I am currently working through the Proud Gypsy Traveller website, page by page, reviewing what we have written and deciding what needs updating.
When I reached our original timeline, I realised how much has changed—not only in the evidence now available, but in my own ability to research it.
I now know how to follow a footnote back to its original source, search historical legislation, question an official record and distinguish between something that is documented, something strongly indicated and something repeated so often that it has come to be treated as fact.
I also understand more clearly that archives are not neutral. They were usually created by governments, churches, courts, police, charities and other institutions—not by our people. Their records often reflect the prejudices, language and priorities of those institutions.
So I am updating our timeline.
I could quietly delete the old version and replace it, but that would hide something important: our understanding develops as we gain access to evidence, build our research skills and listen more carefully to the knowledge held within families and communities.
This revised timeline does not pretend to be the final word. It brings together what can currently be documented, what is strongly indicated and what remains disputed or unverified.
Where something is uncertain, we say so.
Where the official record is incomplete, we do not automatically assume that nothing happened.
And where our ethnicity was erased from the record, we name that erasure rather than allowing it to erase us again.
Different peoples, connected histories
Gypsy and Traveller history is not one single story.
Romani Gypsies, Irish Travellers and Scottish Gypsy Travellers are distinct peoples, with their own histories, languages, identities and experiences. Even within those broad names sit many smaller families and communities.
Not every family uses the same definition, and no outside organisation has the right to overwrite how people identify themselves.
Irish Travellers are an indigenous Irish ethnic group. Genetic research confirms their Irish ancestry and finds no evidence of recent shared ancestry with European Roma. The research estimates that their social separation from the settled Irish population began approximately 360 years ago, but the researchers are clear that this estimates divergence—not the community’s origin.
Scottish Gypsy Travellers also hold different understandings of their history. Some identify as an indigenous Scottish people. Some identify with Romani ancestry and speak or remember words from Rumness. Others use names including Nacken, Nawken, Scottish Traveller or Gypsy Traveller.
These identities can overlap, but they should never be collapsed into one definition imposed from outside.
Research on Irish Traveller ancestry
Irish State recognition of Traveller ethnicity
A history written by other people
Much of our history was not written by us.
It was recorded by governments, churches, courts, police, charities, child-welfare inspectors and other institutions. These records often describe our people through a prejudiced or colonial lens.
More often than not, we were simply erased.
When a story was too large to bury, our ethnicity was frequently removed. A Gypsy Traveller child might be recorded as poor, neglected, destitute, illegitimate or orphaned—but not as a Gypsy Traveller. A transported adult might appear as a prisoner, servant, vagrant or slave, with no record of their people.
The absence of an ethnic label does not prove that we were absent.
Sometimes it shows how effectively our identity was removed.
How to read this timeline
Not every part of Gypsy and Traveller history can be proved through official records. This timeline therefore distinguishes between:
- Documented history: supported by surviving records or reliable historical research.
- Strongly indicated: supported by several pieces of evidence, but not yet proven completely.
- Disputed or unverified: a story, interpretation or community account that remains part of the historical conversation but cannot currently be presented as established fact.
Disputed does not automatically mean untrue or unimportant. It means the surviving evidence does not yet allow a firm conclusion.
Oral history and family knowledge also matter. Official archives are not neutral—particularly when they were created by the institutions responsible for the harm being described.
Early Romani origins: evidence, theories and legends
Possibly before AD 400 — disputed
Some accounts suggest that the ancestors of Romani people were mobile craftspeople, entertainers or military workers within India.
Linguistics establishes an Indian origin for the Romani language, but there is no reliable evidence identifying one original occupation, caste or single ancestral community.
Around AD 420–440 — traditional account, not verified
The Persian Shahnameh tells of a ruler who invited thousands of musicians known as the Luri from India.
Some writers have connected this story to the ancestors of Romani people. However, the account was written centuries after the events it describes. Historians cannot establish that the Luri were Romani ancestors or that the migration happened as described.
Seventh–ninth centuries — disputed connection
Arabic and Persian sources refer to peoples called Zott or Jat who moved—or were forcibly moved—from the Indian subcontinent into Persia and the Middle East.
