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).

Some names have different spellings and others have short or familiar names (John becomes Jack; Margaret becomes Peggy for example). The name often written as Frederick has an alternative in Frederic, and one mid-Victorian black in Britain was Fedric. His forename was Francis (the female version is Frances). Francis Fedric has received the attention of historian Lyn Innes and is detailed in her Fugitive Families: Making Black Lives Matter in Victorian Britain (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 2025). His first two autobiographies had the author’s name Francis Fedric (1859, 1863). Born in Virginia around 1805, he spent half a century in slavery, escaping to Canada where he married an English woman. They went to Liverpool in 1857 returning to the USA when the civil war was over. The third version of his life story was published in the US in 1869, as by Francis Frederick. He settled in Baltimore (a further version of his surname was Fredericks) into 1882. As Fedric he was often mentioned in British newspapers 1857-1865.