For Adrian Stone, the search for his roots began not in a library or an archive but at his mother’s hospital bedside. The Bristol native, now 52, had grown up without his father, who died when Stone was just seven years old. It was his mother’s serious illness years later that lit something inside him, a deep, restless need to understand where he came from.
That curiosity took him to Jamaica, where he immersed himself in local records and historical sources, learning the tools of genealogical research firsthand. What he uncovered there was nothing short of extraordinary. He traced a connection to reggae icon Bob Marley and discovered an ancestor named Eboe Venus, an enslaved woman from Nigeria. The weight of those findings did not belong to him alone. He knew that much immediately.
Workshops rooted in history and identity
Stone has since channeled those discoveries into a series of workshops designed specifically for people of African and Caribbean ancestry. Held at venues including the St Paul’s Learning Centre in Bristol, the sessions guide participants through some of the most complex and emotionally layered corners of genealogical research.
Attendees learn how to navigate plantation slave registers, trace the global movements of African diaspora communities, and search passenger lists from the Windrush era. These are not just research exercises. For many in the room, they are acts of reclamation.
Stone even placed a display in his local supermarket to spread the word, an unconventional move that drew in people who had quietly been carrying the same longing for years. One participant, who had wanted to research her roots for most of her adult life, described the experience as deeply personal. As a Black British woman with Jamaican parents, now a grandparent herself, she felt the urgency of preserving and understanding her family’s story before more of it slipped away.
The gaps history left behind
The workshops also confront the painful reality that so much has already been lost. One attendee noted that reclaiming connections to Caribbean islands and to the African continent is just as important as mourning what colonialism and displacement destroyed.
The research itself is rarely straightforward. Stone explains that cultural traditions around naming create significant obstacles. Many people in Caribbean communities are known by pet names rather than their legal names, and children born outside of marriage are often registered under their mother’s surname alone. These details, seemingly small, can make tracing a lineage feel like solving a puzzle with missing pieces.
There is also a generational resistance to contend with. Older relatives sometimes meet questions about family history with suspicion, uncertain why the past is being excavated. And many carry their knowledge quietly to the grave, leaving descendants with nothing but silence.
Compensation records and confronting the truth
Among the more sobering components of Stone’s workshops is a deep dive into records of compensation paid to slave owners following emancipation. The existence of those records means that for many participants, tracing their family tree will eventually lead them to someone who was enslaved. It is a confrontation with history that Stone approaches with care and intention.
For some attendees the results have already been remarkable. One woman discovered and met distant cousins in Birmingham connected to her paternal grandfather, a reunion made possible entirely through the research methods Stone teaches.
What comes next
Stone is now working with organizers of the St Paul’s Carnival and plans to hold another event later this year, extending the reach of a movement that began with one man’s grief and grew into something his entire community needed.
