Work in progress

African Americans in Victorian Britain usually had a slavery background – and one result was that their surnames could be uncertain. Their forenames could well be those provided by parents, but their surnames were often those of their white owners. On liberation few kept the latter names. But names were required in modern society, and this was true in Britain where officialdom expected surnames. The census (every ten years), marriage, birth and death registrations, cemetery files, court cases and criminal records, school and university files, all expected such details.

Some individuals picked their names – Frederick Bailey became Frederick Douglass, who first toured Britain in the 1840s. Jack Burton became John Anderson (see this website page 107). Maria Smith, whose surname was that of her owner, had a daughter in slavery in the 1820s and she – famous as Mrs Ellen Craft, a British resident for twenty years from the 1850s – had her pre-married name as Collins when her first child’s birth in late 1852 was registered by her husband (ex-slave William Craft). When another child was born, in London’s Hammersmith, in late 1855 she told the registrar her pre-married name had been Atwaters. (see this website pages 059 and 134).

One individual whose identification remains uncertain was the 1850s impostor best known as Reuben Nixon, who used at least five other names in a criminal career in England, Scotland and Ireland (see page 163). Rufus Scott Blair said he was Professor Zodiac in fraudulent activities in England and Ireland over three decades (see page 300).