Swansea's Black community from the mid-18th century

Take these entries in the Swansea parish registers for instance. In one of them, when recording the baptism of twelve-year-old John Jones in 1745, the vicar added the words "a Black." If he had not, we would never have known. Elizabeth Saunders died in 1790 and in recording her burial, the vicar also noted that she was black. Similarly in 1801, when Joseph Roberts and Harriet Thomas were married in St Mary's church in Swansea, the vicar Miles Bassett added a note in Welsh, "dyn du ydoedd," meaning he was a black man.

There was no requirement to note a person's race in the parish registers; it is just something the vicars recorded because they were interested. Nothing about these names is suggestive of ethnicity and if the additional information had not been put down, we would never have known.

We have found nine entries like these in the Swansea parish registers, dating from 1745 to 1814, and none in the other parishes in our area. That there was a Black community in Swansea in the 1700s is not in doubt. It is likely that there are others who are named in the registers, but whose ethnicity is not recorded. How many and who they were, we will never know.