* This article has been updated, with thanks to Frances Macdonald for information.
For a few months now I have been meaning to get an image I found on the internet professionally printed and framed.
The image is of Janet McLean nee Urquhart, her 2 daughters, Joanna and Dorothea, and a slave girl nicknamed Didi.
The picture has a personal connection because Janet McLean was the sister in law of George McLean, the man who manumitted our ancestor Alexander Stiell, the mulatto boy, on the 2nd February 1817.
An extract from the Deed of Manumission reads as follows: ” George McLean of the Island of Carriacou, manumits the mulatto man slave, Alexander Stiell of Limlair, property of Patrick Bartlet, Isabella Bartlet and Dorothea Span….witnesses – James Vass, Jean Baptiste St. Hilaire”
Janet was married to George’s brother John and when John died prematurely in 1816 he left his young family as wards of his brother George.
This was all I knew about the image until I came across more information that it had been auctioned at Bonhams in London a few years prior, not only that but the painting was accompanied by a miniature of George McLean himself.
How fabulous I thought, to look into the eyes of the man our ancestor Alexander did nearly 200 years ago to the day.
Alas, it wasn’t to be, Bonhams replied to an email by me stating that the buyer of the paintings had moved house and left no forwarding address.
So we are stymied in our efforts to see George McLean, for now.
But Didi’s face always seemed to haunt me for some reason and I was desperate to find more information about her life but to no avail.
Until I randomly stumbled across a YouTube video by Kenrick Fletcher which had more information on Didi.
His channel on YouTube is great for history on Grenada, I have only briefly looked at it but it has already been a valuable resource.
Back to Didi, her real name, Malvina Wells, she was the mulatto daughter of John Wells the overseer of Dumfries Estate and a slave, Dumfries is the building in the background of the painting.
Here you can see Didi mentioned in the slave records as a young girl.
(According to Frances, Didi was a favourite of George McLean so it seems unlikely she would have left Carriacou. Frances believes Malvina Wells was another Mulatto girl, especially procured for the return to Scotland of the McLean girl’s. There also seems to be some mention of children in George McLean’s journal, maybe children he fathered by Didi)
It seems Malvina followed the family to Scotland when they returned after John McLean’s death and she lived out her days with the youngest of their 2 daughters Joanna and her husband John Macrae, living to the ripe old age of 82.
She is buried with them at St John’s Church in Edinburgh.
