First of all, congratulations on such an astounding find in your family tree. Finds like these are very helpful to scholars researching the lives of domiciled black British lives in the past. You have all the right to be thrilled and curious.

With that said, it would be very difficult to speculate on who her parents might have been, what might have led them to give their child to the Foundling Hospital, or what their backgrounds might have been. This will be your task to find out and I hope that you will make the effort to look deeper into Charlotte's history, and in extension, the black British past.

But what we can do is to give you an overview of the black British population in London during the 18th century. The preconceived idea that most people arguably enter to when they think of Africans in relation to England in the past is, of course, slavery. Slavery was certainly a very present reality for people of African ancestry who arrived on the shores of Great Britain, but those enslaved persons who arrived from the Caribbean or North America together with rich plantation owners or ship captains joined an already existing community of black British men and women who were born and raised in London. Some had lived in London, or elsewhere in Great Britain, for generations. There were also those who had managed to escape slavery, now living as free men and women in London. By the time your ancestor Charlotte was an adult, she would have been able to visit churches and meeting houses meant specifically for the black community. There were even black pubs. By the time Charlotte was in her 40s, she would probably have noticed the influx of even more black people roaming the streets of London, some disabled, some begging for money -- these were former enslaved persons (and their families) who had fought for the British during the American War of Independence and who had left the newly independent United States of America together with the British Army (those who had fought together with the Hessians returned with them to Germany!). There is therefore not a unified, singular black story.

They were poor and rich, illiterate and highly educated, anonymous and famous. For the vast majority, we know only the scarcest of details. Baptisms, burial records, brief mentions in memoirs written by white authors -- these are the typical sources that we are forced to use for subaltern subjects in history because we have little else. The ones that we know more about, and sometimes even have a likeness of, are predictably those from high society or whose contact with high society made them literate (and able to produce their own memoirs about their experiences). Ignatius Sancho, for example, was born approximately 20 years earlier than Charlotte. Yet he was born enslaved onboard a slave ship. After his parents had died when he was very young, it was his enslaver who took him to England and gave him away as a gift. He was raised as a slave in a Greenwich household before he made the choice to escape, making his way to the Montagu House where he found employment as a butler to the family of the Duke of Montagu. Sancho taught himself how to read and write, promptly becoming an abolitionist as well as a businessman once he left the employment of the Montagu family. He was an eager composer of music, writer of letters and poetry. His book The Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African was published posthumously in 1782.

This is a very brief overview of the 18th century black population of London. There's more to tell, and I will point you towards Gretchen Gerzina's Black London: Life Before Emancipation (Rutgers University Press, 1995) that will give you a proper in-depth look into this fascinating history, but I apologize that we are unable to give you any specific details to the life of Charlotte. I hope that you will one day return and tell us all about her though!