It all started one day when 12-year-old Kyle was talking to his grandma, Joanne Olyn Ramsingh. \u201cShe began telling me all about her family. I thought \u2018Why don\u2019t I look into it\u2019, and my mum\u2019s friend helped me to do some research.\u201d<\/p>
Kyle focused on his maternal line, and again and again came across tales of ancestral trauma, and stories that crossed racial or class boundaries. \u201cOne story my grandma told me centres on the matriarch of the family, my great great grandmother Virginia Elizabeth Springer. She was from a wealthy background and had mixed heritage \u2013 African, Scottish, Italian<\/a> and Portuguese. She was from Guyana (on South America\u2019s North Atlantic coast), and her father Joseph was from an established family in Barbados<\/a>.\u201d Her mother, Maria Gonsalves, was born into a wealthy family that owned lots of businesses, some in Trinidad.\u00a0<\/p> There Virginia met and married a local East Indian man, George Ramdeen. However, her family wasn\u2019t happy with the match because of his darker skin and poorer background. \u201cI think she\u2019s quite inspiring as an independent woman in the late 19th century who challenged her family and did what she thought was best for herself,\u201d says Kyle. The couple settled in Fyzabad, an oil town in south Trinidad, where Kyle\u2019s grandmother later grew up with Virginia, her grandmother.<\/p> \u201cI think she\u2019s quite inspiring as an independent woman in the late 19th century who challenged her family and did what she thought was best for herself”<\/p><\/blockquote> Kyle\u2019s grandfather\u2019s side of the family features another story of breaking boundaries. \u201cIn Trinidad, a large percentage of the population are from India. They came over after the abolition of slavery to fill the labour void, and were indentured to work on plantations. The conditions were pretty bad.\u201d People were sent by sea to the Caribbean and South America. \u201cOne of the few positives that came from this was the concept of jahaji bhai<\/em>, meaning \u2018brothers of the ship\u2019. The indentured Indians created this fraternity, doing away with caste boundaries. One that did remain, however, was the Brahmin, the highest caste. They were the priests needed to administer the Hindu religion.\u201d\u00a0<\/p> Kyle\u2019s grandfather\u2019s family were Brahmin, but he discovered that this had not always been the case for one ancestor, although it is very difficult to move between castes. He came across the online account of an elderly lady from Fyzabad. \u201cShe told the story of my great great grandfather, Pundit Goberdhan. Originally he was from a lower caste. However, he ran away with the local pundit\u2019s daughter and married her, which caused warring between their two families. The local panchayat<\/em>, or council, decided that the wife\u2019s family should accept the marriage and my great great grandfather should become a Pundit, thereby elevating his caste and giving their marriage legitimacy.\u201d\u00a0<\/p> Pundit Goberdhan became quite famous as a leader of the Hindu community in Trinidad. He is partly responsible for making Diwali a national holiday, and when the local Indians rioted over working conditions in the 1930s, he was called in to help calm the situation: \u201cPundit Goberdhan was awarded the King George VI Coronation medal in 1937 for putting down the riots.\u201d<\/p> Indentureship records for Trinidad are available at the National Archives of Trinidad and Tobago, and reveal where in India individuals were from. \u201cMy 3x great grandparents Meetoo and Kaytooki arrived in Trinidad as children with their parents as indentured labourers. Meetoo was three when he travelled from Calcutta to Trinidad in 1868 aboard the Victor Albert<\/em> with his parents Baldeo Tiwari and Rama. They are listed as Brahmins, from Shahjahanpur, Uttar Pradesh, and were indentured at the River Estate in Diego Martin. Kaytooki was four on arrival in 1882, travelling on the Hesperus<\/em> from Calcutta with her parents Gurdyal and Mulloo. They were Brahmins too, from Hardoi, Uttar Pradesh. Gurdyal died on the ship while Baldeo died within five years of arrival, highlighting the harsh conditions on the plantation.\u201d<\/p> The Madeiran records digitised by the Arquivo e Biblioteca da Madeira helped Kyle research his Portuguese family. \u201cMy 3x great grandmother Maria Gonsalves was Afro-Portuguese. Her father Manoel Gonsalves was a Portuguese businessman originally from Madeira, and her mother, who wasn\u2019t named in the records, was a local woman of African descent from Guyana.\u201d Back then richer white men often took black mistresses.\u00a0<\/p> Kyle thinks that he might be linked to a crime that still resonates today. \u201cI found an old newspaper<\/a> article from 1888 about a Manoel Gonsalves, who believed his black mistress was cheating on him and killed her. Manoel was given the death sentence, but it was reported that the king of Portugal wrote to Queen Victoria asking for leniency.\u201d The sentence was commuted to penal servitude. People took to the streets of Georgetown in protest. They felt that the Portuguese could buy their lives, while Africans and Indians were hanged.<\/p> Whether or not this is Kyle\u2019s ancestor, he feels that the incident shows how far back ancestral trauma in the African experience goes. \u201cEven years after slavery ended, there was still the feeling that black lives didn\u2019t matter \u2013 that that woman\u2019s life didn\u2019t matter \u2013 and those things from the past are still present today.\u201d<\/p> Kyle managed to track some of his African forebears in Madeira. \u201cThe Portuguese side of my family included enslaved ancestors. Madeira was one of the first places to institute African slavery, and at one point the population was 10 per cent African.\u201d Kyle got back as far as his 9x great grandmother Maria de Fran\u00e7a, who was enslaved, but hit a brick wall. \u201cHer records just say \u2018parents unknown\u2019.\u201d She appears on the marriage record of her son Bernardo, listed as the slave of a Catholic priest.\u00a0<\/p> Tracing his enslaved ancestors in Barbados has proved trickier. \u201cMy 3x great grandfather was Joseph Watson Springer. His paternal grandfather James Barry Springer senior was actually a slave owner. However, Joseph\u2019s maternal grandmother, Mary Rawlins Licorish, was of African descent. I\u2019ve not found records of her parents\u2019 births or baptisms so they may have been formerly enslaved, but unfortunately slave registers on Ancestry<\/a> only cover 1813\u20131834.\u201d<\/p> Physical records in the UK have been helpful in Kyle\u2019s journey, including the government gazettes at The National Archives, which reveal daily life in the Caribbean. Kyle spotted several references to his family within their pages.\u00a0<\/p> His forebears\u2019 struggles have been a focus of Kyle\u2019s research \u2013 from the enslaved in Madeira and Barbados to his grandmother feeling alienated in a new country: \u201cI feel a real connection to my ancestors, and draw inspiration from them. I think it\u2019s important to recognise everything that they\u2019ve done that\u2019s led to today. It\u2019s so important to keep telling their stories to keep them alive.\u201d\u00a0<\/p> “It\u2019s so important to keep telling their stories to keep them alive\u201d\u00a0<\/p><\/blockquote>![\"Black](\"https:\/\/c02.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/52\/2024\/04\/Manoel-Gonsalves-his-mother-Patricia-de-Oliveira-Goncalves-and-his-Granddaughter-Virginia-Elizabeth-Springer.jpg\")