I HAD NEVER met my grandmother. And she’d never known her father. Like many people with Caribbean roots, my family’s story is beautifully complex. 

Caribbean families often have histories which make up a complicated mosaic of triumph, trauma, heartache and loss. 

The little information we have is often patchy at best, full of unknowns, reliant on a mixture of official records and oral testimonies.  

My own journey, to trace my roots, took me on an odyssey through my Afro-Guyanese side of my family and my Indian side via Trinidad. 

Disturbingly, it also involved confronting the reality that my ancestors were slaves on a plantation owned by a Scotsman in Guyana.

The reality that those who came before us often lived through the hardships of indentured labour and the horrors of slavery, or as is the case in my family, both, is difficult to process.

These realities can create gaps in family knowledge and make tracing our roots challenging.

Challenging – but not impossible – as I’ve come to learn.

I’m named after my late grandfather, Richard Sudan, born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, in 1923.  I was close to him and am among the eldest of his grandchildren.  

His parents, known simply as Ma and Pa, whose names had essentially been anglicized, had their roots in India, either in the Punjab region, or maybe Goa – no one knows for sure.

Ma and Pa’s parents had migrated from India, to Trinidad, and had struggled to scrape a living for their children.  The next generation did a little better. 

My grandfather, Richard, came to London in 1950 aged 27, part of the wave of the Windrush arrivals.  My dad was born in Balham, a couple of years later.

I’ve been to Trinidad many times, including during the carnival season. My grandfather and his siblings knew the famous Naipaul brothers, V.S. and Shiva.  

The Naipaul family home is next door to our family home, which we’ve had for several generations. Trinidad is familiar. I’ve been there.  I know how we got there.  I feel a sense of belonging there.

What I’ve never really known much about, until very recently, were my Afro-Guyanese roots. My grandmother, Hermione who died 5 years before my birth, was born in London in 1921. She’d never met her own father.

For many decades, all we’d had was a picture of grandma Hermione’s dad, which was found in her belongings after she’d died.  He was a black man from Guyana with a Portuguese surname.

His name was Herman De Mendonca.  We knew that he’d traveled to the UK, from Guyana in 1919.  He’d stayed at a guest house run by my great grandmother Renee, in Oval, South London.

Herman’s relationship with Irene had resulted in the birth of my grandmother, Hermione.

Herman traveled back to Guyana, shortly after my grandmother was born in 1921. He never returned to the UK, despite suggesting through letters of plans to do so.  He talked about setting up a home in Guyana with his new family. For unknown reasons, it never happened.

We believe that my grandmother, Hermione, knew more about her father, Herman, than she’d indicated in her lifetime despite never really meeting him.

The one picture we’d had of him, offered clues to his background alongside anecdotal information.  

We’d known he had qualified as a lawyer based on an old newspaper cutting saved by my grandmother.  But that’s all we knew.

All of that changed, in January, 2023, after a long conversation with my mother, a brilliant family historian, writer and former teacher.  We’d been on the phone for over an hour one day talking about family history. 

My interest in what became of my great grandfather, Herman, which had been bubbling below the surface since my mid twenties, when I’d first seen his picture, was making me restless.

We believe that Herman died young.  He’d apparently had plans to come back to the UK.  But we’d never known what happened to him.  And I wanted to know.  Having such a big gap in this side of the family tree bothered me – and I don’t know why – to the core of my being.

I struggled to sleep that night, after speaking to my mother, haunted by his image which remained permanently etched in my mind.  

Long into the evening, as I’d done many times before, I found myself googling Herman’s name for hours, along with any words which I felt might funearth some fresh clues, anything,  about both Herman and his family. My family.  

It always seemed pointless and had definitely always proven fruitless.  A real needle in a haystack kind of irrational hope underpinning these sporadic google search sprees , that I regularly undertook.

But, at around 3 in the morning, half asleep, it happened.  I’d had a breakthrough.  A major one.  I couldn’t believe it at first.

I found Herman’s surname, De Mendonca alongside others sharing his surname, in old newspaper articles from Guyana which had been digitized and made available online.  

The new names were clearly family members of my great grandfather Herman based on the dates and locations. They had to be. I sent a flurry of screenshots to my parents before they could be lost, in the hope I’d found something.

My mother took the information, and began to dig.  What she found stunned us.  She managed to track down a living nephew of my great grandfather, Herman, to the UK.

That nephew, now in his 90’s, was in London.  We were unprepared for finding a living relative.  But what came next was an avalanche of information which months later, for me at least I’m still processing.

I’d had a few guesses about Herman and his family based on his picture, and a little knowledge and research about Guyana

We were told that Herman was from “a slave family”, in Guyana.  We were sent a picture of Herman as a young teen.  The new snap was like receiving a piece of priceless treasure.  

NAMES

Because we’d only ever had one image of Herman our entire lives, and now could see him as a fresh faced young man with a full head of hair – very different from the balding man in his 30s we’d only ever seen up until now.

