Abraham Rodriguez Brandon was born in Barbados during the American Revolutionary War. At the end of his life, his body would rest in that same British island colony, though not before Brandon had made a circuitous route with his family around the Atlantic rim. The Brandon family story thus speaks of the networks that stretched throughout the Atlantic and the mobility that defined the lives of Jewish merchants. Brandon spent most of his life in Barbados, where he served as parnas of Congregation Nidhe Israel. However, the family relocated to New York by 1819, when Brandon presented to Congregation Shearith Israel a large brass chandelier. Four years later, he purchased a plot in Shearith Israel’s cemetery at Cypress Hills, where his wife Sarah was buried after her death during a late March blizzard. It was a few years after her death that Brandon made his return to Barbados.
Brandon’s wife, born Sarah Esther Lopez, was also a native of Barbados born. Together they had seven children, all born on the island. Like nearly all Jewish families in Barbados, where a Jewish presence had been established in the mid-seventeenth century, the Brandons were involved in the sugar trade. Indeed, synagogue dues there could be paid in sugar. As in trade, the Barbados synagogue maintained strong ties to Europe throughout the eighteenth century, especially to congregations in London and Amsterdam. However, Barbadian Jewish families also had numerous connections to other parts of the Caribbean and to North America. 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 English Jew; while their son Isaac married Lavinia Moses, the sister of Sara’s husband Joshua in New York. Three children would be buried beside their mother in New York, one in California, and only one, Alfred, was buried in Barbados, having died the same week as his father.