where is the maid as noted on the 1856 census?!
Her father was a career soldier, she did not know him, she was only a few months old when he was taken away by illness.
I’m tired, letters dance on paper, I have trouble keeping my eyes open. Let’s be reasonable, I’ll put away my writing and go to bed.
I wake up in the morning, I am not in my bed but in a large canopy bed in exotic wood, a mosquito net protects me from insects. I get out of bed the room is huge, The walls, are covered with a fabric of a shade of blue that I do not know, statuettes and other trinkets decorate with delicacy the furniture, the small living room on the right of the room is covered with a velvet of the same shade as the walls. On the left a small bathroom of the same wood, a basin and a ceramic broce finely decorated. I run towards the window, I open the heavy curtain and I remain stunned in front of this view! I’m not in Calais anymore, is it a dream or reality? Have I projected myself towards this Caribbean island? Am I in the parish of Saint Catherine in Jamaica among Catherine’s ancestors? Someone knocks on the door, gently opens the door and asks me if I slept well. She is a young woman with a beautiful smile, she brings me a pretty dress of pastel color and a fabric as light as the breeze that comes from the sea. She leads me to her masters.
Ellen’s grandparents, are sitting on the porch, enjoying the few hours of freshness, all relative for me, Eliza comes to meet me and invites me to join them. Here, I understand and speak the language of Shakespeare perfectly! After a few courtesies, James the butler makes us serve an English breakfast, John Pusey leaves us, he must return to the sugar cane fields where dozens of slaves are busy. Running an area like Ryde Pen is no small feat. Eliza tells me about her two daughters Eliza and Ann born in England before they returned to the Island, her two sons born in this parish John Pusey junior and William Shute. She knows her husband’s infidelities, but here it’s common. John, Richard, and James came out of that relationship. She and her husband were born in Jamaica, her father-in-law traded between England and the Caribbean Islands. Her husband also has siblings from her father Samuel’s relationship with a certain Ruth Anderson, 4 children all recognized have completed the family: Mary, Ann, Elizabeth and James. His father William BAILEY was himself a planter in the commune of Kingston. It yearns for the temperate climate of its Great Britain, even that of France would suit it better than this humidity and permanent heat. She hopes to convince her husband. The countryside stretches as far as the eye can see, trees I do not know exist all around the residence and in the nearby forest, blooms invade my senses, the sky is an azure blue and the sea a translucent green blue. We see fish, crustaceans and corals. All these songs of birds, these scents, this warmth plunge me into a languor close to sleep.
I’m cold, I’m shivering. I’m in my little bed with shelves on it, it was just a dream. But during this period of time I rubbed shoulders with the English bourgeoisie and I kept sensations and memories. It’s Sunday, quickly, I put logs in the fireplace and I go back to bed until the fire diffuses its sweet heat throughout the apartment.
I think back to the words of Eliza, PUSEY and BUTLER are also families of planters who live in the high spheres of English society on this island. All these families come from England, Scotland, Ireland but how to find their roots?
On Facebook Catherine found descendants of the children of her forefathers’ escapades. They live in Jamaica, America, England and Australia. Language has not been an obstacle to converse, to share the finds, to search the evidences of the filiations etc. I put away this heap of papers of all kinds promising me to try to unravel the mystery of the origins of the ancestors
A rebrousse temps généalogie 