VINCENTIANS OF INDIAN DESCENT ABLE TO TRACE ROOTS
Vincentians of Indian heritage can now trace their ancestors back to India.
Junior Bacchus, President of the Indian Heritage Foundation, announced that their website now contains a component for tracking family ancestry during the annual Indian Arrival Day ceremony on Sunday, June 4.
“After two years of hard work, we have launched a genealogy section of our SVG Heritage Foundation Website.” “We’re inviting everyone to go to that site and put whatever information you know about your family in the relative section of the site, and you’ll be able to find a lot of your family members who have passed away, and you’ll be able to trace right back into India where you came from,” Bacchus explained.
He also stated that the foundation’s focus this year will be on fostering greater peace and harmony among persons of Indian descent.
Opposition Leader Hon. Dr. Godwin Friday also spoke at the event, noting that the endurance and fortitude of those who came through indentureship has allowed the remaining descendants to eventually flourish in St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
Dr. Ralph Gonsalves, Prime Minister, provided a historical outline of the Indentureship System. The Prime Minister emphasized parts of the post-Emancipation socioeconomic realities, such as the terrible consequences on the labor force, which had been drastically decreased following outbreaks of small pox, yellow fever, and cholera in the colonies in the 1800s.
Dr. Gonsalves highlighted that the cultural diversity among Caribbean people is due to alternative inexpensive labor from India, Madeira, and even liberated Africans.
Despite this, the Prime Minister stated that “we will have dissonances,” but that “those dissonances are sorted out either through our cultural engagement, our family and community engagement, and also our values, and they have become a core set of values even with ethnic differences.”
On June 1, 1861, almost 2,000 Indians entered via indentureship.