These communities and their uprisings are documented. The claim that they were direct ancestors of today’s Romani people remains disputed.
Eleventh century — possible but unproven
Some writers connect Romani migration with the military campaigns of Mahmud of Ghazni, during which very large numbers of people were captured and enslaved.
The invasions and enslavement are historical facts. The claim that the captives included the direct ancestors of European Romani communities has not been established.
What can be stated confidently is that the Romani language originated in India and developed through contact with Persian, Armenian and Greek-speaking regions during a westward migration.
Before 1200
Romani people were probably living within the European territories of the Byzantine Empire, including areas within present-day Greece.
1385
A Wallachian document records 40 Romani family groups. This is among the earliest records historians can confidently identify as referring to Roma.
1417–1435
Documents record Romani groups travelling through much of Central and Western Europe.
Some travelled under letters of safe conduct and presented themselves as pilgrims. Early hospitality was soon replaced by exclusion, forced settlement, expulsion and organised persecution.
Council of Europe: Arrival in Europe
Arrival and persecution in Britain
1505
The first definite written record of Romani Gypsies in Scotland appears in the royal accounts. A payment of £7 was made at the request of King James IV, possibly to people regarded as pilgrims or entertainers.
1513 or 1514
The first definite record of Romani Gypsies in England appears.
1530
Henry VIII’s Egyptians Act ordered “outlandish people calling themselves Egyptians” to leave England and prohibited further entry.
“Egyptian” was a name imposed on Romani people at the time and is one source of the English word “Gypsy”.
1541
Scotland enacted its first anti-Gypsy law. Gypsies were ordered to leave the country under pain of death.
1554
A further English Egyptians Act introduced harsher punishment.
People classified as “Egyptians” could avoid punishment by abandoning their community and way of life. Failure to leave or assimilate could ultimately result in execution.
1562–1563
English legislation extended persecution to people born in England and to others accused of joining or associating with “Egyptians”.
Identity itself was increasingly treated as a crime.
Romani Gypsies in sixteenth-century Britain
1603
The Scottish Privy Council ordered all Gypsies to leave Scotland and never return, under pain of death.
1609
The Scottish Parliament ratified the Act Anent the Egiptians.
During the following decades, men and women were executed, branded, drowned, mutilated or deported under anti-Gypsy laws.
1714
Agnes McDonald and Jean Baillie were executed in Edinburgh. They are believed to have been the last people executed in Scotland for being identified as Gypsies.
Historic Environment Scotland: Persecution of Gypsy Travellers
Columbus and the first journey to the Americas
1498 — widely repeated but not securely verified
It is frequently claimed that three or four Romani people travelled on Christopher Columbus’s third voyage to the Americas.
The claim may originate from records of people described as egipcianos, or from people transported instead of serving criminal sentences.
However, the surviving evidence does not establish their ethnicity with certainty. It should not be presented as the proven first Romani arrival in the Americas.
It remains a repeated historical claim requiring stronger primary-source verification.
Transportation, bondage and indentured servitude
1650s–1660s
English and Scottish authorities transported people classified as “Gypsies”, “Egyptians”, “vagabonds” and other so-called undesirables to colonies including Virginia, Barbados and Jamaica.
Some were sold into fixed periods of indentured servitude. Other records use the language of slavery or permanent servitude.
Indentured servitude was not the same legal system as the permanent, hereditary and racialised chattel slavery imposed on African people. But many Gypsy people did not enter these arrangements freely.
They were arrested, transported, sold and forced to labour thousands of miles from their families. many times because of their ethnicity.
1665
A Scottish account described plans to transport “beggars, Egyptians” and other people to Jamaica and Barbados.
The stated purpose was both to supply labour to the plantations and to rid Scotland of people whom the authorities considered burdensome or undesirable.
1669
Scottish merchants were authorised to transport “loose beggars and gypsies” from Scottish prisons to Virginia as a saleable labour force.
The state did not view these people as families, communities or human beings with rights. It viewed them as a problem that could be exported—and as labour from which others could profit.
Colonial Williamsburg: Scottish Gypsies and prisoners transported to Virginia
1714–1715
British merchants and plantation owners sought permission to transport Scottish Romanies to the Caribbean expressly for use as enslaved labour.
