Category Archives: Genealogy

Search for Samuel Hawes I Part 4

Fourth installment of researches into the members of the Hawes family in England and the Caribbean in the 1600’s and 1700’s by Steve Jones.

The Hawes branches in Mass are different to the VA branch. This is confirmed by the Family Tree DNA Hawes Project started in 2005 which shows that all male descendants of Samuel Hawes have Haplogroup I-P37 (which is also my haplogroup).

The Richard Hawes that came from Great Missenden in Buckinghamshire (an inland English county) and moved to New England in 1635 on the Truelove is connected to Haplogroup I-M253.  This Hawes family were puritans (the girls typically had virtue names such as Deliverance, Charity, Constance etc) and they sailed over as a family unit. Whilst I-P37 might sound similar to I-M253 they are very different. I-P37 is part of the Subclade I2 whereas I-M253 is part of subclade I1. These two subclades separated around 15,000 years ago so to all intents and purposes they are not related. Descendants of the Edward Hawes of Dedham Mass also have a different Haplogroup  R-M269. This family is believed to come from Warwickshire in England which is also an inland county which would have had no tradition of sailing overseas. Descendants of Edmond Hawes of Yarmouth Mass have the same haplogroup (I-M253) as Richard Hawes but are sufficiently distant from them as to only be very distantly related. This family are understood to have arrived on the Mayflower at Plymouth Rock which also suggests they were puritans. I haven’t been able to establish what part of England this Hawes family originated from.

For a long while I thought I might be descended from the Buckinghamshire Hawes but my Y DNA confirmed that I am not. It becomes confusing as the Buckinghamshire Hawes and my line did cross over in the 1760s in London. In 1768 my direct ancestor John Hawes (1735-1810) was introduced to the Company of Ironmongers by William Hawes who was descended from the Buckinghamshire Hawes. They both had businesses in the same part of London, William was a Grocer and John a sugar refiner. They knew each other and did business with each other but I’m sure it was just a coincidence. Perhaps they thought they were distantly related? The Buckinghamshire Hawes that were in London all died out c 1800 and my line makes no reference to any of them after the 1780s.

The Y DNA I share with the Hawes descended from Samuel share is distinctive and the theory that the Virginian Hawes came from New England has no evidence from what I can see. It was a hypothesis but if it was correct we would share the same Y DNA with one of these branches.

Also looking at my branch there is no evidence of puritanism or the use of virtue names. Our Y DNA is amongst the oldest in England and some of the earliest people to move to England lived in Suffolk. Suffolk folk moved to London easily by sea and were traders; they were used to trading with Holland and had the necessary sailing skills (the folk from Warwickshire / Buckinghamshire were not sailors). The Hawes name is most frequently found in Suffolk / Norfolk versus other counties (there is also a small branch in Cornwall).

Our Hawes were merchants, sailors and adventurers and were not puritans. They sailed as individuals not as families (although once established they will have sent for their family). They sailed between London and the Colonies (Caribbean Islands and mainland US) and traded with the East Indies. They were connected to early investors in the Virginia Company and had long lasting links with the East India Company (I have multiple links). They were based in London.

The lost connection between England and Virginia in the period 1640 to 1700 is because our Hawes were at this time in parts of the world that were ‘outside the law’ eg there were virtually no laws in Barbados in the 1640s as England was in the middle of a civil war; the merchants in Barbados had the island to themselves and as England was effectively cut off from trade they traded with the Dutch who taught them how to grow sugar (the Dutch learned this in Brazil and were successful there for a short time before the Portuguese kicked them out in the 1640s).

When the English Parliamentarians (Cromwell and the Puritan Roundhead Army) won the war and Charles I was beheaded (Jan 1649) they sailed to Barbados and blockaded the Island to establish control from the English Merchants many of whom were staunch Royalists. After a battle they won and at this point I think our link moved on to Surinam (next to Venezuela) that they shared briefly with Dutch Merchants (they had more in common with Dutch Merchants than English puritans). The English part was known as Willoughbyland (Willoughby was from Parham in Suffolk) and this part of the world was definitely outside any control from anywhere. It also reputedly produced the best sugar in the world.

After the second Anglo-Dutch war the Treaty of Breda of 1667 ceded Willoughbyland and the East Indian Island of Run (controlled by the East India Company) to the Dutch in return for New Netherland (which included New Amsterdam, now New York). Subsequent treaties with the French gave them French Guiana and the English retained Antigua. In the 1670s many of the English in Willoughbyland moved to Antigua.  There is an island called Hawes Island on the North East Coast just a few miles to the east of the capital Parham so there were definitely a family of Hawes among some of the earliest settlers in Antigua around this time.

