Caribbean roots: the Irish, Scottish and English threads

Caribbean family history and the British Isles are bound together in ways that ask for honesty. Some threads are emigration stories like the others in this series. Others are not: many British and Irish surnames in the Caribbean arrived through the plantation system and slavery, names imposed rather than carried. Both are real ancestry, both are traceable, and this guide tries to treat each truthfully.

Montserrat: the Emerald Isle of the Caribbean

Montserrat was settled in the 1630s largely by Irish Catholics, many from Cork and Kerry, pushed out of other colonies. Irish names, Irish place names and a St Patrick's Day holiday survive to this day. That holiday is layered: it also commemorates the enslaved Africans who chose 17 March 1768 to rise against the plantations. Modern Montserratians carry both histories, often in the same surname.

Barbados: the Redlegs

In the 1650s Cromwell transported thousands of Irish, and some Scots, to Barbados as indentured labour, and poor white communities descended from them, long called Redlegs, persist on the island's east coast. Theirs is one of the oldest involuntary emigration stories in the Atlantic world, and one of the least told.

Jamaica and the wider islands: names that need care

Jamaica has one of the highest concentrations of Scottish surnames outside Scotland: Campbell, Grant, Gordon, Douglas. Some trace to Scottish settlers and their families. Many trace to plantation owners and overseers whose names were imposed on the people they enslaved. A surname here is the start of a question, not an answer, and the honest tools for that question exist: University College London's Legacies of British Slavery database documents the owners and estates by name, and parish records on the islands go back centuries.

Tracing the threads

For the Irish threads, Villagly Ireland covers village events across all 26 counties, the Cork and Kerry countryside those first settlers left included. For documentary research: the UCL Legacies of British Slavery database, the island archives and parish registers, and for the indenture era, the transportation records held at Kew. If your trail reaches a British or Irish village, what is on there today is a page away on this site.