A surviving 1715 record describes prisoners sentenced to transportation because they were considered Gypsies “by habit and repute”. Merchants were reportedly offered £13 to take them abroad.
Recorded family names included Faa, Fenwick, Lindsey, Stirling, Robertson, Ross and Yorstoun.
Travellers’ Times: When did Romanies first arrive in America?
The Caribbean and the erasure of identity
Seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
People transported from Britain were rarely recorded consistently by ethnicity after reaching the colonies.
They might appear as white servants, prisoners, labourers, vagrants or enslaved people, with no record that they were Romani Gypsies or Scottish Gypsy Travellers.
Transportation lists contain surnames associated with Romani Gypsy families, including Boswell, Cook, Heron, Lee, Locke, Palmer, Penfold, Price, Smith and Ward.
However, surnames alone cannot prove ethnicity.
This leaves us unable to establish the total number transported, how many were subjected to indentured or permanent servitude, how many survived, or how many retained a distinct Gypsy identity.
1793 — Jamaica
Writer J. B. Moreton described young women whom he called “gipsies” being subjected to sexual exploitation in Jamaica from as young as eleven.
His account is disturbing evidence that people identified as Gypsies were present within the island’s systems of servitude and exploitation.
Published research also refers to Romani people being owned by both white and formerly enslaved Black people in Jamaica. Over generations, transported Gypsy people and African or African-descended people formed families together.
The colonial record is fragmentary and deeply prejudiced. We cannot say exactly how many descendants retained or lost a distinct Gypsy identity.
What we can say is that transportation, enslavement, intermarriage and the failure to record ethnicity created the conditions in which Gypsy identity became separated from many of its descendants.
The reported “Gypsy language” in the Caribbean
Community knowledge—requiring further research
Some people of Caribbean heritage retain family or community knowledge of ancestors speaking a language described as “Gypsy”.
That knowledge should not be dismissed simply because it does not appear neatly in a colonial archive.
However, sufficiently detailed linguistic research has not yet established whether this was:
- a surviving form of Romani;
- Romani words incorporated into a Caribbean creole;
- a mixed or private community vocabulary;
- or another form of speech labelled “Gypsy” by outsiders.
The culture may not simply have disappeared. It may have survived in fragments—in words, family knowledge, practices and identities that official records failed to recognise.
Further community-led oral-history and linguistic research is needed.
Black and Romani descendants in America
Eighteenth century onwards
European powers transported Romani people to colonies that later became part of the United States.
The Texas State Historical Association records Afro-Romani populations resulting from intermarriage between formerly enslaved African and Romani people.
St Martin Parish, Louisiana — reported but incompletely researched
St Martin Parish is frequently identified as the home of a community descended from Black and Romani enslaved people.
It is sometimes described online as an “Afro-Gypsy village”. That description is too definite: St Martin Parish is a wider geographical district, not one clearly documented village, and detailed independent research into the present community remains limited.
The existence of Black and Romani intermarriage in colonial America is credible and supported by published accounts. The precise size, location and cultural continuity of this particular community require further investigation.
Similar Afro-Romani communities have been reported in central Cuba. Again, those histories deserve community-led research rather than either uncritical repetition or automatic dismissal.
People met in bondage, built families and survived together. Their descendants do not fit the simple racial categories later imposed upon them.
Texas State Historical Association: Romani Americans
Romani slavery in Wallachia and Moldavia
Fourteenth century–1856
Roma were enslaved for approximately five centuries in Wallachia and Moldavia, territories within present-day Romania.
Families could be owned by the state, monasteries or private landowners. People were bought, sold, exchanged, inherited and separated from their children.
Enslavement was abolished through successive laws, completed in Moldavia in 1855 and Wallachia in 1856.
Freedom on paper did not bring equality. Approximately 250,000 formerly enslaved Roma received no reparations, land or meaningful protection.
Compensation was instead paid to some former owners for their supposed loss of property.
The people who had been treated as property received nothing.
Education, child removal and forced assimilation
1908
The Children Act required children from families recorded as living a travelling life to attend school for at least 200 half-day sessions.