The death rates in the Caribbean Islands were extraordinarily high (much worse than Virginia at the time). Deaths exceeded births almost every year and the population only grew through immigration. Most children were orphans (if they survived). Out of necessity widows and widowers would have need to marry each other and child brides were common. As the slave populations grew and plantations grew larger so the white population declined and moved either back to England or to the Colonies in America.

I think that sometime during these decades of chaos (bearing in mind that piracy was also at a peak in the Caribbean at the end of the 17th century much of it involving merchants) that Samuel moved to Virginia. He probably very wisely figured his life expectancy in Virginia was much better than on the Islands. At some later point (1730s?) my line also moved back to London. I also have the problem of proving where they came from. Unsurprisingly there is little documentation of these moves as there was little law or legal processes; little Church representation; baptismal, death and marriage records are slim, high mortality from disease, war or sea travel; an aversion to documentation and a tendency to not want the authorities in England to know what was happening; the impact of destructive weather, hurricanes, earthquakes – not only on property but also on any documents that were produced;

However the circles that Samuel I moved in subsequent to his arrival in Virginia suggest prior connections between his Hawes family and other families established in Virginia. There are several families in Virginia who had connections to Antigua (eg the Byrd family). It is these connections between merchant families in London and overseas that I am trying to build out but what I am finding is that the families of many of these 17th century merchants just became extinct which is easy to understand. I know my line also had direct connections with Carolina eg John Hawes sold an insurance policy to Edward Rutledge in Charleston in 1786.  I think it inconceivable that this business could have happened unless John Hawes was very familiar with Charleston society. These were relationships that could not be built in the space of a few years, they were built over generations. This was to a large degree a closed society that was impenetrable without education, money and connections.

I am currently gathering a lot of information but it is a time consuming job. Nothing I have come across in the last year or so contradicts the hypothesis above.

Search for Samuel Hawes I Part 3

Third installment of researches into the members of the Hawes family in England and the Caribbean in the 1600’s and 1700’s by Steve Jones.

Brief recap – I’m English and share DNA with the descendants of Samuel I. My earliest known male ancestor was a John Hawes who in the 1760s was a sugar refiner in Goodman’s Fields, London. I suspect a connection between John and a Joseph Hawes, a sugar planter, who returned to London in 1740 but cannot find a direct link.  There are also many connections between the north east part of Antigua where Joseph had his plantation and Virginia. I suspect that Antigua is one of the links between my ancestors and the ancestors of Samuel 1.

This article looks at one specific family who I think are part of our story. This Hawes family were very early traders to Virginia and Barbados and they provide a good picture of the life and times of those early English merchants, how their trade evolved and the risks they faced.

In 1566 Humfrey Hawes was born in London. His father, Lawrence Hawes was born in Ipswich, Suffolk and was a fishmonger who died in London in 1588. His mother, Ursula Eyrick, came from Leicestershire. Humfrey was a clothworker and his wife had her own business with a shop on Little Conduit. He made this absolutely clear in his will when he stated that the shop was her own and made by her own industry. In 1626, just before his death in 1630, Humfrey signed a petition to King Charles I, made by the ‘Adventurers unto the East Indies’ against the cruelty of a Dutch embargo which as well as being violent also restricted the import of cloth from Turkey and other ‘Eastlands’.     Humfrey was also a churchwarden at the Church of St Vedast als Foster in Foster Lane in London.

Humfrey married Katherine Brooke, the daughter of a haberdasher in January 1596 at St Augustine in Watling Street. Katherine had 4 sisters, 3 of whom married into successful merchant families, and 1 brother. Her brother died in 1620 and left to his eldest daughter some stock in the East India Company which was only established in 1600 so they were early investors in the growing East Indies trade.

Humfrey Hawes and Katherine had at least 7 children who were baptised at St Vedast.  Of these children, 4 interest us most. These are: Nathaniel (b 1601), Elizabeth (b 1602 married Randolf Mainwaring 1618), Joseph (1605-1642), and Rachel (1613-1672 married Captain George Payne). Another son John (b1603) was a merchant who died in 1632 leaving a will. The other 2 children are presumed to have died at a young age.

We know a lot about these people through a unique record set (‘Boyds’) of the inhabitants of London at this time. In addition, as the Brooke and Hawes family were prosperous, they left wills which describe the various family relationships.

We also very fortunate because Joseph, Nathaniel and their 2 sisters’ husbands, Randolf Mainwaring and Captain George Payne formed a business importing tobacco and other goods from Virginia and Barbados. This was a typical early merchant structure; in the absence of banks the only way to finance a venture that would take at least a year to recoup the initial investment in a ship and stock, was by bringing a very close group of people together. These people also had to be wealthy with money to invest so this ruled out the great majority of the population. Everyone involved would have been closely connected; trust was paramount and strangers would not have been involved.

