A Burgherbrief Brings Down a Brick Wall

Sometimes all it takes is a single document, a single word, to provide the key to breaking down a brick wall that has stood firm to all assaults.  This week I made progress on one of my very first brick walls that has haunted me since I started researching my family history.  This wall was my 2nd great grandfather, the Conrad from Denmark.

The Continuing Saga of the VI Records

Last night I posted that the new record set from Ancestry.com vanished (Virgin Islands Records Vanished from Ancestry.com).  Through e-mail, spoke with George Tyson of the Virgin Islands Social History Association (VISHA), the provider of those records, and he told me that the collection will be back, at least most of it.  Apparently there was a lack of communication and some records were posted accidentally.

While some records belong to the public (National Archives, etc.), some, particularly church records, do not.  In order to obtain the vast collection, VISHA worked with each record provider to gain access.  Not all of those agreements allow posting to the internet.  Until the owners agree, their records cannot be made available.  VISHA asked Ancestry.com to pull the records until they can be parsed out and/or permissions are granted.

While I would love to access those records, I have to support VISHA’s decision.  We, as genealogists, rely on the goodwill of our record holders and must respect their wishes to maintain that goodwill.  If we don’t, we can expect private institutions to close their books to us completely.  That would be very bad.
George said that the plan is to post the remaining collections soon.  Since I, personally, am most interested in the records from the Danish National Archives (since I can’t go there easily), this is very good news.  Once they go back up I will continue my series on how to use the collection.

Virgin Islands Records Vanished from Ancestry.com

Well, it’s a sad day on Ancestry.com.  If you follow this blog you will know that last week Ancestry.com posted a new collection of Virgin Islands, specifically St Croix, records. I posted two blog entries, New Virgin Islands Records on Ancestry.com, and New Ancestry.com VI Records-First Impressions.  Well, as of this evening the collection is gone from Ancestry.  It doesn’t even appear in the “New Collections” page any more. I don’t know if they are gone for good or just temporarily, but I can tell you I’m going to miss them.  Even though they were images only, without indexes, I found some real goldmines in there for my family research.  Luckily I got some key bits before the collection was taken down.

I had planned to continue writing articles on how to interpret sourcing of the collection.  I even nearly finished one on interpreting call numbers from the Danish Archives (Rigsarkivet) West Indian Local Archive (VILA).  I guess I’ll have to hold it for when (and if) the collection ever returns.

If you found the collection useful, or had planned to use it, and would like it back, leave a comment.  You never know who’s reading my little blog and we should let everyone know that we value these resources.

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.

New Virgin Islands Records on Ancestry.com

One of my fellow VI researchers and blog readers, Gene Miller, sent me an email today letting me know of Ancestry.com’s latest additions.  It seems that they have updated their Virgin Islands record collections.

• Updated:  St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands, Slave Plantation and Town Head Tax Lists, 1772-1821
  30,400 Records
• New Collection: St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands, Slave and Free People Records, 1733-1930
  53,254 Records

According to the references on Ancestry, these were provided by VISHA.