Pore over family documents such as birth certificates and old passports, photographs and heirlooms, however trinket-like they might seem. Family history requires research in its broadest sense.
Passengers disembarking the Windrush at Tilbury docks on June 22 1948.
Eddie Worth/AP/Press Association Images
The UK needed workers, but government documents reveal British subjects in the Caribbean were still actively discouraged from entering the country
Jessica Huntley and Angela Davis at the Keskidee Centre, London, (c.1975).
Courtesy of Michael McMillan/Huntley Archives at London Metropolitan Archives
Cricket was a significant bridge between England and ‘home’ in the Caribbean, making the sport an important part of the black Atlantic cultural exchange.
Unlike the Windrush, the SS Ormonde docked in Liverpool without ceremony or welcome.
National Archives
Windrush has turned out to be a defining moment in telling the story of Britain, with writing by Caribbean migrants fundamental to exposing the realities of the British empire.
Reggae, dancehall, and identity: how Jamaican music transformed British society.
Holly Squire/Canva
A paper trail, both typed and handwritten, documents Cummings’ dogged efforts to secure accommodations and resources for the Windrushers on a time crunch.
Labourers and children of Indian heritage walking down a street in Guyana in the early 1920s.
The Field Museum Library
When people think about the Windrush generation, they are unlikely to imagine someone like my father, who was not black but a person of Indian-Caribbean heritage.
Windrush campaigners, in June, 2021, during a protest calling for a new independent body to administer the compensation scheme.
Mark Kerrison/Alamy
The Windrush generation has a long and storied history encompassing empire, war, migration, multiculturalism, racism and scandal – a history that has transformed British society and culture.