The 1903 purge of Portuguese jurors

The census does not show what passport the Portugese hold.  My guess is that only UK passport holders became entitled to be jurors.  Portugese last names do not mean they were not UK citizens.  If I'm right, I wonder if the Americans were booted off the jurors lists too.

"Portuguese" was of course a pretty loose official term in those days, meaning mixed-race Macanese, too -  many if not most of whom wouldn't have held any kind of passport (nor ever visited Portugal). This is why they were often listed separately from "Europeans" in government reports and documents, and treated very shabbily by institutions such as the Matilda Hospital, which originally excluded "Chinese and Portuguese" from admission, as per its founder's instructions.

The lists are strange. I noticed the lack of Portugese too but the passport argument does not wash. Great many Germans appear.

Never did explain either why my great grandfather John Olson was dropped from list. Don't think his son - born in HK -  appears until about 1906 but records and pictures show he was in the Volunteer Force. A friend , C.E.Warren is on the list at the same he was in business with my grandfather was his partner.

I think there was an element of "grease" applied to stay off the list. Otherwise why my family members were dropped off and were late in getting on has no explanation.

My great grandfather arrived from Sweden but held a liquor licence but that was hardly the reason he was on this list because he still held one when he was dropped off!

I suspect that David is right that something changed in the regulations but I also am sure that "grease" and sheer ineptitude played their parts.

Sean

Just surmising. I understand that plague was at its worst in Hong Kong at the turn of the last century. Would some of the jurors of Portuguese or Macanese roots have returned to Macau so as to get away from the disease?

Just a wild guess: there might be a lot of Spanish people among the Portuguese sounding names. In 1898 Spain lost it´s last colony, the Philippines. The Philippine-American War followed (1899-1902). During that time Great Britain was a close ally to the US and stood against Spain and the new established First Philippine Republic. The loss of the Philippines might have caused an exodus of the Spanish out of Hong Kong.

My theory the decline likely had something to do with Phil-American War dynamics in the region at that time but might not necessarily mean a lot of Spanish having Portuguese sounding names going back to Spain.  That certainly possible though. I am from the Philippines and have been researching my great-grandfather's Portuguese roots successfully tracing back from HK, Macau and Portugal.  My ggrandfather was on the HK Jurors list from 1897 to 1900. In 1901 he is not on the Jurors List anymore. Somehow he landed job as an Interpreter and later on Customs Officer in the US Government Philippine Islands Commission as I've seen in a 1901 US government publication. Maybe the US recruited Europeans/ withEuropean-ancestry from Hong Kong? I wonder how my ggrandfather got that job.  On a sidenote, my ggrandfather's brother who is not on the HK Juror's List also went to the Philippines at the same time to try his luck but it was not with the US government. My ggrndfather did not go back to HK anymore, established his family and died in the Philippines.