Audrey Dewjee’s latest contribution to Historycal Roots is of particular interest to us and we hope you will find it enlightening too. Audrey has chosen the title ‘Roots entwined’ for the article and in it she explores the history of inter-racial marriage in her home county of Yorkshire.
The earliest mixed marriage she mentions in the article took place in Deptford, London, in 1613, but, as she puts it, ‘Yorkshire eventually caught up.’ She goes on to mention the marriage of John Quashee and Rebecca Crosby at Thornton by Pocklington on 12s. November 1732.
Audrey goes on to cite 18th, 19th and 20th century examples. One of her 19th century Yorkshire marriages features John Perry, a Black man born in Annapolis in Nova Scotia in about 1819, who married in Ripon in 1844 and ended his days in Sydney, Australia, having been transported to the penal colony. As an illustration of how ‘entwined’ these stories can become, John Perry has featured in an earlier Historycal Roots article by John Ellis which Audrey references.
Of course, similar stories can be found in virtually any part of the country and there must be people who are puzzled by the results they get back from a DNA test. As Audrey says ‘colour fades quickly if [mixed heritage] children and grandchildren have White partners … and gradually the memory of a Black ancestor fades,’ something my wife and I are only too aware of as we watch our grandson growing up.
Audrey’s article is here:
https://www.historycalroots.com/roots-entwined-inter-racial-families-in-yorkshire/