Finding your ancestors in Jamaica, West Indies

Some of the difficulties of genealogy research using Jamaican records

Some people’s surnames on their birth certificates are different from the ones they were known by, which makes tracing Jamaican ancestors difficult.  When I looked at some birth certificates, I noticed a pattern in the registration.  In Jamaica not so many years ago, if the parents were not married, the father’s name was not entered on the birth certificate. That section was left blank, even if it was the father who was registering the child’s birth. The mother’s surname was entered as the child’s last name. That is why so many older people had a problem finding their birth certificate, because they were requesting it using their father’s surname.

However, if a person is given his/her unmarried mother's surname on the birth certificate, when that person dies, the name on the death certificate would have the father's surname, because that is the name the person would have been using since birth.  This really creates a problem when searching.

Difficulties encountered when a baby is born in a hospital

If a baby was born in a hospital and the parents were not married, the section for home address was left blank. The lack of a home address makes it difficult to identify the mother, because there are usually several people with the same first and last names.  It’s always good to see an unusual name, and even then there would be other people sharing that name.

To further compound the difficulty, sometimes the child born in a hospital was not named right away, so the space for name was left blank.  The section for informant of birth is usually a help in identifying a particular family, as sometimes it would be a family member who registered the baby’s birth, and the name of the person and the relationship to the child was noted in the section for Informant of the birth.  When a baby was born in a hospital, the person who registered the birth was the Chief Resident Officer of the hospital. So just imagine a case where the space for the baby’s name is blank, there is no home address for the mother - the space is blank, and there is no family member registering the birth.  To top it all off, the mother has a very common name.

If the parents were married, the father’s home address was entered on the birth certificate.

Occupation of mother

If the parents were not married, and the mother was a housewife, that information was not entered on the birth certificate. I think the reasoning was that you cannot be a housewife if you are not a wife, so the mother’s occupation was entered as one of three things -  washerwoman, domestic servant, or labourer. Unless you were from the upper strata of society.

Women were really treated less than, and I am surprised that it was allowed to go on for so long.

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Map of Jamaica

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