15 June 2007

Another unusual name

One of the delights of an Ancestry.com subscription is exploring newly available databases. It's been a drought period for new datasets on Ancestry of interest to me of late, but in April, when "English Settlers in Barbados, 1637-1800" came online, I took the opportunity to search some of the less common surnames in my family. That was unsuccessful, and then I remembered the one previous occasion I'd had to explore Barbados' records.

John Rogers from the Ottawa Company of Sharpshooters died at the Battle of Cut Knife Hill on 2 May1885. He was a native of Barbados. While researching the book "The Ottawa Sharpshooters" I found his mother was baptized Mary Licorish Kidney, a most unusual name.

Previous information was that Mary had been born in Barbados in 1818, too late for this dataset. There were lots of Kidney and Licorish family members, and John's paternal line was tentatively extended back to a g-g-grandfather named Andrew. The Kidney and Licorish families also appeared in Ancestry's "Slave Registers of former British Colonial Dependencies, 1812-1834"

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