The English colonized the Caribbean Island of Antigua in 1632. By 1674 the first large sugar plantation was established. The island became important because of its natural harbors. The 1678 Census showed there were 610 Irish out of the population of 4480. This means 13.6% of the population was born in Ireland.

The Irish came to Antigua as indentured servants or as merchants. As more African slaves were imported, there were fewer reasons for the Irish to stay. They would leave for the larger islands or for the mainland American colonies.

There was a direct connection between the merchant families of County Galway and Antigua, and they were often Roman Catholic. When dealing with colonial Catholics, it’s important to keep in mind, Antigua was an English Protestant colony. For this reason, all family baptisms, marriages and burials were recorded in the Anglican Church registers.

Irish Catholics on Antigua also had connections with the Irish Catholic colony on Montserrat.

For the genealogist, Vere Lanford Oliver’s three volume work The History of the Island of Antigua (1894) provides extracts of church records, tombstones, censuses, genealogies and civil records. It is on microfilm at the Family History Library (FHL #1149539): www.familysearch.org Oliver traces many in the planter class of Irish back to Ireland. Primary records at the Antigua & Barbuda National Archives have also been microfilmed at the FHL. The periodical Caribbeana (FHL #38848) is another resource for extracted records. Other records can be found at the National Archives, Kew, England: www.nationalarchives.gov.uk

Antigua is especially important for researching both Catholic and Protestant Irish families in the colonial period. This island may be the link between Ireland and Colonial America.

A nasty piece of North American history has come to light concerning white indentured servants. The program “Who Do You Think You Are?” http://www.nbc.com/who-do-you-think-you-are/ has dealt with several cases. Books such as Don Jordan and Michael Walsh’s White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slavery in America (2008), document the practice. The Irish were a big piece of this ugly history.

For the genealogist it’s almost impossible to not come across servants in the colonial land, court, wills and tax records. Their lives were linked to their masters. It is believed between 1620 and 1775 some 300,000 or two out of every three immigrants to the English colonies arrived in bondage.

Servants were of little value, bought cheap and disposable. They were worth less than an African slave. Whites sold themselves into slavery in hopes of a better life. Early slavery was economic not racial. That came later.

The indentured servant had a contract usually for 4 to 5 years of work, in exchange for an agreed upon amount of acres. The land was held in trust by the owner who bought the right to the indenture at the auction block. If the servant died before the contract was fulfilled the land went to the owner. If a servant violated the contract, by having children (even by the master), marrying or escaping, extra years were added, and the owner received the land. This system benefited few servants, and provided no reason for the master to keep the slave alive.

Typically an indentured servant was escaping poverty, was 15-24 years old, rarely had family and friends indentured with them, lower class, could not select their master and could not marry for their 4-5 year contract. An online database “Immigrants Servants Database”:  http://pricegen.com/immigrantservant/search/simple.php is trying to document up to 100,000 servants. The database currently has 22,441 servants documented. Another source is P. William Filby and Mary K. Meyer’s “Passenger and Immigration List Index” which is now a database on www.ancestry.com Even with databases, do not neglect the county records as a primary source.