There are a number of online sources for genealogical and historical records for the British West Indies, among them the websites familysearch.org, ancestry.com, and the Endangered Archives Programme of the British Library. For those able to travel, on site archives like the St Kitts and Montserrat National Trust. It’s often…
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Following up on the aftermath of the dueling story of John James Amory in St Kitts, I’ve looked further into the mysterious notation on the island’s 1834 slave registry listing for the West Farm sugar estate owned by Amory. In the final count of the enslaved inhabitants of St Kitts,…
A number of British newspapers in 1825 printed a story about a duel that took place in St Kitts, between John James Amory and George Forbes. It appears that the dispute was over how they both tried to win the affections of an unnamed lady from Nevis. According to the…
I’ve written about an ancestor on my maternal tree, my 10th great-grandfather Robert Coles, who was publicly shamed for drinking alcohol. He was made to wear a scarlet letter “D” in the 1630s in Boston. On my paternal tree, I’ve found another ancestor who suffered a similar public humiliation in…
I’ve written extensively about my husband’s roots in the West Indies, but I have almost no historic connection to that part of the world. There is one notorious character on my family tree however who lived for a time in the Dutch colony of Suriname, located on the northern coast…
I have written over the past few years about family connections to a variety of people who came from St Barts to St Kitts. The island of Saint Barthélemy has been ruled at different times by the French and the Swedes, and is now a semi-autonomous territory of France. The…
Following up on a post regarding the story of my maternal DeCamp ancestors, I have found some important family tree clues through a new feature on the familysearch.org website. Their full text search lets you search huge numbers of hand written (as well as typed) documents in their collections. The…
As fascinating as it is to research old records from St Kitts, one encounters all kinds of pitfalls that can thoroughly confuse us and send us down the wrong path. I was recently fortunate to get a look at some of the old parish records from the Catholic Immaculate Conception…
Recent temperatures in the teens, and a potentially huge snowstorm being forecast in the United States, has me thinking about the warm weather in St Kitts, and what was done in the past to provide ice to keep things cool. At one point, I was doing some quick look ups…
Returning to the Gray and DeCamp branches of my maternal grandfather’s family tree, I was recently reminded of John DeCamp and Susannah Gray, my 5th great-grandparents. According to an 1874 newspaper obituary of their son George DeCamp Sr., John and Susannah lived in Winchester, Virginia in the early 1770s, and…