Religion in St. Croix 1841-1911

In my last post I discussed the genealogist’s go-to record, the census.  The DWI census records have one major advantage over US census records: they indicate religion.  This is very helpful as often the only source of birth and death records come from church registers.  How do you know which church to look at if you don’t know the denomination?  Fortunately, it’s right there in the census (Also it’s really convenient that there were only a couple of churches).   I thought it would be interesting to see how popular each religion was, so I collected the data from VISHA and performed an analysis.  Since the official religion was Lutheran, one would expect that most people would be Lutheran… but one would be wrong.

I tabulated all the St. Croix censuses spanning 1841-1911 (with the exception of 1857, which is mostly missing from the VISHA database). This was a total of 203,144 census records.  Of that number, only 987 indicated...
that they belonged to no religion.  This is a very religious people! The vast majority of respondents stated that they belonged to one of the four major religions on the island: Anglican (also known as “English”), Roman Catholic, Moravian, and Lutheran (or “Danish”).  In addition, 975 records stated an affiliation with one of a host of other recognizable denominations including Jewish, Dutch Reformed, Presbyterian, even Hindu and Salvation Army.  There were also things you wouldn’t expect: 158 were Swedenborgian (more on this in a future blog). Eight were listed as “Heathen”. In 1860, Nicoline Augusta Blom, age 24, stated that she “can’t remember”. (Her husband, Peter Blom was Lutheran). 23 were listed as “coolie”, which I can only assume is a Chinese religion, possibly Buddhist.

Distribution of religion according to census records

Here is a breakdown of the major religions from the entire dataset of over 200,000 records.  As you can see, the largest religion was Anglican/Episcopalian, the English church.  In fact, it was twice as large as the Lutheran, which turned out to be ranked last of the 4 major religions on the island.

I wanted to see if this changed over time, so I analyzed the proportions for each individual census.  The table shows that the percentages of Catholic and Lutheran were nearly constant over the entire 70-year timespan.

Percentage of Population by Major Religion by Year

Year	1841	1846	1850	1855	1860	1870	1880	1890	1901	1911	Total
Anglican/Episcopalian	31%	32%	31%	30%	32%	41%	41%	45%	42%	40%	35%
Roman Catholic	27%	28%	28%	28%	28%	27%	29%	25%	28%	28%	28%
Moravian/Bas	26%	24%	24%	26%	24%	17%	15%	16%	18%	18%	21%
Lutheran/Danish	14%	15%	16%	16%	15%	14%	15%	13%	11%	11%	14%
Other	1%	0%	0%	1%	0%	0%	0%	0%	0%	1%	1%
None	1%	0%	1%	0%	0%	1%	0%	0%	1%	1%	0%

Being a scientist, I like to see graphs of my data and this showed an interesting phenomenon.  From 1860 to 1890, the percentage of Moravians dropped to almost half of its previous levels.  Interestingly, the Anglicans saw a rise in the same time.  It would appear from this data that what the Moravians lost, the Anglicans gained. Turns out that the total of Moravian plus Anglican was pretty steady. The number of Lutherans was showing a steady decline during this time.

Change over time of the four major religions on St. Croix

When considered in light of the social structure of the island, maybe this isn’t so surprising.  The Danish may have been the elite in government and the military, but the planters were overwhelmingly English (or Irish or Scots).  Since the Moravians were the missionaries to the slaves, they would have been most important before emancipation.

Well, hopefully you found that interesting, I certainly did.  Demographic analyses help me understand my ancestors and help me get a feeling for their world.  I have done a variety of analyses on the data and continue to find interesting insights.

Please leave me a comment to tell me if you are interested in seeing more analyses like this in the future.