The Hamons and Hammonds of Jersey and USA
The Hamons and Hammonds
of Jersey and USA
Nicolas Hamon/Nicholas Hammond
The Hamon family is one of Jersey's oldest, and the Hammond family, with which it is inextricably linked, is one of the most illustrious, but trying to unravel the history of these families is a major headache for any family historian.
As with so many Jersey families which have changed the spelling of their name over time, it can be difficult to unravel exactly what happened, why, and when.
Payne's Armorial
The eminent 19th century writer on Jersey family history, J Bertrand Payne was quite clear in his Armorial of Jersey: Variously spelling its name, Hamon, and more lately Hammond, this family has been located in Jersey from a very early date ; and by family tradition, but perhaps without sufficient authority, is considered identical with that powerful baronial house of Hamon of Normandy, one of whose members, William Hamon, founded the famous Abbey of St Helier.
So, according to Payne, Hamon was the old spelling and Hammond was later. But there are plenty of Hamons still in Jersey today, so it was not a universal change.
Cross the Atlantic to where researchers have tracked the movement of Hamons backwards and forwards across the ocean in the 18th century and we discover that the Hammond spelling was adopted by Nicolas Hamon, a junior career British diplomat, when he moved to Philadelphia in 1726 'for a change of aire'.
His son, also Nicolas, came back to Jersey where he in turn had two sons, one who remained in Jersey and founded a branch of the family which gave the island one of its most illustrious Bailiffs, whereas his sibling was sent back to the USA to start a different dynasty there.
More of that shortly, but did Hamon cross to America, become Hammond, and return to their native island as the first to spell their name in this way?
Perhaps not, because Charles Stevens, in his Comprehensive list of Jersey surnames reveals that the spelling Hamon, preceded by Hamo, can be traced back in island records to 1172, and Hamond and Hammond to a century later in 1299.
There seems little doubt that Nicolas Hamon and his sons introduced Hammond to Jersey, but, perhaps they were only responsible for reintroducing the spelling.
But back to the story of Nicolas. He was born in Jersey in 1694, the son of Nicolas and Marguerite Lempriere, whose family would be closely associated with the Hamons/Hammonds for some time. Young Nicolas, in his early 20s, went to Portugal where he served as a secretary at the British Embassy in Lisbon, before moving to become secretary to the Governor of the Windward and Leeward Islands, a substantial group of British colonies in the Caribbean.
He obviously made a good impression because when he moved on to Barbados, he took with him a letter of introduction which described him as 'a great favourite of His Excellency and everybody that has the happiness to know him ... he has a great deal of Honour and Honesty, is faithful, curteous, affable, civil, compleasant, a boon bottle companion and a great admirer of the faire sex ...'.
Who could wish for a better reference, for whatever purpose?
Marriage
Whatever happened in Barbados, Nicolas Hamon is next found in Philadelphia, where he married Mary Dyer, daughter of James and Rebecca, in 1732. Payne's reference to this marriage is a small example of how confusing historical records can be for family researchers. He names the wife Mary Dijre, or at least later transcriptions do, separating the 'y' in the surname into 'ij'.
The couple had two children, Nicolas born in 1733 and Mary in 1735. A year after Mary's birth their father was dead, and their mother went on to marry Abraham Wynkoop in 1745, leaving Mary to become known as Mary Hammond Wynkoop until she died in in 1772.
Before then her elder brother had crossed the Atlantic back to Jersey, in 1756, at the age of 21, to marry Marguerite Lempriere, daughter of Jacques and Sarah Atkinson.
Samares Manor
Before we follow the descent of Nicolas, and his younger brother Jacques, who remained in Jersey, we need to refer to their grandfather's brother, Jacques Jean Hamon, who also went to Portugal, but returned to Jersey and acquired Samares Manor.
Jacques Jean, born in 1699, was, like his elder brother Nicolas, in the diplomatic service, as British Consul at Faro in Portugal. There was another brother, Francois Jean, born between them in 1697, about whom little is known.
Some of the detail of Jacques Jean's life is a little confusing. He purchased the manor in 1754 from James Seale, whose father John had acquired it 20 years earlier from Deborah Dumaresq, the last of the family which had owned the property since it passed to them by marriage from the Payns in the early 16th century. By then he was married to Marie Lempriere, who was 30 years younger than him and had a son Jacques, born in 1746 when Marie was 17. There is no record of the marriage or the birth in Jersey, so both may have happened outside the island.
