Rev. Joseph Gerrald

The executors (William Shiell and John Cannonier, both of whom q.v.) of Rev. Joseph Gerald [sic] were awarded the compensation for the enslaved people on Geralds estate on Montserrat.

1. Probably the Hon. and Rev. Joseph Gerrald, identified as a judge in Montserrat in the mid-1820s, who 'reprobated' the coroner on the island for taking the evidence of slaves.

2. If so, then the son of radical Joseph Gerrald (1763-1796), transported to Australia in 1794 for sedition, whose family were Irish 'planters' on St Kitts. Joseph Gerrald, Adm. pens. (age 17) at TRINITY, Dec. 3, 1800. S. of Joseph [barrister and political reformer, for whom see D.N.B.], of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, America. School, Charterhouse, London (not in Al. Carthus.). Doubtful if resided. According to the D.N.B. he was ‘taken under protection by Windham, then Secretary of War,’ when his father was sent to Botany Bay, having been sentenced to 14 years' transportation for sedition.

3. However, the CCEd shows a Joseph Gerrald [or Gerald] ordained 14/03/1813 in London 'lit' [i.e. no tertiary education].

1. Report of the Commissioner of Inquiry into the Administration of Civil and Criminal Justice in the West Indies (1827), p. 144.

2. Ancestry.com, Cambridge University Alumni, 1261-1900 [database online]; Michael T. Davis, 'Gerrald, Joseph (1763-1796), political reformer' Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004), online edn, May 2008.

3. CCEd Person ID 117961