My husband’s great uncle (who he grew up calling grandpa) was a Mallalieu, born in St Kitts in 1919. His middle name was Mumford, which would be considered unusual by most Americans today, but in his Kittitian family, it wasn’t the first occurrence. There was an earlier family member who…
Published March 31, 2019
While trying to reconstruct the history of family from Saint Kitts, I sometimes look at records in the Former British Colonial Dependencies Slave Registers. They can not only give clues to enslaved people, but also their slave owners. My husband’s third great-grandmother, Catherine Fasioux, was living in St Kitts in the early 1800s, where…
Published February 16, 2019
As a follow up to the blog post regarding an Andrew Cannonier of St Kitts, I have fallen down a rabbit hole with another Andrew Cannonier, who left the beautiful island of St Christopher and jumped, with both feet, into life as an American. I have found multiple Andrew Cannoniers…
Published January 19, 2019
There are challenges researching the family tree for a surname like Smith or Jones, but it can be equally difficult to trace back an unusual last name. My husband’s great grandmother from St Kitts was born Margaret Johanna Cannonier (1868-1940), and I have been trying to make sense of how…
Published August 7, 2018
Among the surnames of the St Kitts branch of my husband’s family tree is Maillard. Ann Francis Catherine Maillard (1828-1919) his 2nd great-grandmother, married William Mallalieu. William and Ann lived in the parish of Saint Ann, located on the northern half of the island. Curious about how far back the Maillards may…
Published November 28, 2017
My husband’s ancestors from St Kitts include his 3rd great-grandparents originally from Madeira, Francisco Ricardo de Meneses Cabral and Libania Joaquina Vieira da Silva. Their daughter Eliza was his 2nd great-grandmother, while another daughter Ascenia Augusta was the grandmother of Edgar Oscar Challenger (1905-2000), a labor leader and historian of St…
Published June 21, 2017
The Moravian Archives in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania holds a wealth of period documents from their missionary efforts in St Kitts. Examination of the death records from 1854 shows a heartbreaking number – page after page – of parishioner deaths from cholera. Unfortunately, a combination of poor sanitary conditions and ignorance about…
Read More A fog of ignorance in the cholera epidemic of 1854
Published April 4, 2017
In the civil marriage and birth records of St Kitts, my husband’s 2nd great grandfather Richard Johnson Marshall is listed as a school master, with race recorded as “colored”. It is known that he was born about 1845 on the nearby British West Indian island of Antigua, only a few…
Published September 3, 2016
Finding genealogical information for families enslaved in the western hemisphere is always a challenge. Information on enslaved people was sparsely recorded (if at all). Slave registers were created in British colonies like St Kitts in the early nineteenth century, after the slave trade was abolished by Great Britain in 1807.…
Published August 31, 2015
Two recent episodes of the “Who Do You Think You Are” TV series in the US and the UK featured celebrities discovering Huguenot roots. American TV host Tom Bergeron and British actor Derek Jacobi learned about their French Huguenot ancestors and the challenges they faced in the 16th and 17th…