John Hoyes

Prospect estate in St John, Jamaica, was registered to the estate of J. Hoyes in the almanac of 1811 (based on the givings-in of Q3 1809).

Probably John Hoyes, born 1766 in Balnaferry, Forres, third son and seventh child of James Hoyes and Margaret Adam in Balnaferry. He died 1808 and was the father of John Hoyes of Prospect (q.v.) who certainly owned the estate from the 1820s. Married Mary Riviere (or Renier) Hoyes, nee McGlashan, and later (1803-6) Mary R. Cuming, who married Thomas R. Jackson in 1812.

Catherine, born 17/10/1798 and John, born 17/01/1801, children of Mary Lamb, "a mulatto woman" and John Hoyes, baptised in Kingston, Jamaica, 12/09/1801.

Jamaica Almanac (1811).

See emails from Jim Brennan 06/11/2019 and 14/03/2020.

Familysearch.org, Jamaica Church of England Parish Register Transcripts, 1664-1880 [database online].

We are grateful to Jim Brennan for his assistance with compiling this entry.

Notes on the Hoyes Family in Forres, by Jim Brennan, following the Aberdeen Journal Notes and Queries

The main relevant figures are three of the sons of John Hoyes at Knockomie, east of Forres and Beatrice Watson:

I James Hoyes in Balnaferry, likely to have been the James Hoyes in Forres who married Margaret Adam in Rafford in 1747. His youngest son, John (q.v., as John Hoyes) married Mary Riviere Cuming, nee McGlashan, a carpenter’s widow, in Jamaica, where he died in 1808. John Hoyes was in turn the father of a son named John (1806-1885, q.v. as John Hoyes of Prospect).

II James in Balnaferry’s younger brother, William, merchant and Baillie of Forres, who married Margaret Logan and whose sons John and Lewis (both q.v, as John Hoyes of Grenada and Lewis Hoyes) made careers in Grenada

III John, the third brother, who according to Fasti Ecclesiae began as schoolmaster in Alves, was ordained there, assisted in the parish, and under the patronage of Francis Earl of Moray, was installed minister of Dalgety in Fife, and later, on the appointment of James Gillan, minister of Kinloss, to Speymouth was moved by the Earl to Kinloss, Morayshire. His wife, Janet Reid, was the daughter of the minister of Beath, in Fife, and her mother, Ann Dott, whose father had been convener of the shoemakers in Cupar, may possibly have been of Huguenot descent. Fasti Ecclesiae gives his birth year as 1744 – the OPR as 1739, and the Edinburgh Magazine report of his 1818 death gives his age as 74.

Rev John Hoyes’s eldest son, born in 1788, was also a John, also in Jamaica, and married in Kingston in 1816, Helen Petrie (q.v.), daughter of Ninian Petrie in St Thomas in the East dying in 1818, the year of his father’s death. In 1844 Helen Hoyes (nee Petrie) registered, and had accepted, an assertion in the Kingston register that her late husband had been of white origin entirely. Rev. John Hoyes’s youngest child was Alexander Hoyes (q.v.), born in 1800.