Archives & databases
The following archives and databases have been consulted directly in the course of this research:
National Archives, Kew
Colonial Office records relating to Mauritius, including correspondence, census returns, and records of slave registration and compensation.
Archives nationales d'outre-mer, Aix-en-Provence
French colonial records for Isle de France (Mauritius), including notarial acts, parish registers, and administrative correspondence from the French period.
Civil Status Office, Mauritius
Birth, marriage, and death registers, and records of manumission and civil status changes.
UCL Legacies of British Slave-ownership
Database maintained by University College London recording compensation payments made to slave owners following abolition in 1835. An invaluable resource for identifying slave owners and the numbers of enslaved people they claimed as property.
Mauritius National Library
Historical newspapers, government gazettes, and published records relating to colonial Mauritius.
Genealogical sources
Parish registers
Baptismal, marriage, and burial records from Catholic and Protestant churches in Mauritius, particularly for the Port Louis and Plaines Wilhems districts.
Manumission records
Legal records of the freeing of enslaved persons, including the 1812 manumission of Pierre Jerome by Jean-Pierre Galichet, and Pierre's subsequent 1826 petition for the freedom of his mother Jeanne Clarisse.
Notarial acts
Wills, property transfers, and legal agreements from the French and British colonial periods, including the estate records of Jean-Pierre Galichet.
Ancestry
Online historical records, other members' family trees, and hint-matching, used to build and cross-check the family tree alongside the archival research. The source of most of the tree's non-archival leads.
MyHeritage
A second online genealogy platform, the source of a smaller number of additional leads and record matches not found via Ancestry.
Family oral history
Oral testimony from family members, particularly regarding Alcide François's Malgache identity and the stories of Zela's childhood in 1930s Mauritius. Also the family's own connections to Sino-Mauritian Mauritius: great-aunt Louisa (Lisa) Victorien's marriage to Emile Lam Yee Song and her twelve years living in China, and cousin Solange's marriage to Pierre and his visit to Communist-era China, recounted on this site's History strand. Also Millen Jérome's memory, passed down through the family, of the kari gro pwa eaten for dinner as the 1892 cyclone raged outside.
DNA & genetic sources
AncestryDNA
Autosomal DNA testing and phasing for Gérard, Gervais, and Angela. Geographic ancestry breakdowns for two paternal first cousins.
23andMe
Autosomal DNA testing for Shirley, providing an independent ancestry breakdown from a second platform with different reference populations.
Full Genomes Corporation
Whole genome sequencing for Gérard, enabling finer-grained phasing and haplogroup determination. Y-chromosome haplogroup R-S219 and mitochondrial haplogroup M2b were determined through this analysis.
Historical sources
Allen, Richard B.
Slaves, Freedmen, and Indentured Laborers in Colonial Mauritius. Cambridge University Press, 1999. A comprehensive study of labour and society in colonial Mauritius. Also: "Lives of Neither Luxury nor Misery: Indians and Free Colored Marginality on the Ile de France, 1728–1810," Revue française d'histoire d'outre-mer, tome 78, n°292 (1991), pp.337–358, and "Free Women of Colour and Socio-Economic Marginality in Mauritius, 1767–1830," Slavery & Abolition, vol. 26, no. 2 (2005). The sources for this site's section on the island's free Indian population under French rule, distinct from the later, much larger indenture wave. Also: "Slaves, Convicts, Abolitionism and the Global Origins of the Post-Emancipation Indentured Labor System," Slavery & Abolition, vol. 35, no. 2 (2014), pp.328–348, the source, via its citation of British India Office files (IOR F/4 series, 1813–1833), for the kidnapping element of the Indian slave trade discussed on Marie N's and Catherine N's own profiles.
Milbert, Jacques-Gérard
Voyage pittoresque à l'Île de France. Published 1812, covering his visit of 1801–03. Vol. II, pp.169–174. An eyewitness account of enslaved Indian women in Mauritius kept as concubines by white colonists, and of the recognition of their mixed-race children, "participating in the father's fairness and the mother's elegant form." The primary source underpinning this site's reading of Marie N, Catherine N, and their relationships with Antoine Coré and Noël dit Lajoye.
Boodhoo, Sarita
"The Tamil Presence in Mauritius," Mauritius Times, 8 November 2015. On the early Tamil free artisans, engineers, and clerks who arrived from 1735, the Camp des Malabars where most were settled, and the street names (Goa Street, Calicut Street, Madras Street) still marking its ground in Plaine Verte today.
Teelock, Vijayalakshmi
Bitter Sugar: Sugar and Slavery in 19th Century Mauritius. Mahatma Gandhi Institute, 1998. Essential reading on the sugar economy and the conditions of slavery.
Vaughan, Megan
Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius. Duke University Press, 2005. On the formation of Creole society and identity during the French colonial period.
