Fi Wi Laif / Our Lives
'Fi Wi Laif' is a community heritage project exploring the lives of the African men, women and children who were enslaved on the Jamaican plantations owned by the Pennant family of North Wales and recorded in the 'Slave Registers of the late 1700s and 1800s. .
North Wales Jamaica Society member, Lesley Evans, is working through the Pennant family Jamacian Plantation Registers in the extensive Penrhyn Papers collection, held by Bangor University Archives. To date (Sept 2026, she has identified and recorded the names of more than 1,700 enslaved people recorded in these plantation and slave registers.
The project aims to move beyond lists and statistics by recovering people’s names, family relationships, occupations and individual experiences wherever the records allow. It will also connect this documentary evidence with the memories and oral histories of communities in Clarendon and other former plantation areas.
Developed through the Pennants Heritage Research Group and the North Wales Jamaica Society, the next steps is for the project is to consider and agree meaningful ways to remember and honour these people whose lives and labour helped create the Pennant family’s wealth and contributed to the development of the Penrhyn estate in Wales, and others who's names we will never know.
Further evidence is being sought in Jamaican archives and in compensation records held by The National Archives at Kew.