A FREE GUIDE FROM MAROON HOUSE PRESS

Read the Names

How to find your family in the Jamaican records — and what to do when the record stops.

Five generations. Two Scottish surnames. Two walls I have not yet opened. This is the map I made for myself.

Most people tracing a Jamaican line give up not because the records are missing, but because nobody told them which records exist, in what order, or what each one can and cannot say.

This is the map. Five doors, in the order I would open them again, worked through with my own family — the Grays and McPhersons of Portland Parish.

• Civil registration from 1878 — where the originals are, and how to search them free
• The Anglican parish registers, back to 1664
• The slave registers of 1817 to 1832, and what an entry actually contains
• The 1834 compensation records — and three traps to know before you trust a result
• How to read what you find, and an honest account of what you will not find

More from the HouseStart with how to trace Jamaican ancestry — the question this guide was built to answer — then why Jamaicans have Scottish surnames. After that, read on language, power and accent in Caribbean fiction, browse our Caribbean fiction, or pick up the companion Strong One guide.