We were also sent a picture of Herman’s grandmother – one of my favourite pictures saved on my phone- a striking looking woman named Caroline Chesney.  Caroline is my 3 times great grandmother.  My dad’s, grandfather’s, grandmother.

We’ve since learned that Caroline was born in 1832, 2 years before the end of slavery and emancipation in 1834.  Chesney is the name of a slave plantation which once existed in Guyana, owned by Scotsman, James Chesney. Chesney village exists to this day.  

In 1819, 13 years before the birth of Caroline,  slaves owned by heirs of James Chesney had been registered by another Scotsman, William Munro. 

Scotland is often missing from conversations about slavery, but was heavily involved in the trade as Alexander Scott Assistant Curator at the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool explained to The Voice: “The biggest slave owner in Guyana was John Gladstone. It’s estimated that he received the biggest compensation payout of any individual, from any colony for the loss of his enslaved property

“John Gladstone was the father of William Ewart Gladstone, the [Liberal] prime minister of Britain.

“Scotland’s direct involvement in transAtlantic slavery is becoming more and more recognised at least in academic circles and I think the political climate.”

Scott added: “I know from people who work in this field,that family history is important for everybody but is of acute importance for people of African heritage and who have descended from enslaved people. 

THIRST

“One of the tools of enslavement and colonisation was to deface people’s African heritage, their names, their history. The Importance is the attempt – and often successful attempt – to rediscover an erased heritage.”

My family had also been given a picture of the man that Caroline had married, a Portuguese labourer from Madeira – Louis De Mendonca. 

Louis Demendonca, was one of the names that had shown up on my screen, some months previously when looking for my great grandfather, Herman Demendonca.

For me, finding new information about family roots is less like stumbling across an Oasis and more like a cup of salt.  It doesn’t quench your thirst, but creates a thirst for more answers. Because new questions are raised.

We also learned a little more about the family that Caroline had gone on to have with Louis De Mendonca.

Louis had accumulated enough wealth in his lifetime – through the sale of rum and other commodities – to pass down to the children he’d had with Caroline, to then be passed down to subsequent generations, leading to a living relative in the UK.

But I wanted more information about Caroline, born Chesney, before becoming De Mendonca after marriage.  

I realised that the only reason we had been able to trace Caroline was because she had married a Portuguese man. And I’d had the name De Mendonca to search.  I knew nothing of her own family.  

RECORDS

Had she been born enslaved?  Who were her parents and where had they been born? Were they also named Chesney after the Scottish slave owner? Many slaves in Guyana had been born free.  What were their African names?

My search took me to the National Archives, to scour the records to see if Caroline was listed in the slave registers.

What I found was a list of slaves who would have changed hands between slave owners the Chesneys’ and the Munros’ registered to the heirs of William Munro.   

I saw charts recording itineraries, the ‘gains and losses’ of human beings, but not Caroline’s  name itself.  

It’s possible I had looked at the names of Caroline’s parents, who would certainly have been born as slaves, without realising it.

Caroline was born at the tail end of slavery in Guyana.  And although finding information on her and those that came before her is hard, people trying to trace their African roots in the slavery period should be encouraged and not demotivated. I hadn’t found Caroline’s name – yet – but I did find many more leads to follow up.

With each year more records are becoming available online, which is what helped my own initial search.

Dr Wanda Wyporska, former chief executive at the Society of Genealogists (SoG) and a historian, now head of Black Equity Organisation (BEO), explained why searching your family roots is both possible and important for those of African origin.

“The first step is saying to our communities that there are records – we can’t promise you there’s going to be records for every family – but I think a lot of us just assume that there’s nothing there. 

REDISCOVERING

“One of the most depressing things, but that is interesting in genealogical terms, is that property and possessions are always recorded. And unfortunately we were those properties and possessions. There are records of us.  If you look at slave owner compensation records and counterclaims, it’s possible to find names.”

Dr Wyporska, who is organising a conference on Black genealogy to be held in November by SoG and BEO added: “People would like to think how to do it if they could do it. People would like to think about the healing aspect of it. What does it mean to find your relatives, but also we need to do this in the psychological safety of our own community. 

“Despite the fact we are looking at some horrific records, we are honouring our ancestors. Our ancestors didn’t get to tell their history, shape their history. Even bringing their names to life, saying their names, does give us a sense of completion.”

Completion is how I feel, although the journey is not over, having found some leads about my grandmother’s father, Herman, and his grandmother, Caroline who came from a slave family, from the Chesney plantation. 

I feel a lot of things, having learned a few new details about the people I came from, but mostly at this point, just gratitude.  Thankful for my life.  Grateful to all of my ancestors but especially those who walked difficult paths in the Caribbean.

We have a tendency to think of slavery as a long time ago and Africa as a far away place.  But in my family I’ve realised that both are just a few people back, and not much further

Rediscovering our past, and honouring the names of those who lived so that we might have our own place might be one of the most important journeys we ever embark on.