Peerthum, Satyendra
Research on slavery, marronage, and resistance in Mauritius, including work on the Morne Brabant heritage site and the experiences of enslaved people. Also: "'Fit for Freedom': Manumission and Freedom in Early British Mauritius, 1811–1839," a chapter in Transition from Slavery in Zanzibar and Mauritius (CODESRIA), the source for the mechanics of manumission law used on this site: Governor Farquhar's Proclamation of 30 December 1814 and Governor Sir Lowry Cole's Ordinance No. 21 of 27 January 1827 required whoever granted freedom to give the newly freed person a cash sum (100 rix dollars, reduced to 25 in 1827) as a precondition for manumission, so that they would not become dependent on the colony. Governor Colville's Ordinance No. 43 of February 1829 abolished this fee outright and created the office of the Protector of Slaves. Both the 1814 proclamation and the 1827 ordinance are cited via BPP 1828, XXVII, pp.275–280. Note: rix dollars were the currency of the Cape Colony and Ceylon and don't appear to have circulated in Mauritius itself, which used piastres and the Mauritian dollar; the rix-dollar figure comes directly from the ordinance text as reported to Parliament, so it isn't merely a later reporting convention, but whether that unit actually circulated locally, rather than just being the official reporting currency, remains unconfirmed. A later Mauritius Archives find bears on this directly: a 25 March 1825 manumission made under this same law records the required compensation in local currency, as another enslaved person valued at 300 piastres, suggesting a working equivalence of roughly 1 rix dollar to 3 piastres. Still a hypothesis rather than a confirmed reading of the ordinance itself, but the strongest lead so far. Also, with Kiran Chuttoo-Jankee: "Commemorating the Making of Our History: The Arrival of Arbuthnot's Indentured Labourers in Mauritius in November 1834," Le Mauricien, 23 October 2023, drawing on MNA/RA 341, the source for the details of the Atlas's arrival on this site: the 36 Hill Coolies, the Belle Alliance estate, and Governor Nicolay's landing permission.
Toussaint, Auguste
History of Mauritius. Macmillan, 1977. A general history covering the Dutch, French, and British periods.
Carter, Marina
Research on Indian indentured labour in Mauritius, including the conditions of indenture and the transition from slavery to contract labour.
Code Noir
The French legal code governing slavery in the colonies, applied in Mauritius during the French period (1715–1810). Article 2 required enslaved people to be baptised and instructed in the Roman Catholic faith, and Article 3 forbade the public practice of any other religion, the basis for this site's note that Mauritian Creole identity carries a shared (nominal) Catholicism.
On comparative Creole identity (Louisiana, West Indies, Sierra Leone/Senegal)
General reference on Louisiana Creole identity, where native birth, the French language, and Roman Catholicism, not skin colour, were the traditional benchmarks, historically encompassing both white descendants of French/Spanish settlers and people of mixed Black and white ancestry; on the contested, island-by-island use of "Creole" across the wider West Indies, including Stuart Hall's writing on creolization and the narrower, Afro-Trinidadian usage in Trinidad; and on the Sierra Leone Creole (Krio) people, descended from the free Black poor of London, Nova Scotian Black Loyalists, Jamaican Maroons, and Africans liberated from intercepted slave ships after 1807, whose trading diaspora carried the Creole/Krio identity into neighbouring Senegal, the Gambia, and Guinea, where a small Krio-descended community still lives today. Used on this site to contrast with the narrower, descent-based Mauritian definition.
Kwong Kwok Chun, François & Ng Foong Kwong, Jacqueline
Research on the history and languages of the Sino-Mauritian community, including the Cantonese and Hakka migration waves from Guangdong from the 1780s onward, the rivalry and eventual numerical dominance of Hakka speakers, and the community's shift toward French, English, and Mauritian Creole within a generation or two of settlement. The source for this site's Chinese immigration section.
Mauritius Times / Le Mauricien: on the laboutik sinwa
Newspaper features on the Chinese-run corner shop, "la boutique chinoise," including its role as the commercial and social centre of Mauritian neighbourhoods, its distinctive wood-and-tin architecture, and the carnet laboutik credit system that functioned as informal community banking.
Britannica: "History of Mauritius" and "Mauritius: Independence"
General reference on the interwar period, the economic and strategic impact of the Second World War, the 1959 introduction of universal suffrage, Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam's Labour Party government, the 1965 state of emergency, and independence on 12 March 1968.
The 1892 cyclone
On the cyclone of 29 April 1892, Mauritius's deadliest recorded natural disaster: over 1,200 dead, roughly 4,000 injured, around 50,000 left homeless, and a third of Port Louis destroyed.
Linguistic & anthropological sources
Dahl, Otto Christian
Malgache et Maanjan: une comparaison linguistique. Avhandlinger utgitt av Instituttet for Sammenlignende Kulturforskning, Oslo, 1951. The foundational work demonstrating the relationship between Malagasy and the Ma'anyan language of southern Borneo.
Adelaar, Alexander
Research on the Austronesian roots of Malagasy, including detailed comparative linguistics extending Dahl's work and examining the broader Southeast Asian connections.
Bellwood, Peter
Research on the Austronesian expansion, including archaeological and linguistic evidence for the spread of Austronesian peoples across the Indian and Pacific Oceans.
Blust, Robert
The Austronesian Languages. Asia-Pacific Linguistics, 2013. A comprehensive reference on the Austronesian language family, including reconstructed Proto-Austronesian forms used in the cognate explorer on this site.
Hurles, Matthew E. et al.
Genetic studies on the Austronesian settlement of Madagascar, including evidence for a small founding population and the single-migration hypothesis.
Baker, Philip & Hookoomsing, Vinesh Y.
Research on the etymology of Mauritian Creole, including identification of Malagasy substrate vocabulary such as lapang, zourite, and vangvang.
Further reading
This bibliography will be expanded as the research continues. Suggestions for additional sources are welcome. For a general introduction to the topics covered on this site, the following are recommended starting points:
On Mauritian Creole identity: Vaughan (2005) and Teelock (1998) provide complementary perspectives on how slavery, colonialism, and mixing created the Creole population.
On the Austronesian expansion: Bellwood's work offers the broadest overview; Dahl (1951) remains the essential text on the Malagasy–Ma'anyan connection.
On DNA ancestry testing: AncestryDNA and 23andMe both publish white papers on their methodology. The International Society of Genetic Genealogy (ISOGG) wiki provides accessible explanations of haplogroups, phasing, and IBD analysis.