The Great Chemist, Joseph Black. 61 



Black's Family and Friends. 



It is quite impossible to give in complete detail the histories 

 of the many families in Belfast with which Joseph Black was 

 connected ; they include those of Eccles, Black, Wilson, Legge, 

 Clarke and others ; I must therefore confine myself to the closer 

 relatives and most interesting personalities, and to the more 

 curious results of the constant interlacing of the families of old 

 Belfast. 



John Black, of Belfast, the Grandfather of Joseph, was 

 sworn in a Burgess of the town before Hugh Eccles, who was 

 sovereign in 1675, and was, I have reason to believe, an uncle of 

 John Black's wife. 



John tells his own story in a letter to the head of the 

 Lamont Clan, with which he claimed and was admitted to 

 relationship. 



The letter is written from Belfast in 1723 and from it I 

 extract the following — " I have been an inhabitant of this place 

 for about 60 years, except some intervals when I went abroad to 

 France, Holland and the West Indies, &c., all which time I have 

 been engaged in Merchandysinge ... I was comfortably marryed 

 to one of the name of Eccles, by whom I have five sons and two 

 daughters yet alive, all the former brought up in France and 

 Merchandysing, one of them settled a factor and marryed in 

 Bordeaux and hath a family of six children, another is honoured 

 to be King Georgs Consul at Cadiz, in Spain, where he enjoys 

 both great honour and riches." — So that even two hundred years 

 ago the natives of Belfast had developed that wandering instinct 

 which has never left them. The factor at Bordeaux was his 

 eldest son John, born 1681, and from a power of attorney issued 

 by him in 1761 to his sons, we have a few words more as to his 

 father and himself. ''I, John Black, native of this town of 

 Belfast, born in or about the year 1681 or 1682, son to John. 

 Black and Jane Eccles, his beloved and virtuous spouse, educated 

 here, was in or about the year 1696 or 1697 accompanied by his 



