By tracing the largely forgotten eighteenth-century migration of elite mixed-race individuals from Jamaica to Great Britain, Children of Uncertain Fortune reinterprets the evolution of British racial ideologies as a matter of negotiating family membership. Using wills, legal petitions, family correspondences, and inheritance lawsuits, Daniel Livesay is the first scholar to follow the hundreds of children born to white planters and Caribbean women of color who crossed the ocean for educational opportunities, professional apprenticeships, marriage prospects, or refuge from colonial prejudices. The presence of these elite children of color in Britain pushed popular opinion in the British Atlantic world toward narrower conceptions of race and kinship. Members of Parliament, colonial assemblymen, merchant kings, and cultural arbiters--the very people who decided Britain's colonial policies, debated abolition, passed marital laws, and arbitrated inheritance disputes--rubbed shoulders with these mixed-race Caribbean migrants in parlors and sitting rooms. Upper-class Britons also resented colonial transplants and coveted their inheritances; family intimacy gave way to racial exclusion. By the early nineteenth century, relatives had become strangers.

John Doggett (d.1673) immigrated in 1630 from England to Watertown, Massachusetts, married twice, and died in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Descendants lived in New England, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia and elsewhere. Some descendants immigrated to New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and elsewhere in Canada. Includes ancestors in England to the 1200s.

Descendants of Pierre Baillo who married Catherine Poisot (Poissot) in in New Orleans in 1763.