The transatlantic business was precarious.  In 1637 Joseph Hawes brough a case against Captain John Payne (probably not related to George Payne) who in 1635 had commanded the ship ‘Dorothy and John’ carrying a cargo of tobacco (owned by Joseph) from Virginia to London. Contrary to instructions and objections from Joseph’s agent and other passengers on board, Payne ordered the ship to Ireland where its cargo of tobacco was unloaded in Galway and sold in Dublin.

Worse was to come, as described in a 1646 case that is freely available online from the University of Virginia. This is: ‘The Case of Mainwaring, Hawes, Payne and Others, Concerning a Depredation Made by the Spanish-West-India Fleete, Upon the Ship Elizabeth: Restitution Sought in Spayne, Justice Denied, and Thereupon, According to Lawe, Justice Petitioned of the Honorable Houses of Parliament. In Which Is Prayed, That (out of 50000. L. Deposited in the Parliaments Hands, in Lieu of Plate and Merchandize by Them Formerly Arrested) Satisfaction May Bee Made’

This was a protracted dispute, brought to the English Parliament in the 1640s that continued until 1660. In summary, the ship ‘Elizabeth’, owned by Joseph Hawes and Company, was captured by the Spanish while on a trading voyage to Virginia in 1637. ‘The Elizabeth was 250 leagues (750 nautical miles) short of Virginia and was taken by eleven Sayle of the Spanish West India Fleet all under the command of one Generall whereof 4 were Galeons of the Kings the rest merchant ships who shared the goods among them, barbarously abused the Mariners and Passengers and carried the said ship into Spaine and there detaine her unto this day.’

The petition goes on.. ‘that the (English) Embassadoures in Spain indeavoured satisfaction but could procure no reall retribution… since which time Joseph Hawes (formerly of good estate) by the sayd losse utterly undone, died in prison and Randall Mainwaring, Nathaniel Hawes and George Payne now petitioners to your Honours (left ingaged in several great summes of money for him) as next of kindred have taken out letters of Administration and in December 1642 arrested certain plate, moneys and merchandise arriving at Southampton in the Ship St Clare which were laden into her out of the Spanish West India Fleet in which were divers ships and men that were in the fleet that robbed the Elizabeth…’

In short, the Spanish took the Hawes’ ship (‘Elizabeth’) and the Hawes Company in turn took a Spanish ship (‘St Clare’) that arrived in England in 1642 that had connections to the fleet that had captured the Elizabeth (some sailors who had been in the Spanish fleet were also on the St Clare). The Spanish Government paid £50,000 to the English Government to have the St Clare released and the Hawes Company petition was to recover this £50,000 as restitution for the loss of the Elizabeth. The pamphlet printed in 1646 explains the legal basis for their claim under international law.

The seizure of the St Clare was the second attempt at obtaining restitution through seizure of a Spanish ship. Joseph had already taken one Spanish ship, captured out of Bermuda in 1641 but this seizure was not deemed ‘legal’ and for some reason the English Admirality released this ship, arrested Joseph and put him in prison where he died, unmarried, in October 1642. He was buried in the Collegiate Church of St Katherine by the Tower of London. This was a medieval church founded in 1147 and was demolished in 1825 to build St. Katherine Docks. It was on a 23 acre site with its own prison, officers and court. This was a sad end for someone who just 2 years earlier had been the largest importer of tobacco into London from Barbados. Despite Joseph’s death his brother Nathaniel, together with Mainwaring and Payne, pursued the claim. They probably had no choice given the losses they were facing, their belief in the justness of their claim and the pressures they would have been under from fellow investors, mostly friends and neighbours.

Ships went to the West Indies one year and came back the next. If the ship was lost the financial consequences were terrible. In those days, prison awaited anyone who couldn’t pay their debts. The crew and their families were also financially dependent on a successful outcome for a voyage. The petition continues, pleadingly: ‘The prejudice that Joseph Hawes had in the losse of a known faire estate; his imprisonment and death with grief followed. The consequences of this Depradation in the losse his friends sustained who were in natural affection bound to his support; the ruine of his natural brother Nath. Hawes ingaged for him in direct great summes of money and had Execution upon his estate to his dammage above £6,000 besides losse of his trade.’

‘These damages we humbly conceive Justice will make good besides the sufferances of the Saylors and Passengers. We might further move your pitty by putting you in mind of the necessities of the said Ships company, some Widows and Children relicts of those deceased wanting bread’.   

This case was important as the impact of ship seizures went beyond financial considerations and affected international relations. It was a long time before effective maritime laws were introduced and even then, enforcement was difficult, or even impossible when the main maritime trading nations were at war with each other. 

