> Is it likely that there was a great renaming sweep across the > plantation (or even island(s)?) in the early 19C - after 1805, and > possibly after 1812? (I cannot remember the date of the Pallmer > marriage). This is a very interesting post and the short answer is that I do not know though some people will be better informed than myself. But I have the impression from the Jamaican slave registers, it is no more than that, that the giving of surnames to slaves was certainly becoming more common as the nineteenth century wore on and I would associate this with the evangelical revival which must have affected many slave owners and possibly a feeling of defensiveness because of the attacks by the Abolitionists in England. Whether you could call it a "great wave" I doubt. In individual cases planters, with a crisis of "conscience", may swiftly have had all the baptisms registered and given their slaves surnames but again, it is only an impression, large slave owners with hundreds of slaves, seldom did so. I also have the impression, and I have done no numerical analysis of this, that the vast majority and perhaps overwhelming majority, of slaves of mixed race were given surnames. So as a hypothesis I would suggest that small and medium size slave owners, largely resident, with up to about 50+ slaves may have been giving surnames and registered baptisms more frequently though not invariably after 1815. I reckon from this time favoured household slaves were given surnames pretty frequently and although mixed race slaves may have had surnames earlier, houshold slaves did not. Certainly if you examine the inventories of slaves in the Tharp papers which look at several large estates earlier in the eighteenth century hardly any slaves had surnames. But all of this could only really be answered by a close look at the numerical data. And all the remarks above apply only to Jamaica which is the only lot that I have looked at. Edward Crawford ______________________________________________________________ This message has been scanned by the Datanet VirusScreen Service, powered by BT Ignite and Messagelabs. For more information please visit http://www.VirusScreen.co.uk.