Education law increasingly became one of the tools used to control travelling families. At the same time, many children were denied access to good, safe and culturally appropriate education.
Parents could face prosecution or the removal of their children when travelling for work prevented compliance with a settled schooling system.
Children were punished for the state’s refusal to understand their families’ lives.
The genocide of Roma and Sinti
1933–1945
Nazi Germany and its allies persecuted Roma and Sinti on racial grounds.
People were registered, imprisoned, subjected to forced sterilisation and medical experimentation, deported to concentration and killing centres, and murdered in mass shootings.
16 May 1944
Roma and Sinti prisoners at Auschwitz-Birkenau resisted an attempt by the SS to liquidate the so-called “Gypsy family camp”.
Their resistance delayed the murders and is now commemorated as Romani Resistance Day.
2 August 1944
The SS liquidated the family camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau and murdered the remaining 2,897 prisoners, most of them women, children and older people, in the gas chambers.
The exact number of Romani people murdered across Europe cannot be known. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that at least 250,000, and possibly as many as 500,000, were killed.
Older and campaigning sources sometimes give higher estimates, including one million or more. These figures reflect the scale of missing records and undercounting, but they are not the range currently used by leading Holocaust institutions.
US Holocaust Memorial Museum: Genocide of European Roma
Liquidation of the Auschwitz family camp
The Tinker Experiment in Scotland
Late nineteenth century–twentieth century
The Tinker Experiment was not one isolated project in one place.
It was a collection of laws, policies and institutional practices intended to stop Scottish Gypsy Travellers travelling, separate extended families, remove children from cultural influence and absorb future generations into settled society.
Government departments, the Scottish Office, councils, police, churches, charities and child-welfare organisations all played roles.
Families were forced into huts, camps, official sites, segregated settlements and unsuitable housing. Some accommodation had no electricity, running water or adequate sanitation.
People’s employment, parenting, schooling and movement were monitored. Traditional work was steadily restricted and then the community was condemned as dependent when the state had removed the means by which families supported themselves.
The official research found evidence of forced or discriminatory housing policies in 27 of Scotland’s 32 present-day council areas.
Children were used as leverage
Officials understood that one of the strongest ways to force families to settle was to threaten them with the loss of their children.
Gypsy Traveller children were sent to industrial schools, training ships, children’s homes and segregated schools. Some were boarded out, adopted or sent overseas.
A child-welfare leader argued that the purpose should be to “detinkerise” children.
A chief constable, asked how “tinkerdom” could be abolished, said the easiest route was through the children.
Child removal was not simply an unfortunate side effect.
For some officials, children were the quickest route to making the culture disappear.
Scottish Government/St Andrews archival research
Canada’s “Little Slaves”
1872–1939
British charities and state institutions participated in child-migration schemes that sent children to Canada and other colonies.
Many were described as orphans even though one or both parents were alive.
Children were placed in domestic or agricultural service. Some were treated with care, but many experienced isolation, exploitation, violence, abuse and the permanent loss of their families.
Quarriers sent 6,987 children to Canada. Barnardo’s also operated migration programmes.
Because institutions rarely recorded Gypsy Traveller ethnicity, the total number of children from our communities cannot now be established.
Margaret, Mary and Gracie
Family research by Dr Lynne Tammi-Connelly traced three Scottish Gypsy Traveller sisters—Margaret, Mary and Gracie—who were taken from their mother, placed in institutional care and sent through Quarriers to Canada.
Their parents were recorded as a pedlar and a basket maker.
The girls passed through Fairknowe, Quarriers’ receiving home in Brockville, Ontario, before being placed into domestic service.
They became part of the history remembered as Canada’s “Little Slaves”.
The official researchers could identify only a very small number of Gypsy Traveller children because ethnicity was removed or never recorded. They nevertheless found strong evidence that Gypsy Traveller children were over-represented in Scotland’s child-welfare system.
The disputed question is not whether any Gypsy Traveller children were sent overseas. Individual cases establish that they were.
The unresolved question is how many.
A missing ethnic label should not be mistaken for a missing child.
