[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] 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.
[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.