Trelawny Estate Names
A fourteen-year project tracing surname clusters across three Trelawny Parish sugar estates and their compensation claimants in the 1837 awards.
The project began as a list of seventeen surnames pulled from a single damaged plantation slip book held in a private New Zealand collection.
It has grown into a working surname index across three Trelawny Parish sugar estates, cross-checked against the British Slave Compensation Records, Jamaica probate filings, and overseer return books held in two regional archives.
The work is slow on purpose. Names do not match cleanly across the records. Spellings drift, claimants are shared between estates, and several files have been re-copied so often that small errors stack on top of each other and start to look like patterns.
Notes for the project are kept in numbered paper folders, with cross-references rather than conclusions.