My father collected obituaries.
In retirement, after twenty-five years in politics and sixty years of working life, the Late Rt. Honourable Bradley B. Roberts turned his attention to a project both humble and monumental: collecting obituaries. Not dozens, but thousands—each one a thread in the vast tapestry of Bahamian ancestry, each one a doorway into the interconnected lives that built a nation.
What began as a personal quest to trace his own ancestral roots evolved into something far more ambitious: the creation of the largest Bahamian ancestry tree ever assembled. In those carefully preserved obituaries—clipped from newspapers, copied from funeral programs, gathered from families across the islands—Bradley Roberts was doing more than genealogical research. He was preserving memory itself.
The Democracy of Death Notices
There is a profound democracy in obituaries. They record the passing of the prominent and the unknown with equal gravity. A former prime minister and a Clerk 1 civil servant, a banker and a fisherman, a teacher and a shopkeeper—all reduced and elevated to the same essential facts: when they lived, whom they loved, what they left behind.
Bradley Roberts understood this.
His collection didn’t privilege the politically connected or the historically significant. It honored the fundamental truth that every Bahamian life is a tributary flowing into the larger story of the nation. The woman who raised eight children in Bain Town, the man who captained a mailboat for forty years, the teacher who shaped three generations in a settlement school—these lives mattered not because they were extraordinary, but because they were foundational.
Building the Tree, a vast Ecosystem of Bahamian Life
The work was painstaking. Each obituary had to be cross-referenced, relationships verified, patterns identified. A surname appearing in Eleuthera in the 1940s might connect to a family in Nassau in the 1970s, which might link to emigrants in Florida or England. Marriages created new branches; children extended the canopy. What emerged was not just a family tree but a forest—an ecosystem of connection revealing how thoroughly interwoven Bahamian lives have always been.
In a small nation of islands, the connections ran deep and surprising. The political rivals who discovered shared great-grandparents. The family that had split between islands in the 1800s and lost touch, their descendants unknowingly attending the same church in Nassau generations later.
From the obituary collection of the Late Rt. Hon. Bradley B. Roberts (1943-2018)
The merchant family and the farming family whose roots intertwined three generations back on a Family Island, their modern prosperity and struggle both traceable to that common soil.
Bradley Roberts was mapping not just genealogy but geology—the sedimentary layers of Bahamian society, each generation building on and shaped by the ones before.
The Obituary as Historical Document
What makes an obituary valuable to the genealogist is precisely what makes it valuable to the historian: it records what people thought mattered. The jobs listed, the organizations mentioned, the churches attended, the islands called home—these details sketch the social landscape of their time.
Roberts’s collection spans generations of Bahamian life, capturing seismic shifts in microcosm. The transition from colonial subjects to independent citizens. The migration from Family Islands to Nassau, from Nassau to Florida.
The evolution of professions—from sponge divers to leaders in every field, from seamstresses to surgeons. The changing structure of families, the persistence of churches, the rise and fall of communities.
Each obituary is a historical footnote that becomes significant when read alongside thousands of others. Patterns emerge: which settlements lost population and when, which churches anchored which communities, how certain families moved through social strata across generations, how education and opportunity flowed or didn’t flow through different branches of the Bahamian family tree.
A Retirement Unlike Others
There is something fitting about Bradley Roberts choosing this work for his retirement. After decades in the public arena—the campaigns, the debates, the victories and defeats, the constant forward motion of political life—he turned to the past. Not to escape the present, but to understand it more deeply.
Politicians deal in promises about the future. Genealogists deal in facts about the past. But both are trying to answer the same question: Who are we? Where do we come from? What binds us together?
For a man who spent his career in service to the Bahamian people, constructing the largest Bahamian ancestry tree was another form of service. It was saying: You matter. Your grandmother mattered. Your great-uncle who worked the docks in the 1950s mattered. Your family’s story is part of the national story, and I’m going to prove it.
The Unfinished Work
Like all great projects, this one remains incomplete. There are always more connections to trace, more obituaries to add, more branches to extend. The tree grows not just backward into the past but forward into the future—every birth, every death, every marriage adding new complexity to the pattern.
But the foundation Bradley Roberts built endures. Those thousands of obituaries, meticulously collected and organized, represent an archive of Bahamian life unmatched in scope. They wait now for others to continue the work: to digitize the collection, to verify the connections, to extend the branches, to discover the patterns he began to reveal.
Memory as Legacy
In the end, Bradley Roberts’s obituary collection is itself a kind of obituary—a death notice for an entire way of life that’s rapidly disappearing. The grandmother who knew the family history going back five generations, the settlement elder who could recite the connections between every family on the island, the church matron who remembered everyone’s maiden name—these living archives are becoming rare.
What Roberts preserved in paper and data was what used to be preserved in memory and oral tradition: the knowledge of who we are and where we came from. He translated the old ways of remembering into a form that might survive the forgetting.
Perhaps that’s the ultimate act of love for a nation: to ensure that its people, even the humblest among them, are remembered. Not just the names in history books, but the names in obituaries—the thousands upon thousands of Bahamians whose lives, woven together, created the fabric of a nation.
My father, the Late Rt. Honourable Bradley B. Roberts spent his working life helping to shape The Bahamas. In retirement, he set about proving that The Bahamas had always been shaped by its people—all of them, each one mattering, each one connected, each one a thread in the tapestry.
The tree he planted still grows. And every Bahamian who searches its branches and finds their own reflection looking back is standing in his and the shade of countless others.
