At The Winsome Lady clothes shop in Ballymoney, Co Antrim, photographs of the town’s most famous sons cover an entire wall.
Among them is the 25th president of the US, William McKinley, who served from 1897 to 1901. His ancestral home is close to the neighbouring village of Dervock.
Today, talk at the counter of the family-run shop on Main Street in Ballymoney turns to presumptive Democratic nominee and US vice-president Kamala Harris – and her reported local roots.
Front-page headlines in Thursday’s edition of the town’s weekly newspaper announced “Kamala’s links to Ballymoney” amid revelations she is a descendant of Hamilton Brown, a “notorious” slave owner born in Co Antrim in 1766 who emigrated to Jamaica, where he ran a sugar plantation.
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The New York Post was among other papers to carry the story on the back on genealogical research placing Brown as Harris’s paternal great-great-great-great-grandfather.
“Hamilton Brown won’t be going on our wall,” says Winifred Mellot, owner of The Winsome Lady, “but I’ll tell you something, if Kamala Harris has connections here, we’ll certainly celebrate her.”
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This small farming town is a unionist stronghold where lamp-posts are bedecked with union flags.
“Of course, our nickname – that none of us like – was always ‘cow town’,” says Mellot, who is also president of Ballymoney’s Chamber of Commerce and champions its 2023 status as High Street of the Year.
“Because we are sandwiched between Coleraine and Ballymena, people tend to bypass us,” she says. “What put Ballymoney on the map was the motorbike riders; they’re all from here. So to have someone like Kamala linked to us ... I think it’s absolutely brilliant.”
Archive letters tracked down by Antrim historian Stephen McCracken connected Hamilton Brown to his birthplace in Bracough, a townland north of Ballymoney.
After a “bit more digging”, he says, he discovered that Brown was an “extremely bad man” who travelled to London to appeal the abolition of slavery across the British empire in 1832.
“It’s not a good story, it’s not one I wanted to tell, but you know what, we can’t change our history,” says McCracken. “The last couple of days, I’ve been getting a wee bit of abuse over it. People have been asking me why I’ve publicised it. But Kamala is making history.”
Walking down High Street on his lunchbreak, livestock dealer Malachy McKenna agrees “it’s a big story, all right”.
“I’ve never heard the name Hamilton Brown. Unless someone digs something up, you don’t hear about it, do you?” he says. “The fact he was a slave owner and Kamala Harris is the first female and first black vice-president – and could be the next president – it’s wonderful the way things come back.”
The ancestral research follows earlier research by Harris’s father, Stanford University economist Donald Harris, who wrote in 2019 that Kamala’s great-grandmother, Christiana Brown, was a descendant of Hamilton Brown, “who is on the record as plantation and slave owner and founder of Brown’s Town, a town in Jamaica”.
Some Ballymoney residents have no interest in the development – “Never heard tell of him,” say two women – but shoe shop manager Sharon McClelland says Harris’s genealogy will make her follow the presidential race more closely.
“It does make you curious, doesn’t it? It’s really interesting,” she says.
Alan Millar, a senior reporter with the Ballymoney Chronicle, says the paper’s front page “hasn’t caused so much of a stir as yet. I think Ballymoney people would be quite reticent to speak about this.”
For one woman who has traced her ancestry to Hamilton Brown’s sister, the revelation is “complicated”.
“When I first heard about Brown and Kamala Harris, I was intrigued because I thought I’d got a distinguished ancestor. But the more you look at Hamilton Brown, the less you like him. He was a thug, not to put too fine a point on it,” says Linde Lunney.
The retired researcher, who grew up on a Co Antrim farm and worked for the Dictionary of Irish Biography in Dublin, believes it will be a difficult history for the tourist board to “package”.
“It’s very hard to disentangle any of these stories from the slave trade without dirt getting underneath somebody’s fingers,” says Lunney.
She accepts it is a remarkable genealogy. “It’s a story rather than a celebration or a ‘welcome home, Kamala Harris’.”
“Don’t you just wonder what Hamilton Brown would have thought of his great-great-great-great-granddaughter? He himself was a legislator in Jamaica, would he have counted her as a member?”
But a DUP councillor for the area argues that the exploration of Harris’s ancestry is “not condoning” the actions of a figure like Brown.
“All our histories are not perfect so we have to take that in the round,” says Mervyn Storey. “And if Ballymoney can have part of that genealogy and history, then I think that’s something we should pursue. If Kamala Harris was to become the next president of the United States of America, I can assure you there would be an invitation going to her to come and visit Ballymoney.
“A presidential visit to Ballymoney is certainly something that we would all welcome.”
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