I Found My Great-Great Grandfather

Today I made a great find at the Family History Center.  I located my 2nd great grandfather. This was a brick wall that I have been struggling with virtually from Day 1 of my genealogical journey.  I got started on this hobby (obsession) by chancing across an on-line database, the Danish Demographic Database (Dansk Demografisk Database).  This is a free searchable database of Danish censuses and church records.   They have a link to the St. Croix Census records on their site.  By querying this I found my grandfather (Ludvig Conrad), great grandfather (Christian Andreas Conrad), and his mother (Sophia Andersen).   No father.  No Conrad. I searched the VISHA database and Ancestry.com. Try as I might, I couldn’t locate a Conrad to be the source of that family name.  No Conrad appeared in any census that would fit.

A Great Find

I got a nice email today.  I had sent a request for information to the St. Croix Landmarks Society a short time ago asking for information regarding house addresses in Christiansted.  I wanted to be able to see where family members lived and who their neighbors were.  Unfortunately, knowing the addresses just wasn’t sufficient.  Just like tracking family migrations in the US from state to state, mine migrated from street to street. For example, Johannes van Beverhoudt (b. c. 1760) lived at 11 Queen Cross St and moved to 45 Fisher St.  How far was that?  Since these streets run perpendicular, this could have been next door or clear across town. 
The problem is that addresses tend to be unimportant in Christiansted.  Even current residents don’t know the house numbers.  Even Google Maps didn’t know.  It finds the street, but not the number.  I had tried every way I could think of, even posting a question to the St. Croix Message board at Ancestry.com
All this got resolved with my email.  The St. Croix Landmarks Society just sent me a scan of a US Government Public Works map entitled “Old Limits of Christiansted Town” with each unit marked and numbered.  The map is undated, but since it is a US Government map, it must have been after 1917.

Section of Christiansted map showing the location of 45 Fisher St. in Red.

By looking at the map, I am finally able to answer the question about the residences.  11 Queen Cross and 45 Fisher St are contiguous properties.  They moved just around the corner.

My Microfilm’s In–An Offer for Readers

I just found out that the microfilm roll I ordered from the FHL is in.  It is the Lutheran church records for St Croix (FHL INTL Film 38861) covering:

• Baptisms 1797-1865
• Confirmations 1788-1860
• Marriages 1788-1864
• Burials 1788-1822
• Communicants 1805-1818

Given the number of Lutherans in my van Beverhoudt family, this may be a gold mine, and it may be a dud.  I’m hopeful for the latter.  I figure it will take me a while to get through the roll, given the time it took to go through the Anglican records posted by FamilySearch.org, so if I’m doing the time perhaps I can help someone else too.

If you think your ancestor might be on this roll, please let me know what to look for so I can keep an eye out for it.  I’ll need to know the names and approximate dates, and which section (baptism, marriage, etc.) I should look in.  If I can, I’ll try to get a scan of the relevant pages.

I’ll start at the beginning and go to the end either way, and after I finish this roll, I’ll order another (unless I find that my family didn’t go to that church).  The collection is 4 rolls.

I’m hoping to get started Monday Oct 10, so let me know if you want me to look for something.

Case Study: Adelaide’s Maiden Name

Sometimes it’s nice to have a family entirely contained within a single island the size of St. Croix.  From 1835-1911, 87% of the census respondents listed St. Croix as their birthplace. In the mid 1800s, most people didn’t travel from the island and lived their whole lives there.  This makes it possible to do things that are difficult in other places.  One key technique for research that doesn’t work as well elsewhere is “process of elimination”.  I used this process to find my 2nd great grandmother’s maiden name. In this post, I will show the process I followed and the value one can get by looking beyond the ancestors to other people in the document. Virtually all evidence I found was indirect evidence, but indirect evidence can be as compelling as direct sometimes.

The Problem

My great grandmother’s name was Hester Franklin van Beverhoudt (isn’t that a strange middle name for a girl?).  I found her in the 1860 census, age 3, living with her father Claudius and mother, Adelaide.  Adelaide and Claudius were listed as married in both the 1855 and 1857 censuses. The question was, how to find Adelaide’s maiden name.

Anglican Church Records at FamilySearch.org

A visitor to my blog suggested that I talk about the sources I'm looking at in my own research to share what's out there and perhaps give some commentary on the sources. That sounded like a good idea, so I'll start with the most recent collection I've been viewing.

FamilySearch.org is the on-line presence of the Family History Library (FHL) of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS). Among other things, the new FamilySearch site hosts browsable images of VI church records. On September 7, 2011 they added a collection of Anglican church records from St Croix for both St John's Episcopal Anglican in Christiansted and St Paul's in Frederiksted. These records are organized into groups of Baptism, Marriage, Confirmation, and Burials spanning 1765-2009. This is quite a large collection of images of the church registers. Most of them appear to be originals, even showing editorial comments (such as payments for baptisms). Since, as I showed in my earlier post, Anglican was the largest denomination on the island, these are quite valuable resources for genealogy...