Last week the BBC reported on a project involving Bri-tain’s national archives and various smaller organisations to make available primary materials on the history of minority groups in the UK. The news organisation reported that there had been an explosion in demand from minority communities wanting to undertake genealogical research in addition to investigating the larger history of their peoples in the metropolis. It was in response to this demand that a website had been launched containing 150,000 images and digitised documents.

The website is called Moving Here, and it traces the stories of Britain’s four main immigrant communities - the Irish, the Jews from Central Europe, south Asians and, of course, the West Indians. It has been funded by two million pounds from the National Lottery, and the documents it makes available to the public would take an ordinary citizen months or perhaps even years to locate in an institution like the Public Record Office at Kew.

Of particular interest to Guyanese, for example, might be the slave records. The BBC said that the Moving Here team had identified 1,600 ledgers containing the names of thousands of people. There are also rare photographs of Africans on board a Royal Navy warship in 1869 after it had intercepted a slaver en route to the Americas. The photograph, said the report, is one of the very few of its kind known to exist in the world, and it was taken by a naval officer who was a photographic enthusiast.

No one knows what happened to the people in the photograph; however, in a general sense it is known that the final destination of people rescued from slave trade operators by the Royal Navy depended on precisely where in the Atlantic their boat had been intercepted. If it had been stopped near the African coast, then most likely the Africans would have been taken to Sierra Leone. If, for example, the slaver had been boarded close to the Brazilian coast, then the Africans would have been brought to Guyana - or British Guiana, as it then was.

A quick trawl through the Moving Here website at www.movinghere.org.uk reveals a wealth of information on individuals as well as groups. Among many, many other things, there is the story of Jamaican-born William Davidson who was hanged in 1820 for his part in a plot aimed at overthrowing the British government, known as the Cato Street Conspiracy; there are biographical details about another Jamaican, Dr Harold Moody, who founded the League of Coloured People; and there is, too, Aunt Esther’s story, covering the life of Esther Bruce who was half Scottish and half Guyanese and was born in London in 1912. She tells how she bumped into Marcus Garvey while “walking along the North End road...”