I don't know if there could be any parallel with the situation I have found for the Chesapeake around the time of the War of 1812. My researches into the four thousand African American slaves who took their freedom during that war by way of the Royal Navy, and who settled in Trinidad, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, shows that at least 60% of slaves in Maryland and Virginia at that time had surnames. The point I want to make, though, is that in almost every case the slaveholders themselves did not acknowledge these surnames, on principle it seems, and it is mainly through neighbours' affidavits or through the names quoted by the refugees themselves that I have collected the information. Mostly these were small farms, with a fair amount of movement by slaves, both from week to week (to visit family members or to take their own garden produce to market) or from year to year, being sold from one farm to another, which I suspect is a very different picture from Jamaican plantation slavery, but it is quite possible that in some cases slaves in Jamaica had surnames that their proprietors knew nothing about. John Weiss http://homepage.virgin.net/john.weiss/trinidad/trinidad.html