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Don’t Forget to Look in the Caribbean

8 May By Leave a Comment

Whenever someone comes to me with a tough 1600s and early 1700s research problem (both Catholic and Protestant), they always want to know about records in Ireland. Well, there aren’t that many, but people are usually shocked when I ask if they have looked at the Caribbean. The early colonial migrations were so often from Ireland to the Caribbean and then up the coast.

Irish went to the English Caribbean colonies as indentured servants, slaves, plantation workers, prisoners, exiles, merchants, and soldiers. Much of this was just prior to the full scale importation of African slaves. In fact, the island of Montserrat was an Irish Roman Catholic colony! Another little known fact is the original parishes of South Carolina were named after the Barbados parishes. This was because settlers from Barbados immigrated north to help develop South Carolina.
Main English islands where Irish immigrated or were brought include Bermuda (1609), Barbados (1627), Jamaica (1655), and the Leeward Islands: Antigua (1632), St. Kitts (St. Christopher) (1623), Nevis (1628) and Montserrat (1632).

It’s amazing that between hurricanes, volcanoes, rain, fungus, earthquakes, insects and humidity that anything survived. Much is available either in the Caribbean or from copies filed in England. Key records have been inventoried in Christiana K. Schaefer’s Genealogical Encyclopedia of the Colonial Americans (Baltimore, Maryland: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1998).

Many records have been published or are on microfilm at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City. Others are at the National Archives in Kew, outside of London, and still others are at the archives on the islands. Regardless, access to these valuable and essential records is now easier than ever.

What is an Indentured Servant?

3 May By Leave a Comment

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.

The Irish and the African American Connection

7 Apr By Leave a Comment

Probably all African Americans descended from slaves have a line from Ireland. Some would naturally come through an Irish slave owner on the plantation. However, it’s much more complicated than that.

There has been “free color” in America since the 1600s. It was the intermarriage and intermingling of African slave men and white indentured servants that forced laws to be enacted. Many of these women were Irish.

In Colonial America, there were questions with no legal answers. Who was a slave? How long can one retain someone in slavery? Can a Christian be a slave? What about Muslims and Jews? Can a European Christian be a slave? Is slavery color based? Were the children of an African man and a white indentured servant a slave? The answers to these questions affected the entire colonial economy in the 1600s. Over the decades into the early 1700s, these questions were answered one by one, starting in Virginia.

For those mixed-race families who were considered “free color” from the 1600s, they blended into the white, black or Indian communities. Some remained in-between as “tri-racial isolates.” Be aware that race cannot necessarily defined by skin color.  Many tri-racial isolates have researched their Native American side, reorganized into a tribe, and successfully applied for state and federal acknowledgment.

American history is much more fascinating, and at times bizarre, than we were ever taught in school. All of us, regardless of skin tone can claim our Irish heritage.

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