Connecting with your roots, finding your identity

– how Guyanese are tracing their ancestral linkages

by Ravena Gildharie
ALMOST every Guyanese has heard a sentimental story about their foreparents and how they arrived in Guyana, whether as indentured immigrants, slaves, peasant farmers or merchants. These stories often transcend generations, but in some families, they are so intriguing, that people become determined to trace their ancestral connections.
Popular Berbice businessman Jamna Persaud Ghamandi, of Number 79 Village, Corriverton, is one such Guyanese, currently on a mission to not only track his lineage, but also to connect with living relations in Guyana and India. He, along with three other siblings, is preparing to journey to India before year-end to Uttar Pradesh in an effort to reconnect with their ancestral roots.

Jamna is the eldest son of eight children born to the late Ghamandi, a former sugar worker who was attached to the Skeldon estate and worked until the age of retirement when he migrated to New York, U.S.A. He later returned and lived in Guyana until his death one year ago at age 96.
The elder Ghamandi was the second of four siblings and often told his children stories about his life growing up and about his father, an indentured immigrant, who was 17 years old when he arrived in British Guiana in 1907.

“With that information from my father, I went to the National Archives several years ago when it was on Main Street and from there, I got the Ship Immigration Pass for my grandfather, Ramdharjie, who came from India on the Ganges, together with his cousin, Dhanrajie,” Jamna related. From the records, he learnt that the cousin went to the La Bonne Intention (LBI) sugar estate.

Eager to connect with Dhanrajie’s generations, Jamna recently published an advertisement seeking out relatives or others with information about his connections. He also printed leaflets that he took to the East Coast Demerara village and distributed among residents.
“I am very happy to know the roots of my grandfather and I am hoping to find some relatives in LBI before I go to India later this year and where I hope to see if I can find more relations,” the businessman stated.

Like Ghamandi, dozens of other Guyanese or people with Guyanese roots visit the National Archives weekly. The National Archives is now named the Walter Rodney Archives, located on Homestretch Avenue next door to the National Cultural Centre.

Sources of information
“We have seen people coming here and searching for their ancestors and when they find information, they are so happy and some of them get so emotional. We have seen tears and even got hugs and kisses from those elated with their find,” explained Senior Assistant Archivist Karen Budhram.
Since her employment at the archives nine years ago, Budhram witnessed thousands of persons from Guyana and other countries even as far as Australia, who have researched and successfully traced their ancestors back to this country. Some of these are chronicled in books, journals, television documentaries or newspaper articles.

The archives currently houses approximately 22 ledgers of Ship Registers documenting the arrivals of Indians in British Guiana during varying periods of Indentureship. Assistant Archivist Johnnell Henery explained that each of the books contain records from as many as 22 ships, each of which would have transported about 600 passengers on each voyage. There are also two books with registers of Chinese arrivals and one on Portuguese.

According to Henery, there are also immigration passes, land ownership documents such as transports, records of birth, deaths and baptism, as well as correspondence bearing information of some immigrants on the sugar plantations. Additionally, there are copies of over 30 different newspapers published during the earlier years. All of these records contain information on Guyanese ancestry and are used by the public to trace their roots.
Since 2012, staff at the archives started digitising the information in their possession and to date, they have managed to input quite a lot that is accessible to public search at www.guyananationalarchives.com.

“Along with the name, if you have a date of birth or maybe the year the ancestors arrived in British Guiana, you can use that to search the online database. However, if that search does not turn up any information, people email us and we check through the records that haven’t yet been put into the digitalised system,” Henery noted.
The dates, she explained, are vital to decipher the exact identity since in many instances there are thousands of arrivals recorded with the same name. The website has received about 50,000 consultations to date.

For those who may not have full names or dates, but are eager to trace their ancestral connections, Budhram has encouraged that they speak to the oldest relatives to get some form of information that can initiate a search. Certificates of births, deaths or marriages can be helpful too and in some cases, it is possible to apply to the General Register Office (GRO) for copies of such documents.

Bolstering individual identity
As part of ongoing studies at the University of the West Indies (UWI), Budhram earlier in the year started tracing her own roots. To date, she had linked eight generations of relatives from estates at Leonora, Ogle, Blairmont and Albion to several Indian provinces from which they came. She has also discovered the various castes under which her ancestors were classified and a wealth of information on the way of life of her ancestors.

“I had never given much thought to ancestral lineage before, but after this research and the information I gathered, it really helped bring about a sense of identity with my family and it has been very emotional. It actually brought me closer to my grandfather and I have shared the information by word of mouth with other members of my family and they too are elated,” Budhram said. Since then, her relatives, including those residing overseas, have provided her with stories and pictures of some of her foreparents.
“On the sugar estates, some of my ancestors were estate butlers, plantation overseers, factory mechanics, washer women and some later went into rice-farming and purchased their own land,” the archivist said.

“My grandfather told us that his mother died when he was a baby and during my research, I actually found that a lot of the women in my ancestral line died at a very young age and this was something very prevalent among the immigrants, perhaps due to the physical stress they had endured. There were a lot of women who came to British Guiana at a young age and after giving birth on the colonies, they died. Some of them died in childbirth,” Budhram highlighted.

She is currently working to build a family tree that will feature each generation of ancestors and is hopeful of staging an exhibition before the end of this year to showcase and share with members of the public, her discoveries.

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