Identity: Careful what you wish for.

We live in an age of identity politics. The wish to know who you are easily slides over into telling other people who they are. But who are we, really?

We are many things, just as we have many ancestors. You don't get to choose your ancestors, you have to accept them as they were, warts and all and, perhaps most importantly, try not to judge them by the moral standards of our time. We are no better than the prevailing social mores require, so why should they have been any different?

My sixth great-grandfather Francis Delap (1690-1766) was an Antiguan  merchant and  a slave owner. It's likely that one of the things he was trading in was slaves.

The Delaps were really Dunlops and in the sixteenth century were settled in Irvine, Ayrshire. In the reign of  Elizabeth I, probably around 1600,  Francis' great-grandfather Hugh Dunlop (1575-1641) upped sticks and moved to Ireland, settling in Sligo. The Scottish Presbyterian migrants to Sligo were predominantly merchants attracted by the commercial potential of the port.

We can learn something about this Hugh Dunlop/Delap from Thomas Witherow's  Historical and Literary Memorials of Presbyterianism in Ireland (1731-1800) where he relates the following story (pp 38-9).

"This Hugh Delap appears to have been the first of the family who settled in Ireland. He marries a Miss Aikin, and after his marriage he left Scotland, made his way across the Channel, and set up in business in the town of Sligo. In due time, when he had a home fit for her reception, his wife, who is described as a woman of very small stature, followed him to Ireland, but in making her way over the Donegal mountains was robbed in passing through the Gap of Barnesmore [below circa 1900]. The Delaps were among the first Protestants who settled in Sligo. For years their children remained unbaptized, there being no Protestant minister in the place; but at last one named Roecroft arrived, by whom the rite was administered. Two days before the Irish massacre of 1641, Lord Taffe sent for the family and brought them to Ballymote [below circa 1792] - an event which, in all probability, was the means if preserving their lives."

Hugh's son Robert (1610-1673) made his living as a merchant  in Sligo, Manorhamilton and Ballyshannon, Donegal where this branch of the family seem to have settled. He married Jane Murray and had at least six children.  One of whom,  another Robert (1645-1713), seems to have been the first to style himself Delap,  and was the father of the Antiguan Francis Delap. 

Robert's life was not untroubled. His estates in Ballyshannon were confiscated by James II and there is evidence that the Delap family was intriguing for the party of William of Orange. Robert's prospects improved on the accession of  William to the English throne. Francis, who was born in Ballyshannon in 1690 is described as coming from a prosperous merchant family established in the Dublin wine trade. This sounds credible and we know that the Ballyshannon Delaps had family connections with Bordeaux wine merchants.

Francis married Elizabeth Donaldson on 17th March 1714 and their daughter Elizabeth was born in 1721.  At some point in the next decade the family emigrated to Antigua. Francis acquired a number of sugar plantations and in the process the Delaps became one of the most prominent Antiguan families. In 1823  William Clark produced a set of aquatints, two of which depict  Delap's plantation, one is the scene in the boiling house, the other of slaves cutting cane.

On the 4th of September 1730 my 5th great-grandmother Rebecca Delap was born in Antigua.  She went on to marry into the Anglo-Irish aristocracy and  despite it being a long way took up residence in Suir Castle, Tipperary. Her sister Elizabeth also made a good marriage  in 1741 to a Scottish lad o' pairts from Galloway called John Halliday who began as a tax collector on Antigua and went on to inherit his father-in-law's estates. 

The Hallidays became filthy rich and eventually returned to England, settling in Richmond, Surrey. Elizabeth died in 1781 and is buried in the church-yard of St Mary Magdalene, which means that my 6th great-aunt lies about a mile from my London apartment and 800 metres from a house I used to live in. I have seen reports that the headstone was still readable in the early 20th century and last Summer I went with my daughter to look for the grave but we could find nothing. 

The Delap name though is important to me. I was able to make the connection between the Mills family and the Delaps due to a curious piece of sentimentality. My 3rd great-grandfather, born in Ireland in 1802 was christened St George William Delap Mills in honour of his grandmother a lady born in Antigua who died almost 20 years before he was born. It was reading this name on his son's marriage certificate that got me started on this journey. The writing was difficult to decipher. Was it Dunlop or was it Delap? As it turned out it was both.

The Ring

Where to begin?

I created this blog more than a year ago and then wrote nothing. I was paralyzed by the thought of  grasping  threads that recede into the past and fade into  the unknown. But yesterday, suddenly,  I knew where to start.

It's not true what Larkin says, that all that will survive of us is love. What survives are things, artefacts, relics. That's what we pass on. What we make of them, how we understand them, what meaning we give to them, well, that's our own business.

I look down at my right hand and remove the ring on my ring finger. I've worn that ring for more than 30 years and my father wore it before me until, in his final illness, his finger was too thin to stop it  slipping off. My mother took it home from the hospital, anything that wasn't nailed down in that place would disappear.  When he died she gave it to me.

The gold is soft,  the engraving  indistinct;  three faint runic lines, one standing slightly apart from the other. JH is what you should be able to read. You can't tell now, but maybe, once, it was  like the cursive JH engraved on the silver-plated forks we used every day when I was growing up.

So who was JH? The answer, I thought, was simple: John Hood, my father's maternal grandfather. John Hood, the man that nobody knew anything about. John Hood who moved my grandmother to give his name to one of my uncles and my parents in turn to give me Hood as a middle name. 

He died on the 1st of September 1914, drowned in the Forth and Clyde Canal at Samuel Street Kirkintilloch at 12.30 pm. The death certificate is  precise about the time. It's not quite true that nobody knew anything of him. My great aunt Kitty was 11 when he died, she must have had some memories. My grandmother  was only 5 and her brother Willie just 3; they can't have remembered much. I certainly never heard any of them  mention him.

In 1891 he was a house painter and that is how he is described in all the records that relate to his life and death, sometimes with the qualification: journeyman.  Journeyman, a skilled man, someone who knew his craft. Perhaps a ragged trousered philanthropist.

Why did he fall into the canal? At midday drink seems unlikely. Despair?  Trying to save a child? Rescuing a drowning puppy? Nobody knows. A senseless death.

I took my ring off and did something I'd never done before, examined the hallmark. Nine carat gold, hallmarked in Birmingham in 1848, the year of revolution.  I'm totally wrong. This is not John Hood's ring after all. Like me he inherited it. Its first owner was another John Hood, the John Hood that was my 3rd great-grandfather.

This John Hood was born in 1809 in Kinnoull on the banks of the Tay. In 1837, at the age of 28 he married Julia Mitchell of Glenisla who was 25 and by the early 1840s they had settled nearby in Coupar Angus. Julia Mitchell, another thread of continuity. In 1939 my aunt was given these names.

John is described  in the 1841 census return as a watchmaker. What I'm wearing must have been his signet ring. I always assumed watchmakers would  need slim and nimble fingers to assemble  intricate mechanisms.  If John wore this ring on his left pinkie his fingers were not slim. I couldn't wear it there, it would slip off immediately and so, like my father, I wear it on my ring finger.

In my end is my beginning. Let's see where it takes us.