The 1679 Barbados census offers one of the earliest and most complete snapshots of colonial society in the English-speaking world. It captures land ownership, plantation structure, and demographic patterns at a time when Barbados was the wealthiest colony in the British Empire.

For genealogists and historians, it provides essential insights into early family names, migration, and the structure of a plantation society where enslaved Africans formed the majority. Making this census searchable deepens understanding of Barbados’ early history and the wider Atlantic world.

On 1^st April 1680, Governor Sir Jonathan Atkins sent a box of statistical material – including the December 1679 census – to William Blathwayt, Secretary to the Council of Trade and Plantations. This census is the most comprehensive demographic record compiled in England or its colonies up to that date, listing landowners, acreage, enslaved persons, indentured servants, and household residents.

On 21^st May 1680 Governor Atkins also sent a map of the island, created by Quaker Richard Ford around 1675. Although Governor Atkins criticised the map for omitting churches and fortifications, it remains a crucial early island chart.

Measuring roughly a half-meter squared, Richard Ford’s map shows the island fully inhabited and barely a patch uncultivated; the entire territory, criss-crossed by roads, is studded with English names and symbols marking plantation houses and mills. Even the title’s repetition of “mill” seems crafted to evoke an image of ceaseless, contiguous industry. As the key in the upper-right corner notes, these mills are all, “imployd in the grinding of Sugar Canes” underscoring the island’s total orientation toward sugar production.

In the early 1680s the free white population is estimated to have reached around 20,000; the enslaved black population, whose brutal forced labour supplied and worked the mills, outnumbered the whites by more than two to one. The violence, and indeed even the mere fact of slavery, is silenced by the map.

Rediscovery and Publication of the 1679 Barbados Census

When the 1679 Barbados Census data and Ford map of Barbados reached London in 1680, Governor Sir Jonathan Atkins had already been recalled and replaced by Sir Richard Dutton, and doubts about the accuracy of his figures led the Council of Trade and Plantations to largely disregard the census data.

These census documents remained ignored for nearly 200 years until genealogist John Camden Hotten rediscovered and published portions of them in 1874 in: The Original Lists of Persons of Quality… Hotten published:

• Householders in Bridgetown.
• Landholders for 5 parishes.
• Baptismal & burial registers for 5 parishes.
• List of persons ticketed to leave Barbados in 1679.

However, Hotten omitted:

• Landholder lists for 6 parishes.
• Baptismal/burial records for 6 parishes.
• Militia rolls for all 8 regiments.
• Lists of judges, councillors, and assemblymen.

This missing information was included in the work of James C. Brandow in 1982.

In 2014, Peter J. Koby transcribed the Barbados 1679 census from a microfilm copy held by the main library of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, for his Master’s thesis; Digital Visualisation Of Colonial Cartography: Patterns Of Wealth In The Sugar Colony Of Barbados. The appendix of his thesis includes a consolidated, parish-by-parish transcription of the Barbados Census of 1679. Using this appendix we have created two tables which are fully searchable for the 1679 Barbados census:

• Table 1 – includes all the parishes (including Bridgetown)
• Table 2 – is a more detailed table that covers just Bridgetown.

This 1679 census reinforces a tripartite labour hierarchy:

• free white servants,
• bound white servants and
• enslaved Africans.

The 1679 census shows Barbados at the height of its mature sugar-plantation system, when the island’s population had become predominantly enslaved.

Table 1 : All Parishes including Bridgetown

The table below can be filtered by Parish. It contains 2,951 rows of data so be patient with it loading!

You can also download the raw data in CSV or Excel format. The default table shows 10 rows of data. You can increase this if you want to see more data on the page.

The Bridgetown data has been added in under St. Michael. Under the Bridgetown entries, Servants are the addition of Hired Servants and Bought Servants taken from Table 2 Bridgetown.

For ease of searchability, we have made two small editorial updates:

• The 17th-century use of “Ff” at the start of surnames and Christian names has been modernised to “F.”
• Common abbreviations such as Jas. for James and Wm. for William have been standardised.

Click here to view the historical name style guide we used.