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http://www.joinedupheritagesheffield.org.uk/index.php  If you are a Friend of a historic or heritage park if you want to be part of the heritage conversation you need to join us. See website to get an idea about what we are about. Send your local heritage group content to our web guru: stephen@llamadigital.co.uk Preferably a paragraph of information and photo or logo. We hope to give all heritage organisations a chance to be heard and to be supported.  

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Many thanks for that link which led me to an article on Sheffield's influence on the Anti-Slavery movement and in particular the role of women.   This probably helps to explain how one of my great grandmother's sisters came to marry an escaped slave in Sheffield in 1863.  Another fascinating lead to follow up.

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I find that really interesting especially as around that same time an ancestor of mine was a white slave in penal Australia....with no chance of escape.

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7 hours ago, Judith said:

Many thanks for that link which led me to an article on Sheffield's influence on the Anti-Slavery movement and in particular the role of women.   This probably helps to explain how one of my great grandmother's sisters came to marry an escaped slave in Sheffield in 1863.  Another fascinating lead to follow up.

That is interesting because I have been trying to trace a South African slave a Kaffir who escaped his owners and turned up in Norton at a farm there. Could there be a link perhaps? I think though I am not entirely sure that the man turned up at Backfields married with a daughter and working as a porter. Under British Law any slave found on British soil no longer qualified as a slave so people were horrified when owner offered a reward for his return. Who was the man your great great aunt married?    

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Not to put too fine a point on it but the term "Kaffir" is considered, these days, as a contemptuous and insulting term for a black African.

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It was how he was described and how someone was described living in Backfields. Not my intention to cause offence. I was using it as an illustration that although they were seemingly horrified at him being a slave on British soil they weren't exactly describing him in polite terms. The news accounts are pretty racist in their accounts. 

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 No offence taken...I was just pointing out that these days the word is as offensive to some people as is the term ni**er .

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I would like to know if they were the same person that the farmer was feeding in Norton that was living in Backfields with a wife and child. I had wondered if he came to Sheffield because of the abolitionists who had lived in Sheffield and was looking for a safe house. There is no newspaper accounts I can find after he was in Norton area. It would be nice to know his story had a happy ending.

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The person  who married Mary Atkinson in 1863 was Robert Maxwell Johnson, a qualified doctor, and, after a spell in London, the family returned to Chatham in Canada.  His story is quite fascinating but I can't tell you more as a fellow family historian to whom I forwarded your link sent me an article he has submitted to the Sheffield & District Family History Society which contains far more detail than I was previously aware of, so it wouldn't be fair of me to pass it on. 

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