Aibonito Church Books in Puerto Rico
Researching Puerto Rico ancestry is not as difficult today as it was in many years past. Today, there are hundreds of records available online. This post is about Aibonito and the available online church records. Aibonito is a small municipality that sits in the mountainous area of Puerto Rico. It is surrounded by Coamo, Barranquitas,…
Jamaica Roman Catholic Records 1795 – 1823
One of the great things about Roman Catholic Church records in Jamaica is the amount of information contained in the records. The collection on records is not complete but it was salvaged from further destruction. The collection contains baptisms, confirmations, marriages, and death records from 1795 to 1836. These records also contain free blacks, mixed…
Manumission Records of Slaves in Jamaica
One of the terms that many of us that descend from enslaved ancestors know is the word manumission. Manumission is the term used when referencing the freedom of those that were enslaved. The term is used when individuals managed to attain their freedom, whether through the slaveholder freeing them or through the enslaved person purchasing…
Santiago Margarida – 8 Years Old Facing Slavery
While digging through records for Trujillo Alto, Puerto Rico in search of my own African ancestors, I came across a record at the end of the book that caught my attention. Another baptism, but a baptism of an African child. I had previously posted about discovering a record of a 10 years old girl from…
Mandingo: Another Child Taken Into Slavery
As I continue to go through the records, telling their story, even if it is tiny in nature, is better to be told than to remain silent. This is the case with Teresa Maysonet. I suspect that she did manage to survive slavery as this line has African descendants I’ve seen in years later on…
Joaquin Hernandez: A Slave Documents Where He Came From!
Many of us wish we could jump into a time machine and change what our ancestors faced. This is the reality of those of us that descend from slavery. Unfortunately, many of us who descend from slavery ended with the person who was enslaved when researching our roots. Sometimes it is impossible to go beyond…