However, there is also no record in Jersey of the baptism of their daughter Elizabeth, born in 1760, four years after her father, who by then was 61, had purchased the manor, nor of another son, Thomas, whose birth date is not known, but who died in 1821.
And was Jacques Jean a Hamon or a Hammond? He is always shown in lists of Samares seigneurs as Hammond, and is so described in Seigneurs of Samares, an article by Charles Langton, which was first published in the 1931 Annual Bulletin of La Société Jersiaise. But his father is invariably described as Hamon, and the record of his baptism in St Helier in 1699, shows him clearly as Hamon. So did he, like his brother, Anglicise the spelling of his name while working away from the island?
Certainly his son Jacques, who inherited the manor from him, and passed it to his son Jacques Jean, who sold it some time before his death, are invariably described as Hammond. The baptisms of Jacques Jean and his two sisters all appear under Hammond in the St Clement register.
American branch
We have already seen that Nicolas Hamon, by then calling himself Nicholas Hammond, arrived in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1726. Six years later he married Mary Dyer, and they had a son Nicholas in 1733. For reasons unexplained, this Nicholas moved to Jersey some time before 1756, and in September that year married Marguerite Lempriere, the daughter of Jacques and Sarah Atkinson. They had a daughter, Marguerite, the following year, and then two sons, Nicholas and James, in 1758 and 1759 respectively.
James remained in Jersey, but his parents sent brother Nicholas to Philadelphia to live with his grandmother Mary, widowed for the second time in 1768 when Abraham Wynkoop died. There is some dispute about when Nicholas arrived in the USA: 1772 is the date usually given, but his gravestone says September 1774.
In 1780 he qualified at the Philadelphia Bar and began practising law in Cambridge, Maryland. In 1786 he married his third cousin, Sarah George, from the Dyer side of his family. She died the following year after the birth of their son George Lempriere Hammond, who only lived to the age of three.
After his wife's death Nicholas took up the position of Clerk of Dorchester County, which he held for less than two years before his election to the Maryland Senate. During his two-year service he introduced a bill for the gradual abolition of slavery in Maryland, but it was rejected.
Despite this he was clearly well respected in the highest circles because he was offered the position of Attorney-General of Maryland by George Washington, but he declined because he did not want to move to Baltimore. Washington also asked him to go to Great Britain as an emissary.
In 1792 he married again, to Rebecca Hollyday, of Ratcliffe Manor, Maryland. They had three children between 1795 and 1801, another Nicholas and daughters Anna Maria and Rebecca. Nicholas snr continued his legal and political career, serving as Justice of the Orphan's Court and being re-elected to the Senate on a number of occasions.
In 1798 he moved with his family to Easton, Maryland, and was founding president of the Maryland Steamboat Company, raising $40,000 to build the Maryland.
Despite his political stance, the 1800 census shows him employing nine slaves and six white workers. He had a red brick house built in Easton and called it St Aubin, after the town in his native island. The following year his second wife died at the age of 38 after the birth of their daughter Rebecca, who survived and lived to the age of 55.
Nicholas died in 1830 and was buried alongside his wife at her parents' home, Ratcliffe Manor. His obituary recorded:"Mr Hammond was devoted to his children and an indulgent parent, and their love and reverence for him was unlimited. He became very deaf near the close of his life, but being near sighted his eyes were unsusually strong for his age and he never wore glasses. His systamatic and moderate living of but two meals a day added many years to his life, and his death, though not unexpected, was not the result of long standing disease."
Jersey branch
Nicholas Hammond outlived his brother Jacques, who remained behind in Jersey, by some 11 years. The brothers agreed in 1785 to share the estate of their father, who had died two years earlier, Nicholas receiving his property in the USA and Jacques his property in Jersey. Jacques must have married Rachel Le Vavasseur-dit-Durell about the the time his father died (there is no record of the marriage) and in May 1784 their first daughter, Rachel, was born. She was followed by four sisters and four brothers. The last-born, Jean Hammond, in 1801, went on to become Bailiff of Jersey.
Jacques failed in his attempt to be elected as Constable of St Helier in 1785, losing out to Thomas Anley. But he challenged the result and St Helier was without a Constable as the case dragged on for nine years, until both candidates dropped any further appeals and a new Constable was elected. One of the grounds for Hammond's challenge was that Militiamen had been intimidated into voting for Anley by their Colonel, Major and a Captain who had canvassed on his behalf.