As regards the Hawes Company loss, it was too late. Their petition cannot have been helped by its timing. Parliament, who were hearing the petition, was at war with the King. The English Civil War started in 1642 and didn’t end until 1651. Parliament probably thought the £50,000 better spent on fighting the King than compensating a merchant company.* The legal process failed; the connections between the St Clare and the fleet that took the Elizabeth were deemed too weak. The last petition was in 1660, made by Nathaniel Hawes and George Payne (Mainwaring having died). The defeat must have been devastating. But what happened to Nathaniel?

Well, he was clearly a man of great determination. That he was held in great respect can be seen by the wills that he witnessed or where he is made executor. One can only imagine his sense of outrage that Parliament had denied his claim for damages against the Spanish.

We know from Boyds that he married a woman called Joanne Tanner and had one son (Nathaniel who died as an infant in 1634) and 5 daughters. However, we have no record of the deaths of 4 of the daughters or of Nathaniel and Joanne.  

The last mention I can find of Nathaniel is in the will of his cousin Richard Brooke who died in March 1662. Richard seemed pre-occupied by the disappearance of Nathaniel as the first half of his will is dedicated to Nathaniel: ‘Whereas I now stand seized in fee of all that messuage with the appurtanances late in the occupacion of Nathaniel Hawes.. situate in the Goldsmyths Row on the south side of Cheapside London within the parish of Saint Vedast in Fosters Lane London and being the Corner House turning from and out of Cheapside downe unto the Old Change***.. the which said messuage with the appurtanances I do give devise and bequeath unto Nicholas Herne** Citizen and Merchant Taylor of London and Nathaniel Herne** of London merchant .. on this trust and confidence .. that they the said Nicholas and Nathaniel …. will in all convenient speed after the end of six months next after my decease make sale of the said messuage for the most money the same can be sold for provided and my will and meaning is that if Nathaniel Hawes from whom I and others purchased the said messuage will pay to my said trustees the sum of nyne hundred pounds within six months next after my decease being one hundred pounds lesser than he the said Nathaniel Hawes always told me he would give meto have a conveyance of the said messuage to him and his heirs that then my said trustees upon payment to them of the said nyne hundred pounds by the said Nathaniel Hawes shall and will convey and assign the said messuage to him the said Nathaniel Hawes and his heirs…’

I interpret this as Nathaniel having sold Richard his property with a guarantee that he would buy it back if required for £1,000; that Richard now had no idea where he was, or even if he or his heirs were alive or dead. Was the property worth £1000 or less? Had Nathaniel sold the property quickly to make a quick escape with his family after his final petition had failed in 1660? We don’t know for sure but there is no further record of Nathaniel Hawes and his family (or of George Payne) after 1660. Where did they go?

Nathaniel had connections in the Caribbean and in Virginia and would have known where to go if he wanted to be out of the reach of the English Parliament, which had so sorely treated him.

I don’t know if Nathaniel and Joseph are connected to us but it must at least be a possibility. It seems more than co-incidental that a Hawes family of merchants with strong links to Virginia and Barbados (where sugar replaced tobacco as its main crop in the 1640s) ‘disappears’ from London around 1660 and a Hawes sugar planter ‘appears’ in Antigua in the 1680s and a Samuel Hawes ‘appears’ in Virginia around the same time.

There is an important unresolved question: ‘How did Joseph Hawes come to be trading tobacco in Virginia and Barbados in 1635 (or possibly earlier)?’ Barbados only became an English colony in 1625 so how did Joseph make connections there so soon after it was colonised and make such a success of his trading there and in Virginia in the 1630s? I think the answer to this question provides further evidence to support the idea that the Hawes came from Suffolk and also helps to bring the various bits of the picture together. More to follow.

* Decisions such as this, where Parliament decided against merchants would have had a significant impact on the sentiments of merchants who might previously have supported parliament against the King and helped to ensure the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 when King Charles II returned from exile (Charles I having been executed in 1649).  

**Nicholas and Sir Nathaniel Herne were grandsons of Margaret Brooke who was the sister of Katherine Brook (who married Humfrey Hawes) and the nephews of Richard Brooke. Sir Nathaniel business was focused on the Spanish trade which was hit hard by Cromwell’s foreign policy and he was believed to have been a Cavalier in support of the return of Charles II. He was a member of parliament when he died in 1679.

Another brother was Sir Joseph Herne who was one of London’s richest merchant-financiers whose forune was based on the Mediterranean trade. He was also associated with the East India Company and in 1691 got involved with copper mining in north west America. He was also a member of Parliament.

*** The property described can be placed very accurately even today with Cheapside, Fosters Lane and Old Change (renamed New Change) visible on Google Maps: “situate on the south side of Cheapside London within the parish of Saint Vedast in Fosters Lane London and being the Corner House turning from and out of Cheapside downe unto the Old Change”. It was a short walk to St Vedast in Foster Lane which is still there today. The house was directly opposite St Paul’s Churchyard and would have looked upon the old St Paul’s Cathedral.

