My Ancestors weren’t Married?! (Part 3-Population)

This is the third part of a series on my study into St. Croix marriages. In Part 1, I described what made me undertake this study. In Part 2, I discussed my methodology and results. For this part, I digress slightly and look at the change in baptismal rates over the period.

From my article on Religion in St. Croix 1841-1911, I saw that the latter half of the 19th century showed a significant conversion from Moravian to Anglican, already the most popular religion on the island.  Since I expected to see a rapid growth in population on the island, I expected to see a corresponding growth in Anglican baptisms throughout the period.  Wrong on both counts.

The chart below shows the numbers of baptisms at St. John’s Anglican Episcopal Church in Christiansted, St Croix, the largest church on the island over the 94 years I studied.

Number of Baptisms by year at St John’s Anglican church from 1841-1934

As you see from the graph, the annual baptismal rate peaked between 1871-1873 at about 253 per year and fell continuously to 1934 with only 25 baptisms recorded in that church.  The gap from 1855-1856 is from the set of heavily damaged records which I omitted.  The low values in 1854 and 1867 are due to partial year counts surrounding these damaged records.  Since Anglicans dominated the population, this suggests that the population didn’t grow as it did in the continental US. 

There are a couple of contributors to this trend.  First, families became smaller.  As in the US, the numbers of children born per couple dropped significantly throughout this period.  While early St Croix censuses showed very large households, both urban and rural, later documents show small households. Here are the families in my direct line, by generation, with the numbers of known children and the years of child bearing. The generation numbers are from my Ahnentafel Report.

Numbers of Children by Generation 1759-1940

Generation	Couple	Years	Children
8	Claudius and Gertruyd	1759-1780	7
7	Johannis and Amey McNobney	1790-1817	14
6	Johannes and Mary Quickly	1827-1854	16
5	Claudius and Adelaide	1857-1861	3
4	Hester and Andreas	1887-1893	7
3	Ludvig and Olga	1940	1

 

Another, not so minor effect, was emigration. After Emancipation in 1848, freedmen continued to live and work under strict contracts that severely limited their mobility. Following the Fireburn insurrection of 1878, islanders, both white and colored, were much more free to move about as they pleased, and many were pleased to leave.  The island’s economy was based on the sugar cane industry, but cane sugar was becoming replaced with beet sugar and the economy was in a steady decline.  Property values fell and unemployment surged.  Many people left the island in search of work, just as had occurred on other islands, like Barbados some 30 years earlier.  The economy had become so weak that the Danish crown was supporting the islands rather than profiting from them.  This led to discussions with the US about purchasing the islands as far back as the 1860’s.  In fact, the US and Denmark negotiated treaties in 1867 and another 1900 for purchase, which were never ratified. (The Danish VI Consulate website has a 1902 poem by Julius Reuter on this called “The Bride and the Bridegroom, or Sam and Amalia”)

 

With the availability of steamships in the latter part of the 19th century, there was a significant and steady emigration from the island in  the years up to and beyond transfer (1917) many islanders, including many of my family, emigrated to the US and other countries.  Significant numbers of Cruzans moved to New York and surrounding areas, and their families live there today.  I have read suggestions on Ancestry.com’s Virgin Islands message board that the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) should move their collection of Danish West Indies records, Record Group 55 (RG 55), to the New York Regional Office since most of the Virgin Islanders in the US live there.  As for me, I like them just where they are, College Park, MD, about 15 miles from my house!

 

The next item I will look at is how the rates of legitimacy changed over the study period.  More surprises (at least for me)!