Official research into charities and child migration
Dr Lynne Tammi-Connelly: Canada’s Little Slaves
Nazi racial research on Scottish Gypsy Travellers
1938 — documented
Wolfgang Abel, a University of Berlin racial anthropologist and SS member, travelled to Caithness to study Scottish Gypsy Travellers.
Scottish police and an inspector from the Royal Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children helped him locate families.
Abel photographed people and measured their heads, hands, arms and bodies as part of racial research.
An archived account records Abel asking where he could find “gypsies, primitives and cave dwellers”. Families were paid a shilling for each head he measured.
The visit was not a harmless academic exercise. It placed Scottish Gypsy Travellers within a wider European system of eugenics and racial classification that attempted to decide which people were valuable, inferior or disposable.
The use of Abel’s research remains unresolved
The surviving evidence does not prove that Abel’s Scottish measurements were used directly within Nazi policies of internment, sterilisation or genocide.
However, Abel’s SS membership, his involvement in racial science and the assistance he received from Scottish and British institutions make the episode deeply serious.
Dr Lynne Tammi-Connelly has argued that the visit may have been an exploratory stage in a wider eugenic programme and that the outbreak of war may have prevented further work.
This is an important interpretation, but it has not yet been established by surviving documents.
The absence of evidence showing what happened to Abel’s Scottish data does not prove that it was harmless.
It means the complete chain of evidence has not yet been found.
Official report: Wolfgang Abel’s 1938 visit
Sites, civil rights and resistance
1960
The Caravan Sites and Control of Development Act introduced licensing and planning controls for caravan sites.
Traditional stopping places were disappearing while Gypsy and Traveller families faced growing barriers to establishing lawful sites of their own.
1968
Part II of the Caravan Sites Act placed a duty on local authorities in England and Wales to provide sites for Gypsies residing in or regularly visiting their areas.
1971
The first World Romani Congress was held near London.
Delegates asserted the right of Roma to self-determination and international unity. The Romani flag and the anthem Gelem, Gelem were adopted as international symbols.
Council of Europe: First World Romani Congress
1983 — Mandla v Dowell Lee
The House of Lords decided Mandla v Dowell Lee, a landmark case concerning a Sikh pupil who was refused admission to a school because he would not remove his turban and cut his hair.
The case did not concern Gypsy or Traveller people directly. Its importance is that it established the legal test for deciding whether a community constitutes an ethnic group under British race-relations law.
The two essential characteristics identified by the court were:
- a long shared history that the group understands as distinguishing it from other groups, and whose memory it keeps alive;
- a cultural tradition of its own, including family and social customs and practices.
Other relevant characteristics can include a shared language, literature, religion, geographical origin, or experience of being a minority or oppressed group.
This became known as the Mandla test. It was subsequently used when courts and tribunals considered the ethnic status of Romany Gypsies, Irish Travellers and Scottish Gypsy Travellers.
It is significant that legal recognition depended upon communities proving to the state that they possessed a shared history and culture—the same history and culture that state policies had repeatedly attempted to suppress.
Judicial College: ethnicity and the Mandla test
1989
In Commission for Racial Equality v Dutton, the Court of Appeal applied the principles established in Mandla and recognised Romany Gypsies as an ethnic group protected by British race-relations law.
1994
The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act repealed Part II of the 1968 Caravan Sites Act, including councils’ duty to provide Gypsy sites.
The same Act strengthened powers against unauthorised encampments.
The state removed the duty to provide somewhere lawful to stop while increasing its power to move families on.
Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994
2000
In O’Leary v Allied Domecq, Irish Travellers were recognised as an ethnic group in England and Wales.
2008
In K MacLennan v Gypsy Traveller Education and Information Project, an employment tribunal concluded that Scottish Gypsy Travellers satisfied the principal characteristics established in Mandla.
These decisions did not create our ethnicities.
They recognised—in law—identities, histories and cultures that had existed for generations.
2010
The Equality Act consolidated legal protection against racial discrimination.
Romany Gypsies and Irish Travellers are protected ethnic groups. Scottish Gypsy Travellers can also receive protection where the legal ethnic-group test is met.
Equality and Human Rights Commission: Protected ethnic groups
2011
For the first time, the Census in England and Wales included a “Gypsy or Irish Traveller” ethnic tick-box.