The Great Fire of London in 1666 gutted the old St Paul’s together with 89 other churches including St Vedast which swept through the area on the third day of the fire. Both the current St Paul’s and St Vedast were rebuilt by Sir Christopher Wren and St Paul’s was consecrated in 1697, 31 years after the fire. It is highly probable that Richard Brooke’s house was destroyed in the fire so Nathaniel’s sale to him in 1660 was fortuitous. Nathaniel also escaped the great plague which killed around a quarter of London’s population in 1665/66 so perhaps losing his court case and leaving town, if he did, was a blessing in disguise?                        

Steve Jones

Search for Samuel I. Part 2.


By Steve Jones
To recap, I live in England and I am descended from a sugar refiner, John Hawes (b 1735) who lived in Goodman’s Fields which lies a few hundred yards north of the Tower of London. I also share Y DNA with the descendants of Samuel Hawes I.By

We don’t know how John and Samuel are related and it is probable that we will never establish an exact relationship since the common ancestor was around 400 years ago. There are too many pieces of the jigsaw lost to time to build a perfect picture but I think there is enough evidence to get an outline of what might have happened.

In summary I believe we are all descended from a family from Suffolk, England. Over several generations branches of the Suffolk Hawes family moved to London and then the Caribbean. Some of their descendants moved onto Virginia and a few returned to England. The English lines seem to have died off, mostly, and I guess there are now fewer of the ‘Suffolk Hawes’ in England than there are in the US.

This is a huge simplification, and the paths of our ancestors’ journeys were complicated and reflected the history that they lived through. Perhaps the best place to start explaining my theory is with Antigua, part of the Leeward Islands in the Caribbean.

On the north east corner of Antigua between Crump Island and Guiana Island is an uninhabited rock called Hawes Island. I can find no information on this rock anywhere, other than it was sold together with Guiana Island and the Crump peninsular in 2014 by the liquidators of the fraudster Allen Stanford to a Chinese group who are now developing a huge tourist resort there including Crump Island and Guiana Island. It’s called Island Paradise Resort and you can see it on the internet. It looks very nice, if you can afford it.

A map of Antigua from 1729, overlaid with more recent maps, shows that the island sat just north of 3 sugar plantations, with mills, named Crump, Phillips and Haws. At this time Crump Island was called Goat Island, the Hawes Rock was unnamed by the mapmaker and Guiana Island was named Gurana. The ‘Haws’ sugar mill was just west of Marshalls Creek (now renamed Farley Bay) and less than 5 miles east of Parham which is the oldest town in Antigua established in 1632. The map shows another plantation named ‘Parke’ on the other side of Marshall’s Creek.

So, why is this of any relevance to John Hawes my ancestor with a sugar refinery in Goodman’s Fields in the 1760s? Well in April 1738 the London Gentleman magazine reported a death “In Mansfield Street, Goodman’s Fields, Mr Hawes, an Antiguan Merchant, lately arrived from that Island”. He was buried at St Mary Whitechapel on 2 April (‘Joseph Haws, a man from Mansell Street’ – note Mansfield and Mansell were frequently interchanged). St Mary Whitechapel is very close to Goodman’s Fields and is one of the oldest churches in London (there is also a St Mary Whitechapel in Lancaster, Virginia founded 1669 which I am sure takes its name after the London Church).

Joseph must have realised he was very sick as he made a will two days before he died. The will dated 31 March 1738 starts: “I Joseph Hawes of the Island of Antigua, planter but now residing in London….”. He makes his executors Mr Richard Bodicote, James Parke Esq and Mr Edward Eavenson of Antigua, planter. He leaves all his slaves, estate and effects in trust for his son Joseph Hawes and he also makes them his son’s guardian. If his son dies then his estate should pass to his wife Elizabeth his mother and if she dies to his sister Catherine Nibbs and then to his wife’s 3 sisters Henrietta the wife of James Parke, Amy and Catherine Symes.
The will was proved in August 1739 by the oath of Edward Eavenson one of the surviving executors. The delay in proving he will (17 months) probably reflected the time taken for Edward to get to London from Antigua.

If we look at the various people mentioned in the will it becomes clear that Joseph Hawes’ plantation must be the Haws plantation on the map of 1729. James Parke, one of the executors, was married to Joseph’s sister Henrietta, and was his neighbour to the east. Edward Eavanson was his neighbour to the north and had his plantation on Guana Island (as above). He was also married to Mary Hawes (per Vere Oliver who wrote the definitive history of old Antiguan families) although Mary’s relationship to Joseph is unknown.

