Beyond Property: Uncovering Enslaved People in Women’s Wills in Colonial Jamaica, 1661-1771

This dataset documents wills of several hundred women that were recorded in thirty-eight manuscript volumes between 1661 and 1771, housed at the Island Records Office (IRO) in Twickenham Park, St. Catherine, Jamaica. I devised a systematic approach for recording data that related to female colonists by entering them in a spreadsheet. I prioritized wills made by individuals with recognizably female names. Wanting to capture meaningful changes over time, I entered evidence from 741 documents created by women who either lived in Jamaica or who owned property on the island at the time of the will’s recording. Most of the documents (706) were created between 1665 and 1761. Facing time constraints, I then sampled an additional 35 female-authored wills made between 1770 and 1771.