The Colour of Commemoration: A History of Slavery & Emancipation in Five Monuments

When I started my research in churchyards and burial grounds in Barbados, I was told I would only ever be able to write ‘white histories’ of these places. Nevertheless, it wasn’t long before the illusive history that I sought began to emerge. The following five monuments tell a story that does indeed start with slavery, tragedy and inequality, but it is also a story of resistance, struggle and resiliency.

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Why Barbados? Digitising Cemeteries for Global Genealogy

As an archaeologist and historian, I get asked one question more than any others: Why did I choose Barbados? Why did I choose to record funerary monuments in Bajan churches and churchyards? Since launching this site, the question has transformed to: why did MAP choose to launch with pilot data from Barbados?

The simple answer is: it was there. I had the data in front of me, and it was reasonably complete, and I had the permissions that I needed to make it freely accessible.

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