James Jones of Great Baddow

Returned Jamaica slave-owner, dying in Britain by 1837. The layering of creditors in his will is not completely clear: the compensation for the enslaved people on his estate of Twickenham Park in St Catherine was paid to the London merchants Baker and Philpotts.

1. Clerk to the Commissioners of Forts in Jamaica, 1774 and 1779. Council member in Jamaica 1799, 1802, 1805, 1808.

2. Administration of the will of James Jones of Great Baddow Essex [made in 1825] granted 26/05/1837. In the will he rehearsed a settlement of 1791 to which not only his wife and trustees but also creditors - since paid off - were party, and which gave him the right to charge a rent charge of £200 p.a. on his estate Twickenham Park and the enslaved people upon it, and on an adjacent Penn, and under this authority in his will he left an annuity of £200 p.a to his daughter Lucy Ann Jones. By a second indenture whose date is not reliably decipherable but appears to be 1810, to which the Milligans of London were party, he was similarly authorised to charge a further £500 p.a. on the estates, which he did so for the benefit of his wife or if she died in his lifetime to his daughter Lucy Ann Jones. Under what appears to be a third indenture but dated 1808, with Isaac Aguilar and others, he left this £500 pa.. to his sisters in the event of the death of his wife and daughter. The estates passed to Lucy Ann Jones, failing whom they were to be divided in one-fifth shares among his sisters and their families. In the probate, by Lucy Ann Finlay widow late Jones, he was described as formerly of Jamaica, afterwards of Great Baddow and late of Castlemain[s] near Glasgow and Edinburgh.

3. His only child Lucy Ann Jones married Alexander Finlay of Castlemains in 1825. Their son Rev. Edward Bullock Finlay (1827-1896) was the namesake of Edward Bullock of Kingston (q.v.), the Rev. Edward Bullock Finlay's great grandfather.

1. Walter Augustus Fuertado, Official & Other Personages of Jamaica from 1655 to 1790: To which is Added a Chapter on the Peerage &c., in Jamaica, Comp. from Various Sources (Jamaica, 1896) via http://www.jamaicanfamilysearch.com/Members/b/bfeurtado04.htm. Jamaica Almanacs (1779, 1799, 1802, 1805, 1808).

2. PROB 11/1878/259

3. Edinburgh Magazine Vol. 96 (1825) p. 389.

We are grateful to Stephen Mallet for his assistance with compiling this entry.