Thomas Walker
*The birth of Thomas Walker is affirmed on this date in 1758. He was a white British slave trader.
He is the ancestor of two U.S. presidents, George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush. Thomas Walker was born in Henbury, now a suburb of Bristol, England. Also known as Beau, Walker worked when Bristol was one of the three major slave trading ports in Britain. He served as a slave ship Captain and was a resident slave trader in the Sierra Leone region of West Africa.
He did much of his slave trading at Bunce Island, a British slave castle in the Sierra Leone River, owned then by the Company of John & Alexander Anderson, based in London. He was involved in at least eleven slave trading voyages between 1784 and 1792, taking African captives from Sierra Leone to the British West Indies and the United States.
On February 22, 1785, Walker married Catherine McLelland at St. Andrew's Church in Clifton. She died in October 1806 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a decade after her husband, leaving their older son as the guardian for his sister and a younger son, George E. Walker (1797–1864). Thomas Walker was murdered in 1797 at sea in a mutiny.