The other executor Richard Bodicote does not appear to have held property in Antigua but the Papers of Eliza Lucas Pinckney held by the University of Virginia, refer to him Richard Boddicott the business agent for Eliza Lucas Pinckney’s father Col. George Lucas, in conjunction with the firm of Dunbar Mortgages. Richard Boddicott was a sugar merchant and both Dunbar and Boddicott invested in Antigua.
George Lucas moved his family from Antigua to South Carolina in 1738, the same year that Joseph Hawes returned to London. The Lucas plantation was at Wappoo. His daughter Eliza Lucas Pinckney was born in Dec 1722 in Antigua and aged 10 she was sent to school in London, staying with the Boddicott family with whom she corresponded for several years following her returning to Wappoo where she took on the role of plantation manager developing indigo crops. When she died in 1792 President Washington asked to serve as one of the pallbearers at her funeral so she was clearly known to him and a woman of great status.
The Dunbar with whom Richard Boddicott was in partnership was Charles Dunbar (b 1684) who was Member of Council for all the Leeward Islands, a judge of the Court of Chancery and surveyor-general of customs. He served as a council member until 1750 when he was deprived of all his offices. Throughout his career he was plagued by the threat of removal and accusations of improper dealings and in 1750 it was reported that he was ‘cordially hated by everyone’. And no wonder why as he was central to one of the most scandalous events in Antigua’s history.
I won’t repeat the story here in full (if only to avoid disturbing anyone with a delicate disposition). An overview can be found on Wikipedia (a search for “Lucy Chester Parke” will obtain the necessary article). In summary Charles Dunbar, Richard Boddicott’s partner, manipulated the marriage of his nephew Thomas Dunbar to the 11 year old, illegitimate daughter of the Governor of Antigua (Daniel Parke, who was believed to be related to James Parke above, the executor of Joseph Hawes) in order that the Dunbar’s could inherit Parke’s plantations (called Gambles).
Governor Daniel Parke had long standing connections to Virginia at the highest levels and also to England (more to follow). He too was deeply hated. So much so that, despite being Governor, he was dragged out of his house by a mob consisting of his neighbours and murdered in the street. No-one was ever prosecuted, and no-one was concerned about the lack of prosecution. It seems to have been accepted as a fair outcome.
In his will, the murdered Governor Daniel Parke left all his estates in Antigua to Lucy Chester Parke (hence the interest of Charles Dunbar) while his 2 legitimate daughters Frances and Lucy were bequeathed all his properties in Virginia. His daughter Frances was the wife of John Custis and the mother of Daniel Parke Custis, the first husband of Martha Dandridge who subsequently married President George Washington. His daughter Lucy married William Byrd II. The split of the Antiguan and Virginian legacies in 1711 resulted in 50 years of legal disputes which even dragged in George Washington. The dispute was not resolved until 1761.
I will stop here. There is so much more but I think for now I have shown links between the Hawes sugar plantations in Antigua and Goodman’s Fields in London, where my ancestor had a sugar refinery 20 years after Joseph Hawes returned to London from Antigua, and between the very close plantation owning community in Antigua to which Joseph Hawes belonged, and their counterparts in Virginia. For a period of time the English merchant or planter in Antigua was equally at home in both London and Virginia.

Steve Jones #1 Search for Samuel I

My name is Steve Jones and I live in Manchester, England. In October 2019 I my Y DNA test results came back from FamilyTree DNA which showed a close match to Joe D. Hawes, Richard Simrall Hawes, William E. Hawes, Jesse N. Hawes, Raymond Jerry Hawes and Bentley Hause. I understand all of these men are descendants of Samuel Hawes I and submitted their DNA around 15 years ago to try to find an English family connection to establish where Samuel came from.

Well I am the English connection and Claudette and I have been in communication for the last year to try and figure out our joint deep history. We have not yet found an answer but I am confident that our common ancestor came from a merchant family that lived in London in the early 17th century.

Before we step back 400 years I should probably provide some more recent background.My mother is a family historian with more than 25 years’ experience. She is a Fellow of the Manchester and Lancashire Family History Society which is one of the largest such societies in England and she still transcribes old baptismal records from churches in Manchester. After researching her own family, Mum started on Dad’s family but this was hard as Dad was an only child, brought up by his mother in a very working-class (‘blue collar’ as you say) part of Manchester. They had little money. Together with thousands of other children he was evacuated to the countryside at the start of the second world war when the bombing of Manchester began. After a period in the army, he went to night school and had a successful career in business.

Dad never knew his father and took the Jones name from his mother, my grandmother, who was born in Liverpool in 1896 in even more impoverished surroundings. At some point (we don’t know when) my grandmother left Liverpool for Manchester where Dad was born in 1931. As I approached retirement, I took on Mum’s family history research and realised that DNA testing could help to solve some mysteries so in the summer of 2017 both Mum and Dad took autosomal DNA tests with Ancestry.  Dad died peacefully a few months later and it became my mystery to be solved: “Who was my grandfather?”.

