Tobias Kinsale

A Family Legacy Project Celebrating a Grand Family Reunion

Mrs Kinsale-Manning entrusted us with piecing together a story than spun all the way back to the early 1800s. Our hunt for her ancestry led us to archives in London and Canada, and an exploration of the family’s roots using DNA testing.

This book is a chronicle of how we managed to connect two branches of the Kinsale Family, who always knew they were family but did not fully understand how.

REGIONS COVERED: West Africa, Ireland, Trinidad and Tobago.

“Plantain helped us to answer a lot of questions just in time for our family reunion attended by people from all over the world. The team has helped us not only to honour the past, but more importantly to spread the news to the next generation.” - Hazel Kinsale-Manning

“I loved their excellent work and dedication to the project. At the end of it all Plantain put together a book containing rich information about our family’s history.” - Lisa Kinsale

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“This book honours our past by pausing, reflecting upon, and examining the stories of those who came before us.

As we began to piece together the lives of our ancestors, we realised that their stories had dramatically faded over time. We were at risk of losing our entire history, our whole identity as a family.”

“Broadening our search, we delve into vast online databases of slave registers. We find 150 occurrences of the Kinsale name. Unfortunately, based on the corresponding dates, none of these people could possibly be the Tobias we are looking for. But, could one of them be an even more distant ancestor of ours?”

“This document was created by our late ancestor, uncle Horace Hinds: it is a beautiful, engrossing and wonderfully detailed family tree.”

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“But he would sometimes get angry, and he would tell you, "CARAMBA MAN!" He would sit in the gallery in his rocking chair, all the time rocking.”

“The values they always taught us were to be respectable, look out for each other, and to be kind, caring, family-oriented, independent and business oriented.”