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.

VI Passenger Lists - And a Tempting Clue

Some 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. 

Genealogy in the Virgin Islands-A Curse … and a Blessing

I have been taking a time-out from my VI research and spreading my wings a little researching my wife’s family (I figure she’ll be a lot more cooperative with my obsession if I get her family involved). Her family comes from southwestern Virginia, a little town in Russell County called Swords Creek. With the experience I gained doing my own family research, I knew I would be able to make decent headway fairly quickly, I had no idea how easy, and hard, it would be researching an all-American family. In the process, I’ve had occasion to think contrast the challenges we face as Virgin Island researchers. So in this post I thought I’d contrast the two.

An Early Christmas Present from the CGL



Page from the St Croix Passenger List-1797

I got a Christmas present this year from the Caribbean Genealogy Library. Robert Upson of the CGL sent me DVDs containing high resolution images of 1,115 pages of registers of persons arriving and leaving Christiansted from 1797-1847.  Thank you Robert and the CGL for such a wonderful present!

The DWI Passenger Lists are of particular interest to me, since I am hoping to find information of my family’s travel to and from the islands. While most of my St Croix family was born there, some arrived from elsewhere (like my 3rd great-grandfather, Joseph Robson of England). I’m hoping that I can discover when they arrived on the island and that this will help me find where they came from.