Hannah Barnes

Widow of Joseph Barnes and possibly the employer of Margaret Taylor (q.v.). In addition to her claim in Kingston, her husband's executors were awarded £1253 2s 10d as a share of the compensation for the 267 enslaved people on Cumberland Pen. Hannah Barnes had an annuity of £400 [her husband's will appears to show £300] Jamaican currency secured on the estate.

1. '[M]yself, my daughter and her children are entirely dependent for support on what we receive from [my late husband's] Estate; that in consequence of the non-receipt of our remittances for many months past, I am much in want of money.'

2. Will of Joseph Barnes of Kingston in the County of Surrey, Island of Jamaica, proved 09/11/1831.

3. Hannah Barnes' daughter Charlotte Hannah Barnes married William Trutch in Jamaica c. 1822. Trutch was in financial difficulty in the mid-1830s, when the family had moved to Devon c. 1834. One of the sons of Charlotte Barnes and William Trutch was the Canadian businessman and politician Sir Joseph William Trutch (1826-1904), a central figure in British Columbia described as 'a particular colonial type' with an absentee mentality who had as a boy lived both in Jamaica and in Devon, presumably with Hannah Barnes, at the time of compensation and who at the end of his career retired to England and died there in 1904.

T71/1608 letter from [Mrs] H. Barnes, Barton Cottage Do[a?]wlish [Devon] 21/11/1835 re Kingston claim no. 1856 claim and St Catherine claim no. 502, widow of Joseph Barnes. See also claim of Margaret Taylor Kingston No. 2659, (a free woman of colour and possibly a domestic servant of Hannah Barnes). T71/1592 letter from Commissioners of Compensation to Hannah Barnes Barton Cottage Dawlish 11/08/1835.

1. T71/1608 Various parishes bundle, H. Barnes to Commissioners 21/11/1835.

2. PROB 11/1791B.

3. London Gazette, Issue 19129, 11/02/1834, p. 310 (which shows him in prison for debt and describes him most recently as of Dawlish in Devon) and 19436 11/11/1836 p. 2018 (an adjournment, which gives his most recent address as the Exeter gaol); Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online, Robin Fisher 'Trutch, Sir Joseph William, engineer, surveyor, politician and office holder' http://www.biographi.ca/009004-119.01-e.php?BioId=41229 [accessed 14/04/2011]. W.A. Feurtado also made this connection in The Peerage in Jamaica: see http://jamaicanfamilysearch.com/Samples2/bfeurtado99.htm [accessed 25/09/2012].