Barbados
Barbados was the richest of England's seventeenth-century Caribbean holdings, and is also the richest in terms of the legacy of its documentation.
Relatively complete baptism, marriage and burial registers exist and were microfilmed during the 1970s by the Church of the Latter Day Saints as part of their IGI Index. Vestry records provide a street-by-street social portrait of Bridgetown (Indian Bridge), prior to the disasters that destroyed the original settlement at the end of the century, whilst those of the parish of St John detail the laying out of parish duties, boundaries and the construction of a church.
The period 1627 to 1700 is covered by the first seven volumes of land deeds. These are not the original manuscripts, but a series of supervised hand-written transcriptions, undertaken during the 1890s.
Vestry records, microfilms of parish registers and volumes of land deeds are held by the Barbados Department of Archives, Lazaretto Building, Black Rock, St Michael. The BDA was established in 1964 and is housed in the former leper hospital, built in 1907 (see reading room, left).
In terms of modern documentation which might assist the historian, the fact that place names refer to the process of planting in the seventeenth century means that Barbados's wonderful collection of 1 : 10,000 scale Ordnance Survey maps are a significant source with which to pinpoint the position of settlements, whilst the land deeds reveal, amongst other things: acreage; buying, selling and mortgaging; the rate at which land was felled; livestock and crop development; the setting up of storehouses; the growth of family units and households; the consolidation of larger estates; the switch to cash crops; and the relationship between merchants and settlers.
There are considerable survivals of material culture also: the fabric of the Anglican churches has survived hurricanes and development, and there are a number of grave memorials from the seventeenth century within churches, church yards, and also in the synagogue. The grave memorial pictured, right, is that of the dynamo behind the organisation of the Jewish congregation, Nidhe Israel (The scattered of Israel), emigré from Recife, Lewis Dias, alias Joseph Jesurum Mendes.
Links/ Further reading
Larry Gragg, Englishmen Transplanted : the English Colonization of Barbados, 1627-1660 (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003);
Hilary McD Beckles, A History of Barbados: from Amerindian Settlement to Caribbean Single Market (2nd edn., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2006); Hilary Beckles is the historian for studies of the concept of indentured labour in Barbados and beyond.
Barbados Museum and Historical Society
Deeds - an example of a transcript of Barbados land deeds
Opinion piece - March 2007