This was a form of recognition, but combining two distinct peoples continued to conceal important differences.
2021
The Census for England and Wales introduced a separate Roma category.
It recorded 71,440 people as Gypsy or Irish Traveller. Long-standing mistrust and fear of declaring identity mean official figures should not be treated as anywhere near the complete population.
Office for National Statistics: Gypsy or Irish Traveller populations
Criminalising where people live
2022
The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act created a criminal offence in England and Wales relating to residing on land without consent in or with a vehicle, where additional statutory conditions are met.
The Act also gave police powers to seize vehicles and other property.
Once again, the state responded to the shortage of safe, lawful stopping places through criminal justice.
Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022
2024
The Government restored a more inclusive planning definition in England.
The definition now includes people who have permanently stopped travelling and people with a cultural tradition of nomadism or living in a caravan.
This reversed part of the exclusion created by the 2015 planning definition, which had removed many elderly, disabled and permanently settled ethnic Gypsies and Travellers from specific planning-policy protection.
Planning Policy for Traveller Sites, December 2024
The leaked Tinker Experiment report
14 February 2025
Dr Lynne Tammi-Connelly leaked a draft of the Scottish Government-commissioned Tinker Experiment report.
She said she acted because the report had been delayed and because the Scottish Government had made repeated attempts to remove or weaken important material, including content about Wolfgang Abel and his connections to British institutions.
Those allegations were reported by Travellers’ Times and The Times. They are serious and should form part of the public record, but the Scottish Government has not confirmed that it sought to suppress those particular findings.
It would therefore be inaccurate to present the attempted removal as an independently proven fact.
What can be said is:
The full institutional significance of Wolfgang Abel’s visit entered national public view after Dr Lynne Tammi-Connelly leaked the delayed report. She alleged that officials had attempted to remove or weaken crucial findings. The final report retained the evidence concerning Abel, but the nature and extent of any proposed changes have not been made fully transparent.
Abel’s visit had appeared in a 1938 newspaper and evidence existed within archives. It was therefore not entirely unknown before the leak.
But the leak connected that evidence to the wider Tinker Experiment and brought it into national public view before institutions could decide how the history would be presented.
This history did not become visible because powerful institutions volunteered it.
It became impossible to ignore because community campaigners, descendants, family researchers and academics refused to allow it to remain buried.
Travellers’ Times: The leaked report
Apology and unfinished justice
25 June 2025
First Minister John Swinney formally apologised on behalf of Scotland for the Tinker Experiments.
The Scottish Government acknowledged forced housing in substandard accommodation, the removal of children and the enduring discrimination caused by historical policies.
The Church of Scotland apologised on the same day for historic wrongs carried out in its name.
The apologies matter. Families fought for years to hear them.
But an apology cannot return a stolen childhood.
It cannot reconnect every separated family, restore cultural knowledge or compensate people for lives spent in degrading accommodation.
And it cannot be treated as the conclusion.
Scottish Government response and apology
January 2026
The Scottish Human Rights Commission published No Man’s Land, its human-rights assessment of the Tinker Experiment.
The Commission concluded that Scotland’s Gypsy Travellers had been subjected to systemic forced assimilation.
It found that survivors and descendants continue to experience cultural loss, stigma, unsafe housing, discrimination and barriers within health, education and employment.
The Commission called for transformative reparations designed and delivered in partnership with victims and Scotland’s Gypsy Traveller communities.
Scottish Human Rights Commission: No Man’s Land
This is not history safely behind us
For centuries, laws and institutions have tried to remove our people, restrict our movement, take our children, erase our ethnicity and control how we live.
The language has changed.
The consequences have not disappeared.
Communities are still described as problems to be managed. Roadside life is still criminalised. Planning systems still make culturally appropriate accommodation extraordinarily difficult to secure. Families still fear that disclosing their ethnicity will bring judgement rather than support.
Understanding this history is not about asking for pity.
It is about recognising what was done, who benefited, what continues today—and what must change.
The gaps in the archive are not empty spaces.
They are people.
And where official history erased us, we will continue putting ourselves back.
