Who were they?

The Jerome line begins with Pierre Jérome, born into slavery in Mauritius around 1798. His mother, Jeanne Clarisse, had been brought from Madagascar, carrying with her an Austronesian heritage that stretches back thousands of years and thousands of miles. Pierre's freedom was recorded in 1812, when Jean-Pierre Galichet signed his manumission document; he was fourteen and a half years old. From that moment of documented freedom, the family line runs forward through six generations to the present day.

The research draws on original documents held across six archives: the Archives Nationales de Maurice in Coromandel, the Mahatma Gandhi Institute in Moka, the Civil Status Division of Mauritius in Port Louis, the Colonial Office records at the National Archives, Kew, the Archives d'Outre-Mer in Aix-en-Provence, and the UCL Legacies of British Slave-ownership database. Together these sources allow the line to be traced with unusual precision for a family whose origins lay in the slave system of the Indian Ocean.

The family tree tells the detailed story. The sections below (memoir, photographs, and research notes) provide the narrative and archival context behind the names and dates.