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.

Ancilla and Elizabeth: Who were they?

Probably one of the most enjoyable aspects of blogging genealogy is helping other people research their Virgin Islands roots.  The complete lack of helpful information for VI researchers makes it very easy to get frustrated and quit.  Hopefully, I help fill in a little there.  Apart from the sheer enjoyment of sharing my passion, working on someone else’s family allows me to work with records and locations that don’t pertain to my family. It helps me learn about the other people on the islands which gives me a better understanding of the culture and society that shaped my family.
Since it’s summer, most of my free time is devoted to the old “honey-do” list and I have been lax in both blogging and genealogy. I haven’t been as energized as I would like, so I was thrilled to receive this email from a blog reader:

I have been looking into Genealogy recently in St Croix and stumbled across your blog that is probably the most informative thing I have found. 

I have been looking into a little bit a family mystery.  We have not known much about my Great grandfathers Brother (I guess my great -great uncle).  Only that he left Denmark and died in the Caribbean.  Since I last looked into it a few years back there was not much available on the internet.  A couple of seeks ago, I tried again and found quite a bit.  His Gravestone on find a grave (his name is Jacob Sorensen).  He died a shoemaker in 1874 after at least 25 years on the island.  I am not sure how common it was for soldiers to stay on during the Danish period   
What I have been able to find through census records, Visha and Ancestry, is that he was married (something that we did not know).   I would like to find the marriage license.  I would also like to find any christening records (to see if there are any distant cousins out there).
 
What I also find intriguing is that I believe his wife (Elizabeth Block)would have been descended from Slaves because her mother's name was Ancilla Benners.  I have read that Ancilla means Slave girl in Latin.  I would love to find out more about them.

The reason I am writing is that I will be going to St Croix for a few days in a couple of weeks.  It is a family trip but I am hoping I will have a little time to do some research.  I live in Salt Lake City so I do have access to resources but I am wondering if you might have any suggestions on where I might be able to visit in St Croix to find a little bit more about my relatives.

Sorry for the long e-mail.  thanks  James

Well James, I wanted to give you something to help for your trip. While I certainly didn’t do an exhaustive research job since time is short, I think I found some things that will help your search in St Croix considerably.

Hester Franklin–Record of a Freed Slave in 1832

My grandfather’s mother was named Hester Franklin van Beverhoudt.She was the last of the van Beverhoudts in my family line.  I always thought her middle name, Franklin, was rather odd for a girl until I discovered that it was a critical link to another woman, her grandmother, Hester Franklin.  In fact, it was the name that offers the best evidence that Hester van  Beverhoudt’s mother, Adelaide Robson, was actually the daughter of Hester Franklin.

I have not located a birth or baptismal record for Hester Franklin.  From later records, she was born about 1804-1805 in St Croix.  I have found no documents of her early life.  The first time she is mentioned in the records is in the 1832 Free Colored Register.  The Register was an accounting of all free colored people on the Danish West India islands.  These documents are extremely valuable as they predate the earliest surviving census by 10 years.  Hester is listed in the Register of Free Colored Women for St Croix, Christiansted Jurisdiction. 

New Online Records: St Croix and St Thomas

This week I ran across three new resources for VI research that should be of considerable help to island researchers. These include an indexed collection, a new entry to Ancestry’s offerings, and a secret back-door entry into some census records from the Danish Archives.

Top 10 Sources for your Virgin Island Roots

Back when I began my search for my Virgin Island roots I found it hard to figure out where to start looking for information.  There are many books and blogs about record types and sources for US and European genealogy, but nothing that really talks to the wealth of documentation on the Danish West Indies.  In my work I have found and consulted a large variety of resources.  I have by no means exhausted them.  Below I list the Top 10 that should be on the "must read" list for anyone researching their Virgin Island family, and where these resources are.  Many of these records are available at the St Croix Landmarks Library at Whim and the Caribbean Genealogical Library in Charlotte Amalie, but as I am off-island, I have indicated where they can be found from the mainland.

So, What’s Interesting to You?

I’ve just returned from a short vacation to the sand and sun of southern Florida.  While I was away, I got an email from Bernice Bennett, the host of a genealogy oriented Internet Radio Show, Research at the National Archives & Beyond.  Ms. Bennett asked me if I would be a guest on her show on October 25, 2012 to discuss my research and the interesting topic of Virgin Islands genealogy.  Of course, I can’t refuse such an opportunity.

The show is a live broadcast web-feed show, with listeners commenting and asking questions through on-line chat.  It airs every Thursday at 8pm Central Time. The shows are available as podcast on iTunes for those, like me, who listen to the show later.  The show covers virtually all aspects of genealogy and family history.  I listen regularly.

Ms. Bennett asked me to send her an outline, or at least talking points, for what I want to discuss.  That’s where you can help.  What topics are interesting to you?  Was there a post you would like me to talk more about?  A topic I’ve not addressed you’ve been interested in?  Records I should discuss?  Island history?  Let me know and I’ll see if I can talk about it on the air.  What should we tell the rest of the community about our heritage? All ideas and suggestions are welcome.

Leave me a comment or send me an email at paradise200blog@verizon.net and let me know the kind of things you want to hear about, or things you think the other listeners would be interested in.  After I firm up the outline, I’ll post links to the show and information on how to get the podcast.  I hope you’ll tune in.

It’s not often the Virgin Islands get mentioned in mainstream genealogy circles, much less get a whole broadcast episode devoted to them.  Let’s make the most of it.

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.

New Ancestry.com VI Records-First Impressions

After seeing the large data set posted to Ancestry.com I was very excited to see what I could find.  Turns out there’s a lot there, but it takes a bit of getting used to to understand what’s there.  From my early browsing it appears that the collection is from several sources.  Ancestry doesn’t help much in their source citation:

Ancestry.com. St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands, Slave and Free People Records, 1733-1930 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2012.
Original data: U.S. Virgin Islands St. Croix Records. Frederiksted, U.S. Virgin Islands: Virgin Islands History Associates (VISHA).

That may be where the data came from, but it doesn’t help in understanding the provenance of the records.

St Croix Census–The Missing Ancestry.com Images

Regular readers will know that I have been spending much of my free time at NARA Archives II in College Park, MD, going through microfilms of their Virgin Islands records, the Selected Records of the Danish West Indies 1672-1917.  Since Fold3 has the 11 roll set of M-1883,Essential Records Concerning Slavery and Emancipation online, I have been devoting my time to photographing M-1884, Records with Genealogical Value.  These records have been keeping me busy as a proverbial bee.  Since I haven’t really spent much time discussing what I found, I thought I’d start by showing you where the missing Ancestry.com images are.