Oxfordshire FHS Logo

Today Oxfordshire Family History Society held their first Zoom Fair online. It was an enjoyable event and the Society, with their volunteers are to be thanked for organising it. To find more about the Society, click the logo (left).

I dropped into the afternoon session at the Guild of One-Name Studies online stand, which was busy with folk asking about the surnames in their family histories and pondering on the way forward with studies.

October is Black History Month in the UK and it was quite by coincidence that someone who stopped by the Guild stand at the Oxfordshire event asked about the surname of Ramadhar.

The name sounded to me to be of Asian origin, but we had a quick look at the website, Forebears.io which showed that the surname was, at least in 2014, the most common in India with 2091 instances. The next highest number was 460 in Trinidad and Tobago, which was somewhere the enquirer referenced.

These numbers are quite enlightening and are worthy of debate, and discussion.

The spread of the surname outside of India is quite possibly as a result of migration and potential historic influence of “Empire”. It is well established that the former Empire did provide opportunity for movement because of labour shortages in other parts of the Empire. Whilst the topic of Empire is emotive, we cannot change history.

The Trinidad and Tobago National Archives have a research guide on their website, which can be found HERE. There is some links in the FamilySearch Wiki. I firmly believe that it is important to understand the context and broad subject of wherever we are researching. Here is an interesting site, Discover Trinidad and Tobago. The last two links I am going to share today is firstly the, Caribbean Memory Project and the Caribbean Family History Group.