Does anyone know how I can find out more about this? My grandfather's family came to Tobago from India in the early 1900s. I would like to see if it is possible to trace his family back to India. Can anyone help me? Thanks, Cindy

On Dec 18, 1:27 pm, Cindy Loadman <[email protected]> wrote: > Does anyone know how I can find out more about this? My grandfather's > family came to Tobago from India in the early 1900s. I would like to > see if it is possible to trace his family back to India. Can anyone > help me? > > Thanks, > > Cindy It is unlikely that they went to Tobago. Tobago was a separate colony until 1898? and never imported Indian indentures. The group of choice is of course http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Bhatchaman/ which you should join and where you can post your query. Someone may recognize your family. They will certainly tell you to go The National Archives in Trinidad and check for yourself. It is all well and good to recommend Shamshu Deen, but if you save his fees you can fly around the world twice, stop off in Trinidad, get the information, and on your second trip stop off in India. BTW the term of choice is coolie. We were not known by any other name in the 1800s, so use the term when doing searches. I don't think the East India Company had anything to do with it. Look on the British Library/Museum site for Charter Party documents. The Moving Here page http://www.movinghere.org.uk/default.htm has a lot of this type of information. Lots of surprises. The first coolie ship to Trinidad, the Fath Al Razack was owned by a ... coolie. We have put up a lot of information on the internet. Our main site is here http://www.indocaribbeanheritage.com/component/option,com_frontpage/Itemid,1/ The St Vincent site is here http://svgindianheritage.com/ If you do a search in this group for coolie you will get some interesting results... about 140 pages in fact. But I have already done that and the information is here http://www.esnips.com/web/lharradansWebResearch Lots of stuff there, go to the main page http://www.esnips.com/HomeAction.ns;jsessionid=EA0856BF7979ACE75B5D01AC9A68A375 With respect to the following My ggm was indentured in the Virgin Islands, which was administered by A Dutch company for the Danish Govn't. I am assuming that the VOC brought in the indentured to the islands they were associatedd with. Unfortunately, she died before my mother was born, so we just have the oral history of ggm's children and contempories. Some time ago I posted a list of coolies from St Croix. I have not found the ship's list of immigrants, but most went back to India, and some of those who remained are on my list. The document is on the e- snips page. I had also an article on the first migrants to St Croix, written by a Mrs Hayes, some time around 1870. That is somewhere in our newspaper, Indo-Caribbean Times. But this is of interest to us, because we have never been able to trace any of their descendants. Could you tell us your story sometime? I am not a member of this group and my posts tend to disappear. Can someone tag it with, say, "Eh Heh" or "Yeah Mon" so listers can get a chance to read it? Thank you. H