Over the next two years I separated out Dad’s DNA maternal matches. The remaining paternal or unknown matches must have included connections to his father. After a year or so of wondering who all these other people were I eventually found a common denominator, with four matches in Canada all sharing the same great grandparents in England. By expanding the families of their English great grandparents I was able to identify other DNA matches to Dad and I have now identified around 20 people who match Dad’s autosomal DNA and who can  be traced back to Harriet Barons (b London 1769) and John Hawes (b London 1770).

Through further matching to people related to Dad’s paternal grandmother I was able to identify my grandfather who lived in Manchester for a few years in the 1930s. This is the only occurrence, that I can find, of a Hawes living in Manchester. Although I have identified my Hawes grandfather, I have made no attempt to contact his descendants as these are sensitive issues even after 90 years. 

Last year I realised that if my theory about my grandfather was correct, then I am on the Hawes male line and my Y DNA should match to other men called Hawes. It did and that is how I discovered my genetic connection to Samuel Hawes I of Virginia. It is interesting that after 15 years there are still no other close matches to anyone called Hawes living in England or Europe and only a couple of other matches to other men not called Hawes in the USA.  

My research into Samuel Hawes led to the discovery of the Hawes Family Association. I contacted Claudette last December and since then we have been working together to see how we might be connected. It’s been interesting reading the HFA Newsletters especially those from 2005-2007 when the Hawes men who I match to, submitted their tests.

DNA is amazingly accurate. However, autosomal DNA cannot be used to establish how I am connected to Samuel Hawes since it decays with every generation and it not meaningful after around 250 years. Meanwhile Y DNA hardly decays at all. I am a ‘Generational Distance’ of 1 from the descendants of Samuel Hawes. In Y DNA terms this means we most likely have a common ancestor within the last 400 years. Our common ancestor must have been born before 1700 so this is consistent.

The Y DNA submitted by the descendants of Samuel Hawes around 15 years ago was measured at the ‘Y-25’ level (the 25 corresponds to the number of DNA segments that are analysed). I initially tested at the ‘Y-37’ level but then upgraded to a ‘Big-Y’ which looks at 700 segments. My ‘Y-37’ test gave me a haplogroup known as I-P37 (also known as I2a) which is relatively uncommon. My ‘Big-Y’ provided a more specific haplogroup below L-161 (which is a branch of I-P37). The descendants of Samuel Hawes also have the I-P37 haplogroup but we don’t know if we match at the L-161 level; I am sure we do but this can only be proved if and when a descendant does an updated, more detailed test. This would also provide a more accurate assessment of how closely we are related.

The I-L161 haplogroup is nicknamed “Isles” because it is more common in Great Britain and Ireland than in continental Europe. But it is rare even in Britain and Ireland, less than 1% of men here belong to I-L161. I belong to an even smaller haplogroup I-A2330 which mostly includes English men but also some men with ancestry from Germany. I-L161 has also been nicknamed “The Deerhunters” which is supposed to mean that our paternal ancestors were living around the North Sea leading a hunter-gatherer life before Britain became an island around 8,000 years ago. They were certainly some of the earliest people to live in Britain after the retreat of the last ice age.

I can trace my family back with confidence to John Hawes and Harriett Barons. So who were they? A notice in the ‘Lady Magazine’ of 1789 stated that ‘John Hawes Esq of Goodman’s Fields (was married) to Miss Harriet Barons’.  In 1793 John Hawes (Harriet’s husband) was admitted to the Company of Ironmongers and he was stated to be the son of John Hawes, a sugar refiner.

Goodman’s Fields was a focal point for sugar refining in London in the 18th century and one of the biggest of the refineries there was owned by John Hawes senior who died in 1810 in his 75th year. He had retired to Walthamstow in Essex a wealthy man. As well as being a sugar refiner he was also a director of the Phoenix Assurance Company (established in 1782) and a founding director of  the Pelican Life Office in 1797. The Phoenix specialised in fire insurance and was established by sugar refiners as they found it very expensive to insure their businesses (due to fire risk) and rather than pay excessive premiums they joined together to form their own insurance company.

The Phoenix also did business in America. An auction held in March this year sold a Policy of Insurance written by the Phoenix Assurance Co of London in 1788, signed by John Hawes, Director, in favour of Edward Rutledge in Charleston South Carolina. He was a signatory to the Declaration of Independence. The policy covered insurance for loss or damage by fire on his dwelling house on Broad Street, Charleston in return for a premium of £25 a year.  John Hawes was clearly familiar with doing business in Carolina. Did he have distant family connections there?

