The Webbe family and New River Estate in Nevis

I was introduced to Ruth Hecht by Dr Madge Dresser at the University of Bristol who I’d contacted while looking into my slave owning ancestors. Ruth appeared in the Radio 4 Descendants podcast series I recommended and was prompt for the new Recommended category on this blog (helping both directly and indirectly with the resources for those researching slave owning ancestors contained in my post announcing it).

That was all hugely appreciated, but to top that she has produced the following report looking at the Webbe family ownership of the New River estates I had been looling into. It’s way more forensic than anything I have done, but as she explained it’s incredibly complicated and so she isn’t sure if it is completely correct for reasons explained below. But in answer to my Joshiah Webbe(s) and New River(s) Estates? post that asked whether their were two New River estates and two related Josiah Webbes , she says the answer to both of those questions is an emphatic ‘yes’!!

Webbe family tree which shows the ownership of two New River estates on Nevis

Joshiah Webbe(s) and New River(s) Estates?

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_St.Kitts_and_Nevis_(1888).jpg

As you may have seen in the last few posts, I am exploring my slave owning ancestors. It’s not quite the ‘Blood Legacy: ‘reckoning with a family’s story of slavery’ by Alex Renton that has been recommended to me, but that’s one I will check out (not least because its reckoning theme is part of what I am trying to do with this series of posts).

Most of my ancestors involved with the slave trade owned plantations on the Island of Nevis in the West Indies, and through marriage not only were they connected to most of the other plantation owners there but also across the Leeward Islands. What’s been difficult is to find out more about the family history of some these ancestors before they appear on these islands because what is publicly available is patchy.

From what I have been told that patchiness is the result of various fires, invasions and earthquakes that over the centuries have destroyed a lot of the original documents. For example, during the French invasion of Nevis in 1706 records were “burned in the street” hence the earliest record that the Endangered Archives Programme (EAP) are working on being from 1705.