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 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 June 16, 2016
My husband recently had his DNA analyzed by ancestry.com. Unlike my family tree, which is limited to a fairly small area of northern Europe, his tree is a melting pot with branches from the United Kingdom, the Portuguese island of Madeira, the West Indies, and Africa. In addition to some…
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…
Published March 5, 2015
Because many genealogical records from the island of St. Kitts have not been digitized and put online, I have often turned to civil registry records on microfilm. While looking through page after page of Kittitian death records from the mid 1800s, I suddenly noticed that over the space of just…
Published December 8, 2014
While researching some of my husband’s Kittitian ancestors who settled in Harlem in the early 1900s, I have been coming across lots of information about immigrants from the West Indies, and their influence on the Harlem Renaissance period of the 1920s. Escaping the decline of the sugar industry and looking…
Published October 26, 2014
My husband’s paternal family tree comes from St. Kitts, a beautiful island in the Caribbean that was a British territory until its independence in 1983. His Kittitian ancestors are an interesting blend of British, French, African, and Madeiran lines. The Madeirans came to St. Kitts and Nevis in the mid-1800s,…