Many of the early settlers of Barbados eventually moved to the mainland and settled in Virginia, Georgia, the Carolinas and other colonies, with the result that many families in America today trace their origins in the New World first to Barbados. Barbados’s surviving parish registers were all copied during the mid-19th century and deposited in a central registry. And it is these copied parish registers, housed in the Barbados Department of Archives, which form the basis of this reference work.

This volume of wills is abstracted from the “Recopied Wills Series” in the Archives. Arranged alphabetically according to the name of the testator, each abstract gives all heirs, dates, titles, relationships, place names, references, land owners, burial locations, slaves and vessels mentioned in the wills.