Adele Perry. Colonial Relations

Colonial Relations: The Douglas-Connolly Family and the Nineteenth-Century Imperial World tells the fascinating story of the Douglas-Connolly family over several generations. James Douglas was born in Demerara in 1803. His father was an itinerant Scotsman and his mother probably a free woman of color. Douglas accompanied his father to Scotland at around the age of eight or nine, was educated at Lanark Grammar School, and took up a position in 1819 working for the North West Company in Canada, where he married Amelia Connolly, the daughter of a Cree mother and an Irish-Canadian father. It was not unusual for men working in the fur trade to marry Metis or indigenous women, but it was less common for someone like Douglas to remain married to Connolly for the rest of his life (and, indeed, to marry her formally in a Christian ceremony in 1837). Douglas was unusual because he rose to become governor of the colony of British Columbia, and thus Connolly took her place at the very apex of colonial society, despite her Metis origins.

Ancient history · Archaeology · Ceremony · Colonialism · Ethnology · Genealogy · Governor · Indigenous · Irish · Metis · Queen (butterfly) · Sociology · Tribe · White (mutation) · Anthropology · Canadian Identity and History · Historical Studies of British Isles · History · Indigenous Studies and Ecology