Search by Ethnic Group
The following online sites are listed by ethnic group and are meant to be starting points only, not a complete listing:
- European heritage
You may be able to find a record of their transportation to British Guiana by sea. Many sites have online ship manifests that can be searched for your ancestor's name. As the colonialization of early Guiana included the French, Dutch, and British, those country's record should also be searched. We know that the British left vital records in Guyana when they left but did take newspapers back to England. Perhaps the French and Dutch may have taken some records back to their countries as well?
There are some online Dutch records of births, marriages and of transport. These sites are in the Dutch language, but you can use an online translator to assist you in finding what you are looking for. - Dutch newspaper NRC - Births, Deaths, Marriages from 1910-1945 - West Indies
- Passagierslijsten ná 1736 - internet - List of ships from Netherlands to various ports, 1737 to 1950s, and URL for transcribed list of passengers
- Olive Tree Genealogy provides a page of Dutch phrases and words in Church records which might be useful for a Dutch language site search
- East Indian heritage
There are many books written about the transportation from India, as well as some ship manifests. There are also many web sites devoted to East Indians in the West Indies. An interesting article on the Migration Histories web site is about Indentureship.
- East Indian in the Caribbean Basin 1838 to 1960
This site gives the number of persons indentured to work in the West Indies by country as well as a chart of known Guyana (among other countries) plantations receiving these workers. - Moving Here, Tracing your roots of the UK has a page which lists available lists and records available at the PRO on "Asians via the colonies to Britain" and British Guiana.
- Yahoo Group for East Indians from the British West Indies
This is a message board for communicating about East Indians in the West Indies.
- Asian (Chinese) Heritage
Visit the large Rootsweb site Chinese in Guyana: Their Roots which provides internet sources for Chinese in Guyana.
- African heritage
Again, there are many books on the subject of Africans transported to Guiana as well as several web sites. An English web site, Living Easton, has a timeline of uprisings by Africans in the West Indies and other countries, many list the plantation where the uprising occurred. An interesting paper, while not really pertaining to genealogy, is Liberated Central Africans in Nineteenth-Century Guyana, by Monica Schuler of Wayne State University. Especially interesting is the Caribbean Online - Routes to Roots web site, from the Institute for Commonwealth Studies in the UK on the issue of slavery and records of the plantation owners. A site about the history of the international slave trade routes is Breaking the Silence.
This article is highly recommended: Josiah, Barbara P. After Emancipation: Aspects of Village Life in Guyana, 1869-1911 Journal of Negro History, Volume 82, No.1 (Winter, 1997), Pages 105 - 121. This article describes phases of life of these Afro-Guyanese families; Elcock, Benn, Williams, and Browne, in communities primarily, Hague, Blankenburg, De Kinderen, Meter-Meer- Zorg, Fellowship and Den Amstel of West Coast Demerara, and Vergenoegen, Philadelphia, Tuschen, Zeelugt, and Parika on the East Bank Essequibo. And, perhaps more importantly, informs readers of sources which were available as late as 1997 in Guyana. - Amerindian heritage
Although there are books on the various tribes of original peoples of Guiana - none are known to cover the "family trees" of the individuals. Any citations of reference materials for the genealogy of the native peoples would be welcomed to include here. One particularly interesting web site, Windsor Forest, from the University of Chicago has an article written by Raymond Smith on the Amerindian (original peoples) of Guiana. - Portuguese heritage
To learn more about the Portuguese heritage, history, and to start your research, try the following links:
