From the notarized records of Saint-Domingue, we were able to finally see an inventory for members of one of the very large families of free people of color. In this case, the Cangé. In 1773, after the death of Jean Celin Cangé, an inventory was written listing the goods of his estate. Obviously, their human property were also enumerated in the document. Alas, some of it is difficult to read due to the handwriting of the notary. Nonetheless, we were able to construct a quick table showing the numbers of slaves held by Cangé and his wife. Through our great-great-grandmother, we are probably descendants of members of the Cangé family and/or their chattel.
We suspect Jean Celin Cangé was baptized in 1694, born to a presumably white father of Spanish origin and a black woman, Marie Therese Damelide. The latter may have been from one of the Spanish colonial territories (Santo Domingo? Veracruz?). In 1703, a census for the Jacmel area listed the father of Jean Celin as the owner of only 2 female slaves. Well, by 1773, the estate of the son held 14 slaves, only 3 children. Creoles were the largest group, but they were clearly not the wealthiest, most important planters in the Jacmel quartier. Indeed, some of their slaves were quite old, and the habitation only held 4 houses/shacks for the slaves.
We will, obviously, need to see inventories and other records of property owned by different members of the Cangé to see to what extent members of the family became wealthy. One branch, at Petit-Harpon, was able to produce the Pierre Cangé who later fought in the Haitian Revolution. That branch built a coffee plantation with slave labor. Here, however, at the habitation situated near the rivière Gauche, the plantation ran by Celin and Butet grew cotton. We need to find more detailed notarized records for coffee plantations and other types of farms in the hills and valleys of the region, closer to our ancestral "roots" in the Bainet-Jacmel area.
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