The CGL Needs Your Help–Research Kickstarter

Was your family in the VI for Transfer Day? I know it’s been a long time since I have posted (and I promise to start up again soon), but I wanted to reach out to you to let you know that the Caribbean Genealogy Library on St. Thomas urgently needs your help. With the centennial of Transfer Day approaching, Volunteers from the CGL are coming to NARA II in College Park looking for records from the transfer years.  These records are not well known as the microfilms and finding lists at the Archives focus on the pre-1917 timeframe. Members of the CGL are volunteering to travel here to find and digitize records of this time period to make them available to you.  Several researchers near the College Park area are volunteering their time to assist (including me!).  But the project isn’t free.  So, how can you help?  While people are donating their time, it still costs quite a bit to a project like this done.  To offset that cost, the CGL has a kickstarter page at http://kck.st/1ywwEZd.  Go to the page to read all about the project.  Their budget is $2,000, but only $1,245 has been pledged so far.    If you don’t know how kickstarter works, they don’t get a dime unless they meet their goal of $2,000. The kickstarter only runs through 11:13 PM, Sunday May 3, so there are only 7 days to go.

I'm speaking at the DC Public Library on Saturday

I will be speaking at the DC Public Library, Southwest Library this Saturday, May 17.  They have asked me to speak generally about genealogy for a novice crowd, but you know I'm going to get my VI family in there somehow!

 

If you're in the DC area, please come by.  It's at 1:00.

 

Here's the link:  http://dclibrary.org/node 41907

900 Wesley Place SW

Washington, DC 20024

 

There are Benefits to Cleaning Out Your Basement

Under my living room I have a little storage space, about 3 feet high, running the full length and width of the room (13' x 24').  Nearly 1,000 cubic feet of dry inside storage space. Packed full. There are all sorts of things we have put in there - never to be seen again.   Along with an admirable collection of dust and debris, there are lamps, suitcases, old pillows and bedspreads, knickknacks, my old comic collection, one new car tire, an inflatable boat [anybody want an inflatable boat?],  and dozens of boxes of books and papers.  Somewhere in there, I knew, I had some old papers I had shipped up from my grandmother’s house in Christiansted, but where?  It seemed like less trouble going to all the way to St Croix to look through the collection at Whim than to tackle that beast of a storage area.

Well, Monday was a holiday for me but not for my wife, so I figured I’d surprise her and spend my day off cleaning out and organizing the years of junk, rather than “chillaxing” in front of the TV like most sensible people.  Since the ceiling is 3' high and I'm 6' 1", it was pretty cramped, and I'm still quite sore, but it was worth it. Not only did I complete a task we’ve been putting off for years, but I found that box of old papers. That night, I started going through them and made quite a find: the Royal Appointment of my great grandfather, Christian Andreas Conrad, to the office of Toldskontrølor (Comptroller of Customs) of St Croix in 1907.

The Virgin Islands at War

Painting of the Bombardment of Copenhagen

As regular readers probably know, I’ve been spending a lot of time lately going through the latest Ancestry.com St Croix collection (St Croix Death Records).  There a dozens of collections of records, comprising hundreds of documents.  One of these is a 32-image collection entitled “Free Male Inhabitants 1807”.  This sounds useful (who can’t use a list of Inhabitants from any particular year), but while it isn’t exactly what it seems, the document is actually much more interesting than that.

While Ancestry’s name of the collection certainly appears to be an accurate description (the people listed are free, male, live on St Croix, and it was for the year 1807), this isn’t a document of a census or a complete listing of free people.  The list is only adult males, children aren’t recorded.  Also it doesn’t appear to be comprehensive.  It appears that there are names missing from this document.  As a quick check, I looked at some burgherbriefs issued in 1806 and early 1807, figuring that those people would likely still be on island.  A Charles Ferdinand Wass, born in London, received his brief in December 1806 yet does not appear in the “List of Inhabitants” a year later.  Neither does an Alexander Instant, born in Scotland.  I also couldn't find Stephen Wheeler, born in North America, yet he received his brief in July 1807.

How useful is a “List of Inhabitants” that doesn’t show all the “Inhabitants”?   Well, not very, until you notice what the list really is.  To do that, I need to digress and discuss a bit of Virgin Island history that isn’t as well known as it should be.  It is a time when world events reached across the Atlantic to the little Danish islands and brought significant changes, affecting our families and their lives forever.

St Croix Death Records on Ancestry.com

When I began searching for my family there were very few records available online for St Croix. 

The best online collection was the St Croix census.  There were indexes at the Danish Demographic Database (http://www.ddd.dda.dk/ddd_en.htm) and VISHA (http://stx.visharoots.org/db.html) and images on Ancestry.com. 

There were a few church records on FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/) and the copy of NARA’s Colored People records M-1883 on Fold3 (which has since been posted to Ancestry.com). 

That was about it.