Barbados Department of Archives (BDA): Deeds RB3/1

This is an example of how the land deeds of Barbados have been transcribed. They currently exist in a series of huge leather-bound volumes, hand-transcribed in the late nineteenth century. The names of the transcribers are unknown, but the check intermittently made by a supervisor is inserted as marginalia. These transcriptions do not distinguish between elements of the originals which were illegible, damaged or difficult to decipher, and the nineteenth-century transcriptions are not as accurate as one might wish. There are portions, for example, in which the transcriber has not been able to read the original and has left white space, or simply omitted the illegible section, but otherwise transcribed continuous prose, or copied the shape of the letters as close to the look of the original. The transcription did attempt to copy verbatim the spellings of the original.

Unlike the wills and deeds of Jamaica, for example, in which the individual documents have not been kept together nor copied in chronological order, it was thought that the Barbados deeds had been transcribed chronologically. However, this proved not to be the case. The Barbados deeds are largely transcribed in chronological order, but there are batches of documents scattered elsewhere throughout the deeds which refer back to earlier sections, and thus, it will only be when the full run of deeds have been transcribed that a complete database of the social and geographical establishment of settlement can be ascertained.

It was not thought necessary to transcribe verbatim from an original not, of itself, accurate. This transcription therefore, has largely modernised the spellings, except for words which have an integral curiosity value, such as the original ‘hammacoe’ and personal names.

Permissions were obtained for the contents of the land deeds’ volumes to be dictated and then transcribed, but were not granted for the volumes to be photographed. These particular examples of deeds were dictated onto mini-disc tapes and then the oral recordings transcribed. It is hoped that future recordings can be made on a digital recorder, thus improving the application of voice-recognition software, and the speed with which oral copies can be transcribed. Notes of peculiarities and items which were difficult to represent orally were made at the time of dictation. Any punctuation within the original has been retained, supplemented by added punctuation.

The wording of the deeds became standardised and fixed, meaning that all of the contracts which were drawn up to describe land or labour relations could be printed with spaces left for the changing material, such as names, locations and conditions to be entered by hand. Very few originals survive: there is a labour indenture extant in the National Archives of Scotland. Although antiquated, the same idiom is still used in land auctions in South Carolina, as can be seen here is an extact from the classified section of the Low Country newspaper 'The Post and Courier'.

Permission to cite these documents can be obtained from Dr Sarah Barber, Department of History, Lancaster University, Lancaster, LA1 4YG, UK.