In researching my husband’s Cannonier ancestors from St Kitts, I have come across connections to Cannoniers from Montserrat. I’ve also found one Cannonier who appears on the small West Indian island of Dominica. Originally populated by the native Ortoroid, Arawak and then Kalinago (also known as Carib) peoples, it was…
Author: <span>dreamer</span>
Period newspapers can provide some very interesting reading as historical backgrounds for family research. My husband’s great-great-grandmother, Lillian Gracey Macauley (abt. 1836-1920) was a comfortably situated, upper middle class, Irish Catholic housewife living in Belfast in the 19th century. I found an article from the Belfast Morning News from November…
An online book selling marketplace is offering for sale a letter written in 1831 to my husband’s 3rd great-grandfather from St Kitts, Frederick Walton Mallalieu. In the letter, a London banker named William Wilson is pushing the services of his newly formed firm of Hankeys, Plummer & Wilson, in the…
The Washington Post uses a rating system for statements made by politicians – the more Pinocchios earned, the less truthful the statement. That kind of analysis might be used in genealogy, to rate the accuracy of old family lore passed down through the generations. Is the old story completely wrong…
A 1764 diary of one Jabez Fitch provides a quick glimpse into an episode in one of my Brewster ancestor’s history. Jabez, a cousin of my 6th great-grandfather William Brewster, wrote about meeting William when he traveled from his home in the Oblong area of Dutchess County, New York to…
My husband’s 3rd great-grandfather was Frederick Walton Mallalieu (1802-1851), who was born in Lancashire, England, and came as a young man to the British West Indian island of St Kitts about 1820 and worked as the manager of the Belvedere sugar plantation. Only just leaving his teen years, his duties…
The voices of enslaved people of the past can sometimes be heard, albeit rarely and in painfully brief snippets. On the island of St Kitts, once part of the British West Indies, slavery existed until the 1830s. While the enslaved were brutally treated and had precious few rights, one avenue…
I have written before about my husband’s Cabral ancestors who came to St Kitts from Madeira in the 1850s as indentured workers. I’ve looked at different aspects of the Madeirans in St Kitts, such as the conditions that led to their immigration, the need for workers in post-emancipation British Caribbean,…
In the mid 1980s, my husband’s Kittitian grandmother sketched a quick family tree of her ancestors. On her maternal side, she wrote a few minimal facts… her grandfather was a Cannonier, whose family came from France or Italy, she thought, and her grandmother was labeled only “Cabral, Madeira”. We also…
Most of my paternal ancestors lived for hundreds of years in the Hudson River valley of NY State, from Putnam County in the south, extending up to Albany in the north. One lady from my Brewster line did something quite different – she followed her husband to the California gold…