Abraham Rodriguez Brandon^{[1, 2]}

1766 - 1831  (65 years)

• Name	Abraham Rodriguez Brandon  [3, 4]
  Born	1766  [3, 5]
  Gender	Male
  Reference Number	2522
  Died	6 Jun 1831	Barbados West Indies   [3, 5]
  Person ID	I2522	aojd
  Last Modified	11 Nov 2011

  
  

  Family ID

  F1282

  Group Sheet  |  Family Chart

  
  

• Notes

  (Research):AJLLJ Portrait Database 5 Aug 2011 Abraham Rodriguez Brandon was born in Barbados, and though at the end of his life his body would rest in that same British island colony, the Brandon family story speaks of the networks that stretched across the Atlantic and the mobility that defined the lives of Jewish merchants.      His wife, Sarah Esther Lopez Brandon, was also Barbados born, and together they had seven children. Like nearly all Jewish families in Barbados, where there had been a growing Jewish presence since the mid-seventeenth century, the Brandons were involved in the sugar trade. Indeed, synagogue dues at Nidhe Israel, where Brandon served as parnas, could be paid in sugar.      As in trade, the synagogue maintained strong ties to Europe throughout the eighteenth century, especially to Amsterdam and London. However, there also existed for Barbadian Jews numerous connections to other parts of the Caribbean and to North America. In 1819 Brandon presented Shearith Israel with a brass chandelier, which, incidentally, was passed along fifteen years later to the synagogue then being built in Cincinnati, as Shearith Israel was converting to gas lighting.      The movements of the Brandon children are telling. Of the five whose fates we know, a daughter, Sara, was married in London to Joshua Moses, an American; another daughter, Lavinia, married Judah S. Abecassis, a Gibralter-born Englishman; while their son Isaac married Joshua Moses' sister Lavinia in New York. Three children would be buried in New York, one in California, and only one, Alfred, was buried beside his father in Barbados, having died the same week. Even Brandon's wife, Sarah, would be laid to rest in New York, having died during an unseasonable blizzard in late March 1823. So tremendous was the snowstorm that her funeral had to be postponed several days, a contravention of the Jewish obligation to quickly bury dead. [6]

  
  

• Sources

  [S81] . [S285] . [S4] PG. 26, RODRIGUEZ BRANDON (Reliability: 3). [S4] PG. 26 FONSECA BRANDON (Reliability: 3). [S38] . [S294] BRANDON, ABRAHAM RODRIGUEZ (Reliability: 3).