The sugar trade was hard in the early 19th century, not helped by the Napoleonic wars and the difficulty in securing safe shipping lanes. The sugar refinery partnership that his father had set up in 1770 was dissolved several times and in 1816 John Hawes junior was made bankrupt. He presumably recovered from this but in 1833 he resigned as director of the Pelican Life Insurance Company and in 1834 he appeared in the Court for the Relief of Insolvent Debtors. I cannot find the record of his death but his wife Harriet died in 1847. It is possible that John died in a debtors’ prison.

John Hawes senior was baptised at St Mary Whitechapel in January 1736 to a John and Elizabeth Haws of whom very little is known. John Senior married Margaret Pritchard in 1766 and he was admitted to the Company of Ironmongers in 1768 (proposed by W Hawes, who is also an unknown). Despite much research I can get no further on John and Elizabeth Haws who must have been born around 1700. This is a similar situation to that of Samuel Hawes I.

I can trace Harriet Barons’ family back further than I can go with the Hawes line and as most marriages took place between people from similar backgrounds this provides insight into the sort of family that John Hawes came from.

The Barons were a merchant family who came from Exeter on the south coast of Devon. In the 16th century Exeter was a wealthy and important trading port (more important than Liverpool). Its wealth was based on shipping high quality wool produced in Devon to London and also across the English Channel to France and more importantly to Rotterdam in Holland. The Barons were established traders on the Exeter to Rotterdam route and they would have exchanged metal ware and other goods in Holland for Devon wool. They would have visited London regularly and engaged in business with many other merchants.

Harriett’s father was Samuel Barons who died in Goodman’s Fields in 1781 where he had lived since 1711 at least (this is when his brother George was baptised). His father (also Samuel Barons) and Uncle George were both born in Devon in the 1670s. Father Samuel died in London 1722 and Uncle George died in Rotterdam in 1740 having married a Dutch woman. In 1720 George was also a founding director of  the City of Rotterdam Insurance Company, one of the oldest in Europe. This George eventually settled in Holland but in the early 1700s he ran a merchant business with his brother Samuel running the London office and George looking after affairs in Rotterdam. This would have given them a strong base for transatlantic trading which was dominated by the English and Dutch at this period.

The two Barons brothers had interests in Newfoundland fisheries and Virginian tobacco. They also financed a couple of voyages carrying slaves in 1714/15 using a captain who came from Devon and whose grandfather had mastered ships sailing to Barbados and Virginia in the 1670s.

In 1718 the Barons carried indentured servants to South Carolina on the Neptune. The Neptune left Charleston on 30 August 1718 carrying pitch, tar, rice and deerskins but was captured on the same day by pirates on a ship called Queen Ann’s Revenge captained by Charles Vane. The previous year this ship had been captained by Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard.  

So based on Harriett’s family background it is reasonable to assume John Hawes was also from a merchant family trading across the Atlantic. Merchants mixed with merchants. John was born in 1735 but at age 35 he entered into partnership to run a large sugar refinery in London. This suggests wealth acquired over many decades or inherited. But where did this wealth come from? And how is this John Hawes connected to Samuel Hawes I ? Well, I have a number of ideas but it’s a long story that involves people from Suffolk in England sailing to the West Indies and sugar plantations in Antigua. There are many connections and hints that suggest what might have happened and it is fascinating history. But this will have to wait for the next newsletter.   

Reunion at Woodpecker


Front View of Woodpecker

Attendees at the Timbers Restaurant at Ruther Glen, VA enjoyed a delicious lunch and gathering, meeting new relatives and talking about Hawes history, very important to Virginians, as our first known forebear built the house pictured here in 1750.  Besides renewing close family ties, the best part of gatherings is sharing stories with  kinfolk, always learning new things.

After lunch, we drove to Woodpecker, and had dessert al fresco, strolling around the grounds and being very kindly treated to a house tour by the Lintons, who now run a Equestrian Riding School and Equine facility on the property. Click here for more information on the farm.  http://www.woodpeckerfarm.com/


Aurelia Josephine Combe
Hawes 1822-1894

When I was married in 1955, my mother, Claudia Hawes, wrote to the Naunheim branch to ask if I could wear one of the French lace veils that is described on page 208 of the original Blue Book. It was originally worn by Helene Clary Hawes Kerney  and I wore it also.  Imagine my surprise to find that a new-met relative had also worn one of the veils.  William Franklin Hawes bought four of them on a trip to France for his soon-to-be wed daughters and nieces.  He was married to Aurelia Combe; one of the photos brought to share was  of Aurelia, my great-grandmother.  Looking at her face for the first time was worth the trip for me!

 

 

Old Photos

Ol' Man Daddy and his family

Most of us have old photos of members of our family.  This is a photo of my grandfather, Edwin Combe Hawes, and my grandmother, Angela Lillie Morris.  My father, Walter Herman Hawes, is the baby.  If you would like to have old family photos preserved, rather than having your children throw them out, scan them and email them to me.  They can be added to a family gallery, for others to enjoy.