Walter Augustus Feurtado

Walter Augustus Feurtado (1839 – 23 November 1910) was a Jamaican accountant, freemason, genealogist, and author whose biographical guide to the Official and Other Personages of Jamaica, from 1655 to 1790.

[1] Jean M. King of the Institute of Jamaica, West India Reference Library, writes that the break with the Jewish faith probably occurred with the generations before Walter, for in January 1840 he was christened by the rector of the cathedral in Spanish Town (St Jago de la Vega Cathedral), the reverend Walter Scott Coward, who gave him his own first name.

He later worked for ten years as a clerk in the office of the Island Secretary where his job was to make searches.

His sources were local newspapers, the Jamaica Almanack, the journals of the House of Assembly, James Henry Lawrence-Archer's Monumental Inscriptions of the British West Indies (1875), manuscript memoirs (some now lost), and personal knowledge.

[5] Feurtado was a freemason at a time when lodges in Jamaica were largely organised along ethnic and religious lines.