Alexander & John Fraser

By 1766 John and Alexander Fraser, from the parish of Kirkhill (CC8/8/147 TD&I of John Fraser), were clerks in the merchant house of Smith & Baillies [NAS SC29.55. 11.331], formed in St Kitts in the 1760s by James Smith and the Baillie brothers, Alexander and Evan. In the late 1790s Alexander Fraser subscribed £450 from himself and other inhabitants of St Kitts for the establishment of the Northern Infirmary in Inverness.

They were still in St Kitts in 1804 [Reports of cases determined at nisi prius] but within a few years, along with John Haywood, they acquired plantation Good Intent on the west bank of the Demerary River.

Alexander Fraser ‘formerly of the island of St Kitts’ died in Demerary on 23 March 1808 [Caribeanna Barbados Mercury], just two weeks before his partner, John Haywood, arrived in the colony. Haywood found that Fraser had 'left his own and the Estate concerns in a dreadful confusion'. John Fraser was at this point in Philadelphia, in poor health and suffering from gout in his hand. [Highland Council Archive,  D122/2/3 Demerara 6th June 1808, letter John Haywood to Alexander Fraser, merchant, Inverness. In his will John Fraser left £200 to Miss Ann Hollingsworth the daughter of John Hollingsworth junior of Philadelphia.]

Alexander's heir was a minor, referred to only as 'W Fraser'. John Fraser, John Haywood and James Fraser were appointed as executors and guardians. [E&DRG 18 July 1812]

John Fraser transferred his own share of the plantation, and the adjoining plantation Sisters, to Haywood in 1811 [E&DRG 26 Jan 1811] and in 1817 left the colony with a female servant [Royal Gazette 22 Feb 1817]. The ownership of Good Intent, which had 348 slaves in 1817, was then with John Haywood and the heirs of Alexander Fraser.

John Fraser died at Findhorn, Moray, in 1818. With him was a ‘free mulatto woman’ Henrietta Fraser, formerly a slave on James Smith’s plantation in the island of Nevis - presumably the servant who had left Demerara with him the previous year. Their son, James, was at this time a ‘a teacher in the County of Middlesex or Essex’. A daughter, Elizabeth Fraser, a ‘free coloured girl’, the daughter of a slave Rose on the same estate, was living in Alnwick, Northumberland. [See the Will of John Fraser]