52 Ancestors # 6 - Johannis Proverbs - a ninth great-grandfather

This post is for Week 6 of the 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks Challenge - 2015 - by Amy Johnson Crow from No Story Too Small. Prompt for Week 6, So Far Away. This prompt suggests - which ancestor is the farthest from you, either in distance or in time/generations? So, I have selected my 9th great-grandfather Johannis (John) Proverbs who lived in Barbados.

So a little bit about Barbados ...
The first English ship, the Olive Blossom, arrived in Barbados in 1625. They took possession of it in the name of King James I. In 1627 the first permanent settlers arrived from England, and it became an English and later British colony (Wikipedia).


The arrival of the British and French in the Caribbean in the early seventeenth century marked the beginning of the never-ending expansion of sugar production and the deepening of its identification with slavery. For the first half of the seventeenth century, plantation cultivation relied for labor on varied combinations of African and indigenous slaves and European indentured laborers. From the middle of the seventeenth century, however, sugar was exclusively produced by enslaved Africans on plantations that monopolized land use and transformed entire islands like Barbados and Jamaica into virtual "sugar factories" (Ashcroft 1999, p. 44).

Barbados provided the perfect habitat to grow the sugarcane, tropical heat and saturating rain. So, the British settled in the West Indies transforming virgin forests into a patchwork quilt of Sugar Plantations.


The 1680 Barbados Census - St Phillip Parish - lists the following Proverbs males:
Proverbe John St. Phillip
Proverbe Thomas St. Phillip
Proverbe John St Phillip
Proverbe William St Phillip

Plantation life would have been hard in the seventeenth century, and the British must have found the climate unbelievable. But, there were serious fortunes to be made. I don't know if the Proverbs men made a fortune or not, probably not, but they certainly stayed in Barbados and are there to this day.

Cutting sugar cane West Indies © Corbis - used with permission

John Snr. died in St Phillip's Parish, Barbados on the 25th February 1686. His simple will identifies John as a planter and informs us that he had four sons, Thomas, Benjamin, Ambrose & John and one married daughter Mary Budd living at the time of his death.

John Proverbs Snr Will - English Settlers in Barbados 1637-1800

There is a family story - yes dear reader - a family story that a group of people, the 'originals' were a set of people banished from England by the Monarchy for whatever reason, and on the ship they decided to pick a new name for themselves. Opening the Bible at a random page, they chose Proverbs ... imagine if they opened their bible at Ecclesiasticus, what an interesting name that would be. As there was a Provarbs family in Bristol in the seventeenth century I doubt that this particular family story has much credence. 

There is also some, but not much, evidence that the Proverbs were slave traders. They certainly owned plantations and slaves in Barbados as evidenced by the Slave Registers of former British Colonial Dependencies, 1813-1834.

I am descended from John's son Ambrose and his wife Jane Hay. I wonder what John would have thought about his 9th great granddaughter in Australia writing about Barbados. A trip to Barbados is certainly on my 'bucket list'. 

On another thought, I am thinking of a One-Name Study on the Proverbs name and all the variations. What do you think?

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Bibliography
Ashcroft, Bill. "A Fatal Sweetness: Sugar and Post-Colonial Cultures." In White and Deadly: Sugar and Colonialism, edited by Pal Ahluwalia, Bill Ashcroft, and Roger Knight, 33-50. Commack, NY: Nova Science, 1999.

Joanne McRee Sanders. Barbados Records: Wills, 1639-1725. Vols. 1-3. Baltimore, MD, USA: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1979-1981.