Hi Louis:

Thank you for your comments. I’m pleased that I suggested the IN MOTION website.

I remember a discussion on the AfriGeneas mailing list about a poster’s query of an ancestor with a Spanish name. I think it was Hector. Perhaps this name could have been a link to his unknown Caribbean ancestry.

An article, on the IN MOTION site is entitled “The History of Afro-Caribbean Migration to the United States" by Winston James. It discusses a more balanced history of early immigration from the Caribbean to North American colonies. He agrees with an historian about the limited scholarship on immigration. “…what is needed is for scholars to go beyond the restricted field of vision offered by studying one or more ethnic groups.” Very true! Multi-lingual scholars like Jane Landers and Gwen Midlo Hall point out that many historians haven’t explored a wider history of the US because of they are limited to English texts. If scholars offer a limited vision (in this case Caribbean immigration) then what’s the perception of the genera or larger population?

Mr. James writes “Barbadian slaves were taken by their colonizing British owners to South Carolina during the seventeenth century, and earlier in the same century slaves from Barbados constituted an important portion of the black population of Virginia and the Chesapeake generally.”

You can find the above mentioned article at the url below:

http://www.inmotionaame.org/migrations/topic.cfm?migration=10&topic=1&tab=image&bhcp=1

Winston James’ article is on the left.

Enjoy!

K Wyer Lane