Bahamas Emigration and Immigration

Contract Labour Records, 1940-1966: Contract agricultural laborers recruited to work in Florida and the adjacent states. The files contain a wealth of information: name, address, date and place of birth, nationality, settlement, physical description, parents' names, children and spouses names.

Naturalizations, 1861-1930.

Finding the Town of Origin in Bahamas

If you are using emigration/immigration records to find the name of your ancestors' town in Bahamas, see Bahamas Finding Town of Origin for additional research strategies.

Bahamas Emigration and Immigration

"Emigration" means moving out of a country. "Immigration" means moving into a country.
Emigration and immigration sources list the names of people leaving (emigrating) or arriving (immigrating) in the country. These sources may be passenger lists, permissions to emigrate, or records of passports issued. The information in these records may include the emigrants’ names, ages, occupations, destinations, and places of origin or birthplaces. Sometimes they also show family groups.

The Bahama Islands were inhabited by the Lucayans, a branch of the Arawakan-speaking Taíno, for many centuries. Columbus was the first European to see the islands, making his first landfall in the 'New World' in 1492. Later, the Spanish shipped the native Lucayans to and enslaved them on Hispaniola, after which the Bahama islands were mostly deserted from 1513 until 1648.
In 1648, the first English settlers arrived on the islands. Known as the Eleutherian Adventurers. They migrated from Bermuda seeking greater religious freedom. These English Puritans established the first permanent European settlement on an island which they named 'Eleuthera', Greek for 'freedom'. They later settled New Providence, naming it Sayle's Island. Life proved harder than envisaged however, and many chose to return to Bermuda. To survive, the remaining settlers salvaged goods from wrecks.
The Bahamas became a British crown colony in 1718, when the British clamped down on piracy.
After US independence, the British resettled some 7,300 Loyalists with their African slaves in The Bahamas, including 2,000 from New York and at least 1,033 European, 2,214 African ancestrals and a few Native American Creeks from East Florida. Most of the refugees resettled from New York had fled from other colonies, including West Florida, which the Spanish captured during the war. The government granted land to the planters to help compensate for losses on the continent.
The slave trade was abolished by the British in 1807; slavery in The Bahamas was abolished in 1834. Subsequently, The Bahamas became a haven for freed African slaves.
Africans liberated from illegal slave ships were resettled on the islands by the Royal Navy.
Some North American slaves and Seminoles escaped to The Bahamas from Florida. Bahamians were even known to recognize the freedom of enslaved people carried by the ships of other nations which reached The Bahamas.
Today Afro-Bahamians make up 90% of the population of 332,634.
From 1940-1966, contract agricultural laborers recruited to work in Florida and the adjacent states.^[1]

Emigrations From the Bahamas

There are an estimated 56,498 people of Bahamian ancestry living in the US as of 2015.
Bahamians began visiting the Florida Keys in the 18th century to salvage wrecked ships, fish, catch turtles and log tropical hardwood trees. After 1825, Bahamian wreckers began moving to Key West in large numbers.
Bahamians were among the first West Indians to immigrate to the mainland US in the late nineteenth century. Many went to Florida to work in agriculture or to Key West to labor in fishing, sponging, and turtling. Two main factors that contributed to increased Bahamian migration were the poor economic climate and opportunities in the Bahamas, as well as the short distance from the Bahamas to Miami.
Southern Florida developed Bahamian enclaves in certain cities including Lemon City, Coconut Grove, and Cutler.
Between 1900 and 1920, between ten and twelve thousand Bahamians moved to Florida, mostly to do agricultural labor, often on a seasonal basis. *Starting in 1943, Bahamanian workers came to Florida under the British West Indian (BWI) Temporary Labor Program.
The majority of Bahamian Americans, about 21,000 in total, live in and around Miami, with the Bahamian community centered in the Coconut Grove neighborhood in Miami. There is also a growing Bahamian American population in the Atlanta and Oklahoma City areas.
A large population can be found in the New York City area, with the population particularly centered in Harlem. ^[2]

For Further Reading

The American Loyalists in the Bahama Islands: Who They Were

References

↑ "The Bahamas", in Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bahamas, accessed 14 July 2021.
↑ "Bahamian Amereicans", in Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahamian_Americans, accessed 14 July 2021.

[1] "The Bahamas", in Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bahamas, accessed 14 July 2021.

[2] "Bahamian Amereicans", in Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahamian_Americans, accessed 14 July 2021.

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