Hesse family

This article is about the Hesse family of Accra, Ghana. For the European dynasty, see House of Hesse.

Hesse family
Current regionAccra, Ghana
Place of origin
FoundedArrival on the Gold Coast
18th century, Osu, Accra
FounderLebrecht Wilhelm Hesse
Members
Connected members
Connected familiesClerk family
Distinctions
TraditionsPresbyterian

The Hesse family (/ˈhɛsə/)[1] is a Ghanaian family of Dano-German origins.[2] The progenitor of the family was Dr. Lebrecht Wilhelm Hesse, a German medical doctor and a subject of the Danish Crown under King Christian VII.[3] Hesse was an employee of the Danish colonial administration.[3] After qualifying in medicine and surgery, he sailed to the Gold Coast as a young bachelor in the late 1700s to treat chaplains from the Church of Denmark and its latter affiliate, the Danish Missionary Society, civil servants and garrison soldiers stationed at the Christiansborg Castle, now called the Osu Castle.[3][4] He married a local Ga woman, Lamiorkai, from Osu Amantra in Accra.[3][4]

During the nineteenth century, the Euro-Ga descendants of Dr. L. W. Hesse were influential in commerce in the Gold Coast colony.[4] Family members later branched into other occupations, becoming bureaucrats and ministers.[4] Additionally, the Hesse family is directly related to the Clerk family through Dr. Hesse's granddaughter, Pauline Hesse (1831–1909), a trader who was married to Alexander Worthy Clerk (1820–1906), a Jamaican Moravian teacher.[5] Clerk was among 24 individuals from the West Indies recruited by the Basel Mission of Switzerland in 1843 and sent to Ghana to establish Protestant churches and schools.[4]

  1. ^ "Definition of HESSE". merriam-webster. Archived from the original on 22 December 2017. Retrieved 16 March 2018.
  2. ^ "Hesse Family Tree". familytreenow. Archived from the original on 17 May 2019. Retrieved 17 May 2019.
  3. ^ a b c d "Interview with H.E. Virginia Hesse, Ambassador of Ghana". Czech & Slovak Leaders. 19 August 2020. Archived from the original on 22 October 2020. Retrieved 7 December 2020.
  4. ^ a b c d e Sill, Ulrike (2010). Encounters in Quest of Christian Womanhood: The Basel Mission in Pre- and Early Colonial Ghana. BRILL. ISBN 978-90-04-18888-4. Archived from the original on 22 July 2023. Retrieved 13 April 2020.
  5. ^ Kingdon, Zachary (21 February 2019). Ethnographic Collecting and African Agency in Early Colonial West Africa: A Study of Trans-Imperial Cultural Flows. Bloomsbury Publishing USA. ISBN 9781501337949. Archived from the original on 22 July 2023. Retrieved 12 October 2020.