Henry VIII ordered that parish registers of baptisms, marriages and burials be kept from 1538. Very few have survived from this date. Elizabeth I repeated her father’s order in 1558 and then ordered that parish registers be kept on parchment (rather than more vulnerable paper) in 1597. More registers survive from this date.

Parish registers are the most used sources at county archives. They are often used to trace researchers’ family history, but also contain information that can be useful to different types of researchers.

Most of the people of African descent living in this country during the eighteenth-century were men. Some historians* suggest that 80% of the Black population would have been male. This reflects the ratio of men to women forcibly transported from Africa to the West Indies and America.

Most of the men and women of African descent living in Britain at this time worked as servants. It is not always clear whether their official legal status was free or enslaved.

Eighteenth-century British newspapers contained advertisements for men, women and children who had run away from their enslavers. The adverts offer rewards for the return of the owners’ “property”. Many of these men and women are referred to as servants.

*See David Olusoga “Black and British: A Forgotten History”, London 2016. His discussion of the work of Felicity Nussbaum a scholar of the eighteen-century.

This is the burial entry for William Wandoe from the Hexham parish registers. It reads:

6 [March 1716] Willm Wandoe a negro brought over by Capt Roger Carnaby & baptized.

There is also part of an entry for William’s baptism, but the page is very fragile and hard to read. The date of the baptism is September 1714.

The registers also show that Roger Carnaby was buried on 7 April 1713. William received £10 from Carnaby’s will (see Border Ancestors website below). In the will William is referred to as Carnaby’s “man servant”.

It isn’t possible to say exactly when William came to England – “brought over” as it says in his burial entry. However, we do know that Carnaby made at least four voyages between 1702 and 1707 (see slavevoyages.org website below).  All of these voyages followed the triangular route of the transatlantic slave trade. Two of his voyages (1702 and 1704) picked up enslaved people in Calabar (present-day Nigeria) and took them across the Atlantic to Maryland on the American mainland.

Wando is the name of a river in South Carolina, USA. The Wando flows into the Atlantic at Charleston, which was one of the biggest markets of enslaved people in America. Many slaving ships stopped off at Charleston after crossing the Atlantic; the brutal “Middle Passage”.

It could be suggested that William Wandoe was one of the Africans from Nigeria that Carnaby’s ship transported in 1702 or 1704. The name Wando suggests some connection with America and so it seems more likely that he was on one of the voyages that stopped off on the mainland, rather than in the West Indies.

The captain of slaving vessels made agreements with the investors before they set off on a voyage. There were usually several investors on each voyage to spread the risk. The captain of a voyage would negotiate a cash payment and a “privilege slave”- one of the enslaved people taken from Africa and transported on the ship. Once the ship arrived in the Caribbean or mainland America, the captain would usually sell his “privilege slave” and take the money. Occasionally, the captain would bring their “privilege slave” back to England with them as a servant.

It seems likely that William Wandoe was one of Carnaby’s “privilege slaves”.

Documents from the eighteenth-century regularly use language that is unacceptable. People of African descent were often called “negroes” as in this parish register.