Dorothea Christina Thomas

Dorothea Christina Thomas (26 June 1796 – 5 August 1846) was a free woman of colour and slave owner from Grenada, whose common-law marriage with Major John Gordon became the centre of a Scottish legal case. It set an important precedent defining the circumstances under which a marriage could be established by "habit and repute" in Scotland and is illustrative of the challenges encountered in family law prior to the establishment of uniform reciprocity agreements regarding marriage recognition. Her relationships also refute the notion that free women of colour were merely mistresses and confirm that there were various types of relationships in her era that mirrored stable marriages. Early life Dorothea Christina Thomas was born as a free woman of colour in St. George's, Grenada, on 26 June 1796 to Dorothy Kirwan and Joseph Thomas. Her mother was a former slave, who had purchased her own manumission, and was engaged in business, running a hotel. Her father was engaged in trade, providing goods between various islands in the British West Indies with his sloops, the Mary and the Jack. She was the youngest of her mother's eleven children. Thomas, who variously was called "Christina" or "Dolly", moved with her mother around 1799 to Bridgetown, Barbados, after her father died. Business competition in Barbados was high and by 1807, her family had relocated to Georgetown, in the Dutch Colony of Demerara. During the French Revolutionary Wars with Britain (1792–1802), the Dutch Empire had collapsed and to keep Demerara from falling under French influence, the British began occupying the colony in 1802, though a formal change of governance did not occur until 1814–1815. In 1810, Thomas, her older brother Henry and more than a dozen of their cousins, were taken to Britain for schooling. The boys were enrolled at Dollar Academy near Glasgow and the girls at the Kensington House Academy in London. At the school, Thomas was trained in art and music, as well as bookkeeping, sewing and writing. She studied there for three years before returning to the Caribbean, where she joined her older sister, Ann and her husband John Gloster Garraway in Grenada. While living with them, she met John's brother Robert Garraway, a lawyer and business partner of his brother. Considered to be disreputable, he had already sired at least four illegitimate children with two different partners.