“Fortune … A Free negro” had travelled to the colony with a wife and a child over the age of 10.

No man by the name of Fortune appears on any musters of Black soldiers, but he may have served the British forces in other ways.Īlthough Fortune and his family are not recorded in the “Book of Negroes,” which lists some 3,000 Black people who sailed from New York to Nova Scotia at the end of the war in 1783, they appear on a muster roll of discharged officers, disbanded soldiers, and loyalists in Annapolis County that was drawn up in the summer of 1784. Whatever the status of Rose’s father, whether enslaved, formerly enslaved, or born free, he perhaps decided to render his position more secure by responding to a British offer of liberty to “indented Servants, Negroes, or others (appertaining to Rebels,)” who joined the loyalist cause during the war. This couple could have made their way to neighbouring Pennsylvania, where slavery still existed but where a large proportion of African people lived freely, many of them having been granted manumission. Her father may have been the Fortune who with another slave, Aminta, presumably his wife, had escaped from a Virginia plantation owner named William Bradley in April 1773. Family tradition relates that she was born near Philadelphia, shortly before the American War of Independence. Rose Fortune was almost certainly the child of Fortune, an African man who arrived in Nova Scotia in 1783 or 1784. c. 1774 in Pennsylvania d. 1864 in Annapolis Royal, N.S., where she was buried on 20 February. FORTUNE, ROSE, porter and informal law-enforcement officer b.

Nova by Margaret Fortune