Tracing your Caribbean ancestry can be tricky because surviving records are patchy - but these websites offer a fantastic place to start and there are more and more Caribbean ancestry records going online all the time so why not give it a go!
If you wish to trace your Caribbean ancestry, then FamilySearch should be your first port of call. The link above takes you to pages on the different regions and islands. For example ‘Grenada Online Genealogy Records’ leads to external databases on MyHeritage and Ancestry, as well as free images of the St George Register of baptisms, marriages and burials (1765-1785) on the British Library’s website.
On FamilySearch there are Jamaican civil registration records, including more than 3.8 million life events (1880-1999), plus Caribbean-wide collections such as deaths and burials (1790-1906). You will find lots of record scans too, with more and more of them being indexed and made freely available online. There is also a growing collection of records for Barbados including civil registration records (1900-1931).
This Caribbean family history site offers a useful list of libraries, archives, museums and other institutions from across the region, which may offer up some online gems. The Department of Archives at the Commonwealth of The Bahamas, for example, has an index to wills from 1703 to 1968. The site also offers some databases including Barbados burials and Quakers in Barbados.
The Jamaica Gleaner, the leading Jamaican newspaper, was first published in 1834, and you can access a pretty complete digital archive online. The database contains more than 970,000 old newspaper pages, searchable by keyword or date, leading to PDF copies you can scroll through or zoom into via the browser, and containing obituaries, birth records, marriage notices and more. The wider archive site Newspaper Archive has more than 9,800 titles in its global roster.
Ancestry.co.uk website includes The National Archives collection of incoming passenger lists, 1878-1960 as well as an important collection of slave registers in its collection Former British Colonial Dependences, Slave Registers, 1813-1834. The slave registers are free to view and do not require a subscription. You can read more about them in our guide to Jamaican records. The site also has a database of English settlers in Barbados, 1637-1800.
"Jamaican Family Search is an online library for finding historical records of those who lived in Jamaica from the 17th century to 1920 - mainly white families and their offspring. The website has transcriptions from various documents including 19th century Jamaican almanacs (which list property owners plus civil and military officials), extracts from Jamaican church records, civil registration records, wills, Jewish records, and excerpts from directories, newspapers, books and other documents.
"The website is especially useful for anyone interested in developing narratives around the legacy of British slave ownership - the lists of property owners and pens, sugar estates and plantations will be of particular interest if you are researching ancestors who were enslaved in Jamaica. Links to various documents related to slavery in the country are grouped on a page called ‘Slaves and Slavery in Jamaica’.
“If your focus is researching ‘the French connection’, then there’s material relating to refugees fleeing the 1791-1804 revolution in Haiti (then known as Saint-Domingue - a French colony).
"This website was created by an individual, not a corporation. So the database is not complete by any stretch of the imagination. However, it is great if you are at an advanced stage of genealogical research, or are simply looking for a bit of information that might stimulate your curiosity further."
11 сен 2024
