Sign up for Genealogy Pointers »

Many of the early settlers of Barbados eventually moved to the mainland of North America and settled in Virginia, Georgia, the Carolinas, and other colonies. A son of John Winthrop, for example, was one of the original settlers of Barbados, and two of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, Lewis Morris and Arthur Middleton, were descended from men who left Barbados a century earlier. Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, in fact, there was a continuous flow of settlers from Barbados to virtually every point on the Atlantic seaboard, with the result that many families in America today trace their origins in the New World first to Barbados.

Records of Barbados families exist in a variety of places and indeed a great many have been written up and published in the turn-of-the-century journal Caribbeana and The Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society. Unfortunately, back issues of these journals are no longer available, and copies can be found toda in only a handful of libraries. With this present work, however, genealogists at last have access to both of these publications, for the book contains every article pertaining to family history ever published in these journals.

The combined articles, reprinted here in facsimile, range from conventional genealogies and pedigrees to will abstracts and Bible records and refer to some 15,000 persons, all of whom are listed in the index. Besides the genealogies and family records ranging from Adams through Yeamans, many of them contributed by the renowned genealogists Vere Langford Oliver and Eustace M. Shilstone, this compilation also contains a selection of notes on the connections between Barbados and New England families and four invaluable lists of Barbados Quakers.