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Sheorani Kilawan's Wedding Ceremony
This photograph was taken during Sheorani's wedding ceremony in her home in Albion, Guyana in 1986.

Mohaiyuddin Khan, 1921
The U.S. Census, passport applications and naturalization petitions unfold the story of Mohaiyuddin Khan, a commercial trader who married, then divorced, a German-American woman.

Mohaiyuddin Khan Photo, 1919
At 5’11’’, Mohaiyuddin Khan was tall and striking, with an aquiline nose, a pointed chin and an oval face. His passport photos show a man who could have passed for Greek or Italian. Indeed, when he landed in New York in 1913, in his mid-twenties, he declared his intention to naturalize and gave his “color” as “white” and his birthplace as London.

Photo of Mohaiyuddin Khan with his wife Gertrude
Mohaiyuddin Khan's passport applications suggest that he was often away from his wife Gertrude’s home in Bedford-Stuyvesant. In 1920, the census showed him living in Brooklyn with her and her German immigrant family. The 1930 and 1940 censuses record her shorn of the surname Khan, using her maiden name again and working for an insurance company, with Mohaiyuddin no longer living with her.

Guyana Exercise Book Cover with Burnham's Image
This notebook contains diagrams of mitochondrial DNA by Mahendra Bahadur when he was a student at the University of Guyana in the late 1970s.

A heavy wooden vase, carried
This photograph was taken in Cumberland Village in Guyana the year before Gaiutra Bahadur's family left for America. Here, the archival creators fellow is sitting in the living room of the Bahadur family home, built by her grandfather born on a ship from India to Guyana a mile from the plantation where he worked as a sugar cane cutter.

Shew Persaud's Naturalization Petition
Shew Persaud was born in Georgetown, Guiana's colonial capital, in 1881. After arriving in the United States on a ship that sailed via Barbados, he petitioned to become a U.S. citizen twice, in 1917 and 1924. The first time, he was working as a dishwasher and living in West Harlem, separated from his wife, who was still in British Guiana.

Henry Sivenandan's Census Record
This U.S. Census record from 1940 provides a picture of a family from British Guiana with Indo-Caribbean last names identified as "Negro." Henry Sivenandan, an elevator operator in a loft building, and his wife Agnes, who worked in a dress factory, lived in Harlem with their toddler Saundra and Agnes' widowed older sister, Rose Persad, who worked as a seamstress in a dress factory.

Photograph of Clarice Ercel Reid Khan
Born in Georgetown, the capital of what was then British Guiana, Clarice Ercel Reid arrived in New York City on the steamship Mayaro in 1922, at the age of eighteen. In her years in the United States, she lived in West Harlem and worked as a housekeeper. She is pictured here in a photo from 1931, when she declared her intention to become a U.S. citizen. She became a U.S.

Photograph of Wazir Ishmael
Wazir Ishmael is pictured here, at age 10, with his father Yussuph Ishmael, a dispenser at the Rose Hall Sugar Estate in Guyana, and Alan Dabbs, whose family Wazir stayed with during school holidays when he was in boarding school.

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