MY BOOKS

Jamaican Genealogy Research: A Practical Guide to the Best Resources for Tracing Your Ancestry

Numerous people of Jamaican descent worldwide are looking for help to research their ancestry and build their family tree. This practical book is a detailed collection of the major Jamaican genealogy resources. I compiled them during more than 20 years of researching my own family’s ancestry. The guide makes it easier for researchers worldwide to find the various types of records of Jamaica online or in repositories. Readers will learn how to access baptism/birth, marriage, and burial/death (BMD) records, the mainstay of genealogy research. Chapters include where to locate Jamaica’s wills and other legal records; land patents and deeds; land surveys and maps; sales and conveyances of land enslaved African people; partial censuses, and lists of inhabitants; immigration, emigration, and military records; and other historical documents. Other chapters explore the history of Jamaica's record-keeping, the island's multiethnic history, and the compelling British colonial history of sugar and slavery, wars and rebellions, and pirates and piracy,