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, there are on site archives like the St Kitts and Montserrat National Trust.…
Category: <span>Mallalieu – Marshall</span>
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,…
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…
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…
While researching an interesting historical figure in the Caribbean, the Wesleyan minister Thomas Meade Chambers (1824-1892), I came across a large number of newspaper articles about his relationship to the temperance movement in St Kitts. He seems to have lit a firestorm of controversy in the small British West Indian…
I have written in the past about an unusual surname in my husband’s family tree. The name Canarikin (also Cannarakin, and other variants) appeared in St Kitts as far back as 1707, and was used as a middle name in the family in the later 1800s. I have not found…
I have been reading a fascinating thesis about the history of the middle class in Antigua. The author described ties that bound the Antiguan middle class in the 19th and 20th centuries, including common schools, occupations, businesses, social organizations, and marriage connections between similarly situated families. These ties existed throughout…
Listening to a recent NPR radio story about New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia during World War 2, I was reminded of the participation of one Mallalieu family member in the home front war effort. My husband’s great uncle was Reginald Mumford Mallalieu (1919-2000). He was born in the…
An interesting newspaper article in a September 1839 issue of the St Christopher Gazette and Charibbean Courier reported that a petition had been submitted to the House of Commons in London, by an MP named Sir Stephen Lushington. Lushington (1782-1873) was the Oxford educated son of the chairman of the…