Sunday, June 23, 2013

Ancestry.com Source Citations for VI Census

imageOne of the most troublesome aspects of genealogy, and a cause for much discussion, is formatting source citations for all those records. This is perhaps one of the most frustrating and intimidating aspects of genealogy for beginners and intermediate level genealogists, so many people give up and just use whatever websites like Ancestry.com suggest.  Unfortunately, this really doesn’t work very well for the St Croix census on Ancestry.  Since I’d like to do my genealogy right, I have been spending considerable time to try to figure out what’s the best, and most useful, way to format my citations in my database. 

Wednesday, June 5, 2013

VI Passenger Lists - And a Tempting Clue

imageSome of the most useful records for US genealogy are the Passenger Lists that show when the first immigrants came to Ellis Island, Castle Garden, or some other US port city.  These same records show VI researchers when their ancestors left the islands and came to the US (probably New York).  Wouldn’t it be nice if there were similar records showing movement to and from the Virgin Islands?

Turns out, there are.  Many people don’t realize that the Danish Archives in Copenhagen hold some very similar records.  These records were microfilmed and eventually imaged to DVD on to a set of 34 discs and several copies were given in 2011 as a gift to libraries on the Virgin islands, Puerto Rico, and Tortola.