I Found My Great-Great Grandfather

Today I made a great find at the Family History Center.  I located my 2nd great grandfather. This was a brick wall that I have been struggling with virtually from Day 1 of my genealogical journey.  I got started on this hobby (obsession) by chancing across an on-line database, the Danish Demographic Database (Dansk Demografisk Database).  This is a free searchable database of Danish censuses and church records.   They have a link to the St. Croix Census records on their site.  By querying this I found my grandfather (Ludvig Conrad), great grandfather (Christian Andreas Conrad), and his mother (Sophia Andersen).   No father.  No Conrad. I searched the VISHA database and Ancestry.com. Try as I might, I couldn’t locate a Conrad to be the source of that family name.  No Conrad appeared in any census that would fit.

Well, that all changed today.  I was searching a roll of microfilm of baptisms from the Danish Lutheran Church in Christiansted when I ran across the name Anna Sophia Conrad.  This was my great grandfather’s oldest sister. 

I promptly sent the image to my internet friend Kaj, a very kind person I contacted through the Ancestry.com Danish message board.  He has been kind enough to translate many Danish documents for me.  The baptismal register showed Sophia’s father as one C. A. Conrad, a merchant, Lutheran, age 52 in February 1855.  Although I don’t yet know what C. A. stands for, I can guess that it is Christian Andreas Conrad ( since his son, my great grandfather, was the only son of 4 children, that I know of).  And he would have been born in 1802 (or January 1803). 

So, I still need to find out where he was from, and why he never appears in the census.  Since the witnesses don’t show up in the census and one is listed as a Captain, it seems reasonable that they were seamen.  So, I will keep looking, but as of right now, I have a great-great grandfather that I never knew about. 

Genealogy Happy Dance!

I’ve had a couple of requests to look for information in the microfilm from readers.  I found several documents for one lucky reader on a shared family line and sent those off, but no luck yet in finding Busby or Brewater for Ann.  I’m still looking though.