How a shocking DNA test revealed my family's links to a celebrity chef and slavery in Jamaica

My origin story until relatively recently was this: I was born at Nuttall Hospital in Cross Roads, Kingston, Jamaica. And all four grandparents were from Jamaica. This came up more frequently than you might imagine – I’m a light-skinned Jamaican. An uptowner, as we say here. A privileged minority, very likely descended from enslavers.

I was relieved this apparently did not apply to me, however, because the only ancestor I knew anything about until relatively recently was John McCaulay, a Scottish-born missionary who was lost at sea in June 1905, while returning to Jamaica following the death of his wife from tuberculosis. His four children were thus orphaned – the only boy was my paternal grandfather, Gerald. 

So whenever I was asked, “But you’re not Jamaican, are you?” I responded: “I was born in Jamaica. My great grandfather was a Baptist missionary.” The subtext was always: not a plantation owner. 

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I knew nothing of my mother’s people and thought her story boring. Her father sold insurance, died and left her mother in debt.

Then in 2014 I got an email from the producers of a New Zealand television show called DNA Detectives. They said I was related to a celebrity chef from New Zealand named Ray McVinnie. Would I be prepared to meet with him and be filmed for the show? Along with one of my sisters and a cousin, we met at the Liguanea Club in Kingston, Jamaica, an ultra-colonial setting. And there I was handed a single sheet of paper with a history I did not know – on my mother’s side, I was descended from a Portuguese Sephardic Jew named Hananel d’Aguilar, and an enslaved ‘mustee’ woman, Nancy McLean, who lived and laboured on a plantation in a place I, as a bawn-ya Jamaican, had never heard of: Mason Hall. 

We modern-day Jamaicans cooked ackee and saltfish for our New Zealand celebrity chef cousin and the film crew. Afterwards, the producer handed me a DNA kit and that sent me on an internet search for my ancestors. Over the next few years, I built a family tree with over 1,200 names of people living in some two dozen countries. Hananel d’Aguilar was an aristocrat so he appeared in the historical record – put another way, I found him on the internet.

Of course, Nancy McLean left no written trace. I found the words of their son – David McLean, my seven time great grandfather – in the transcription of a post-emancipation commission. As I connected with distant relatives, they sent me other documents – Nancy McLean’s manumission papers. David McLean’s death certificate. An account of his death in 1851 – killed in election violence, it said. I went to look for his grave in Morant Bay, St Thomas, but did not find it – the site was too overgrown, the graves without inscriptions.

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2020: the Covid pandemic and lockdown. My fifth novel had just come out and publicity was impossible. I was tired of the publication journey. I would write, but just for myself, for my own entertainment. I imagined Mason Hall, wondered why Hananel d’Aguilar ended up there, thought about Nancy McLean and her origins, how they lived and survived.

And then an old woman moved into my mind – someone with my own ancestry, who did not know her connection to the enslavement centuries, as I had not. I began to channel her voice – making no attempt at plot or any other convention of novel writing – I was not sending this anywhere. I called it my long strip of knitting and was determined it would never be forced into sweater, tam or pair of socks.

Via the computer, I learned of the Legacies of British Slave Ownership project which tracked the names and amounts of those who were paid at emancipation as compensation for enslaved people (who got nothing), and sitting at my desk, I searched for David McLean’s name, not expecting to find it.

But there it was – he was paid £927, 19 shillings and nine pence for the 45 people he thought he owned at another place I’d never heard of: Middleton in St David (now St Thomas). A man born in slavery went on to own slaves himself. How would the woman in my mind justify this?  

At a socially distanced dinner of that time, I heard talk of a man, a foreigner, who had taken the stones of a collapsed great house to build his own house, and the woman in my mind said, “Why a white man? Why not a Black woman? And what would that woman do to keep those stones and the shelter she built for herself if they were threatened?”

I let that woman out, onto the page. By then, she was Miss Pauline, a force to be reckoned with, facing the end of her life and she had a lot to say. So did the stones themselves. And Mason Hall, which I eventually visited, had become in my mind a village of stone, ringing with the voices of Jamaica’s ghosts.

A House for Miss Pauline by Diana McCaulay is out on 27 February (Dialogue, £20). You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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