Claimants

Frederick and Mary Aberdeen were a free coloured couple of modest means living on the Providence Estate in St Andrew, whose daily lives reflected the quiet stability and limited opportunities of Grenada’s small property-holding families in the years surrounding emancipation. They enslaved a girl called Reine. Her life was likely defined by domestic labour and carried the quiet endurance of someone entering womanhood as Grenada moved from enslavement to freedom.

The Aberdeens were a family of Scottish origin who became part of Grenada’s free coloured community, rising in status through property, public service and the manumission that reshaped their family line. The people they enslaved lived under coercion, sale, illness and constant uncertainty, yet their recorded lives reveal extraordinary resilience in the face of bondage.

The Aerstins were small-scale but active enslavers, transferring, selling, and inheriting people between 1817 and 1834. The individuals they held endured repeated displacements yet demonstrated resilience, with some living to see emancipation and shaping Grenada’s future communities.

Eleanor Alder was based in St George’s, Grenada. She depended on the labour of three Black enslaved women to run her small household. Though illiterate and far from wealthy, she actively participated in the enslavement system, to sustain her daily life.