Caribbean & Diaspora Storytelling
Maroon House Heritage
Trace Your Jamaican Roots.
Your family’s story is waiting in the records: parish registers, birth and death certificates, estate papers, and the memories of your elders. These Jamaican family history guides show you where to look, how to request what you need and how to make sense of what you find.
Latest guides
New from the Heritage desk
Nine paths into your family’s history
Explore our Jamaican family history guides
Start Here
First steps, what to gather from family, and how to get past common dead ends.
Read the guides → 02Records
Civil registration, church registers, wills, land records and old newspapers.
Read the guides → 03Parishes
A research guide for each of Jamaica’s 14 parishes: history, churches and where the records sit.
Read the guides → 04Surnames
Where Jamaican family names came from and what they can tell you.
Read the guides → 05Slavery-Era Research
Slave registers, compensation records, manumissions and tracing ancestors before 1838.
Read the guides → 06Maroon Heritage
Moore Town, Accompong, Charles Town and Scott’s Hall, and how to research Maroon lineage.
Read the guides → 07DNA
Choosing a test and reading results that point to Africa, Europe and Asia at once.
Read the guides → 08Diaspora
Tracing relatives who left for the UK, the US, Canada, Panama and Cuba.
Read the guides → 09Elder Interviews
What to ask, how to record it and how to preserve the stories before they’re lost.
Read the guides →From the House
The stories behind the records
Maroon House Press publishes Caribbean stories rooted in the same history your research uncovers.