The descendants of Port Royal Primary’s first headteacher need help solving a mystery. Sisters Cheryl De Bari and Jennifer Stubbs, discovered a hand-embroidered pillow cushion while going through the things of their late grandmother, educator Amanda Eustace.

The sisters live in the United States, but regularly travel back to Bermuda to stay in the family homestead, near Evans Bay in Southampton.

“We found the embroidery in a box,” said Ms Stubbs, a retired nurse who resides in Florida. “It was folded up.”

The piece depicts a shepherdess in Portuguese costume, and has Portuguese words stitched on it.

“I thought it was beautiful, so I took it home to California and had it framed,” Ms De Bari said. “Then I brought it all the way back to Bermuda and hung it on the wall of the homestead, as a tribute to my grandmother.”

Their neighbour, Sandra Taylor Rouja, was excited when she saw the piece. Ms Taylor Rouja has often written and spoken about the Portuguese experience in Bermuda.

“She is the one that helped us to really see the value of the embroidery,” Ms De Bari said. “She got a friend who spoke Portuguese to translate it.”

In English, the verse said: “The threads of my spindle make new linen sheets; and the wool from my sheep is as white as the ermine”.

Ms Rouja explained that in traditional Portuguese culture it was considered a romantic gesture for a woman to made a shirt for her man.

The piece could have been stitched by Maria Correia, nanny to the sisters’ mother Marjorie De Bari, Mrs Eustace’s youngest daughter.

“Tia Maria and my grandmother were very close,” Ms De Bari said. “She had two sons Emmanuel and Joseph Correia. Joseph operated a crane in the 1960s.”

It could also have been made by one of Mrs Eustace’s many Portuguese students.

Mrs Eustace was born in Cardiff, Wales, to a well-off family. She graduated from Truro Teacher’s Training College in Cornwall, England, in 1919. After university, she married Henry Eustace and lived in London.

The Eustace family moved to Bermuda in 1930 when Mr Eustace found a job as a watchmaker at Gibbons Company.

The next year, Mrs Eustace became the head teacher at the Greenfield School on Middle Road in Southampton, a cottage school.

“If you were heading west from Frank’s Bay, Southampton, [where Middle Road nears the Little Sound and the old Railway Trestles are visible] it would be the first house on the right,” Ms Stubbs said. “It is a home now. We approached the owners of the building. They did not even know it had been a school.”

Many of her students were Portuguese children from nearby farms, as revealed by class registers and administrative documents Ms Stubbs found stashed in yet another box.

“My grandmother kept everything,” Ms Stubbs said.

A letter in the file praises Greenfield, but also hints at the prejudice the Portuguese faced in Bermuda.

Angeline Lough, daughter of a prominent local Anglican minister, wrote to Mrs Eustace in 1935: I want to tell you how much I enjoyed my visit to your school for the Empire address. When I heard it was a Portuguese school, I rather dreaded it, thinking it would be difficult to gain their interest. Why? Yeah, on the contrary, it was the most enjoyable of my three schools. … I congratulate you on your success and hope that your good work will continue and you will be a means of training some really good citizens of the British Empire.

“That letter says a lot about the times,” Ms Stubbs said. “It is interesting how she commented on the Portuguese in a way that was putting them down.”

Ms De Bari also noticed comments on individual students, in school reports, that would not be acceptable today, such as that some pupils were dirty when they came to school.

In those days, children were sometimes sent home for being too dirty for school.

The sisters showed the comments to their close friend and neighbour veterinarian Andrew Madeiros, who in turn showed them to his father, Raymond Madeiros, another former Greenfield student.

“He said, ‘of course they were dirty! They were working in the fields before they went to school in the morning’,” Ms De Bari said, adding: “That put it in to context for us.”

Mrs Eustace opened the three-room Port Royal School on Church Road in Southampton in June 1935, for White children in the area.

School fees were one shilling and six pence per week. She resigned a little more than a year after the school opened, owing to ill health.

She taught several students who went on to prominence in the community, including Ralph Marshall, who died in 2012.

He was an early member of the United Bermuda Party, and founder of architectural and civil engineering firm Marshall Bernardo Partnership.

In one Greenfield school report from 1932, Mrs Eustace wrote of the eight-year-old Ralph Marshall: “A clever boy, making good progress.”

Ms De Bari met another former student, Clarence “Tessi” Terceira, at her uncle’s funeral ten years ago.

Dr Terceira, a dentist, was another early member of the UBP and parliamentarian who held portfolios such as education and works and engineering.

“He told me that when his brothers went to school he badly wanted to go too, but he was only four,” Ms De Bari said. “My grandmother told his mother that if he wanted to go that badly, then to send him the next day.”

Dr Terceira described his first day at Greenfield in his 2014 autobiography Tessi’s Highway.

He wrote: “Mrs Eustace was testing counting and the alphabet. One of the children told Mrs Eustace that the youngster next to her knew his alphabet and could count to a hundred.

“I then found myself, a shy and frightened little boy, in front of the class being asked to demonstrate.”

“Many of her former students often came to the house to visit her, when we were growing up,” Ms De Bari said. “They appeared to think a lot of her.”

When Mrs Eustace died in January 1978, Mr Marshall paid tribute to her in the House of Assembly.

Ms De Bari said: “At her funeral, the minister did not know my grandmother, but made a comment that, just by looking at the people that were in the church, he could see the influence she had had.”

Ms De Bari and Ms Stubbs hope to donate their grandmother’s material from Greenfield and Port Royal Primary, to the Bermuda Archives. “We want to make copies first,” Ms De Bari said.

• If you have information about the embroidery in question or want to share your memories of Amanda Eustace, e-mail cheryl.debari@gmail.com