I represent Rebecca Walker Durnford. I was born in Lowenstoffe in Suffolk England. I married Elias Durnford in London in 1769, while he was back in England consulting with Lord Hillsborough about the charges against Lt. Gov. Montfort Browne. We returned to London later that year, and our first child, William Elias, was born in late 1770. Unfortunately, we lost him after only a few months. In 1773 I traveled back to England – possibly because I was pregnant with our second child – and survived a mutiny aboard The Earl of Sandwich. The crew, well into their drink during a patch of bad weather, decided to plunder the cargo hold and the belongings of the passengers. I was treated quite roughly and we had to be rescued by another ship bound for Nova Scotia. I made it to England where Elias Walker was born in July 1773. My husband had vast tracts of land in West Florida, particularly our 5,000-acre plantation called Belle Fontaine. It was located on the cliffs of Mobile Bay near present-day Montrose. But I had a grant of land in my own right, in the westernmost part of the province on Thompson’s Creek, granted in 1772. In 1780, Elias was in command of the paltry garrison at Mobile. The Spanish besieged the fort, and the story is that while Elias was giving as much of a fight as anyone could, I was giving birth to Phillip on the floor of a hut in the fort. (The story goes that I was assisted by the wife of Governor Johnstone, but there was no such woman in West Florida in 1780 – it was probably Martha Ford, his longtime mistress.) As much fun as this story is, Phillip was born March 31, which was a couple of weeks after the surrender of the fort, so he was probably born in New Orleans or Pensacola. After the war, our family returned to Europe, but Elias continued in his military career and was assigned to the Caribbean in the 1790s. He died of yellow fever in 1794. I died in 1810 at Charlemont in Ireland.
Sources: 8, 37, 62, 75, 104