About
The Story Behind
In Search of James
A journey into the heart of who we are, guided by the stories of those who came before us.
In Search of James
“He laid the track. I’m still following where it leads.”
My great-grandfather James McFarlane was born on March 7, 1879, in Jamaica. He came of age during one of the most ambitious engineering projects in the island’s history — the construction of the railway system that would eventually connect Kingston, Montego Bay, and Port Antonio. He was a navvy: one of the Jamaican laborers who cut through mountains by hand, drilled 17 tunnels, built bridges across flood-prone rivers, and laid track across terrain the engineers called among the most difficult standard-gauge mountain railways in the world. He was in his late teens when the hardest work was done. He was in his early twenties when the network was complete.
His name never appeared in the official records. No contract, no crew list, no monument. The history books noted the engineers, the financiers, the American syndicate that funded the lines. The men who built it with their bodies — men like James — were simply absorbed into the landscape they transformed. For most of my life, I didn’t know he existed. Finding him — really finding him — changed what I understood about myself. He gave me something I didn’t know I had been missing: a sense of inherited purpose. The knowledge that I come from people who built things under hard conditions and kept moving forward. That is the foundation this practice stands on.
My Mother
Barbara Jonas
1932 – 2024
My mother was born Barbara Jonas in Kingston, Jamaica in 1932. She was twelve years old when her mother left for New York City, trying to build a better life, intending to send for Barbara eventually. Her father died two years later. From the age of twelve, my mother was raised by her great-grandmother, Robertha — a woman who had already spent decades holding a family together through poverty, abandonment, and loss, working as a barmaid, taking in boarders at 6 Van Street to make ends meet. My mother did not see her own mother again until she was nineteen.
In the years in between, under Robertha’s care, my mother finished high school. She completed two years of business school. She learned to play piano. She had a bicycle she loved. She kept a collection of photographs of her favourite movie stars cut from magazines — small beauties gathered against the weight of everything else. In 1952, she emigrated to New York City. She was twenty years old. She had built herself from almost nothing, guided by a woman who had done the same.
She raised three children — largely on her own. She passed in 2024. I think about her every time I sit with a client who is trying to understand what they inherited and what they are choosing to carry forward. She taught me that lineage is not just what is passed down. It is what is built, deliberately, in the face of what was not given.
Meet Your Coach
About Barry
I came to this work the long way around. I spent years not knowing that the questions I kept returning to — about identity, about belonging, about what I was actually here to do — had answers waiting in my family’s history. It was the search for James that changed that. And it was my mother’s story that showed me what it looked like to build a life from what you were given, rather than what you were denied.
I am a certified Life Coach, a Genealogical researcher, and a Reiki Master — but I want to be clear about what that means in practice. These are not three separate services. They are one way of working, developed over time, rooted in a single belief: that understanding where we come from unlocks something essential about who we are and who we are capable of becoming.
The genealogy does what James’s story did for me — it grounds the work in real history, real names, real places. It gives the abstract something solid to stand on. The Reiki addresses what genealogy sometimes uncovers: the grief, the unresolved patterns, the ancestral weight that lives in the body long after the mind has moved on. And the coaching brings it all forward — helping you decide not just what happened, but what you are going to do with what you now know.
I have done this work on myself first. Ten Blocks — my forthcoming memoir — is the record of that. A life written in ten-year chapters. The same search I now guide others through.
Methodology
One Practice. Three Ways In.
Each path leads to the same place — a clearer understanding of who you are and where you are going.