Going back to the 1600s on my maternal grandfather’s tree, I’ve traced back to Laurens Jansen De Camp (about 1645-1719), a Huguenot who came to New Amsterdam in the 1660s. In the New World, he married Aeltje Mandeville, a Dutch woman born about 1657 in Holland. Aeltje’s father was Yellis…
Published October 2, 2021
“Six degrees of separation” is an esoteric math concept that began with a short story written in 1929. The idea is that in an ever shrinking world, the connections between any two people might be reduced to no more than six associations. A popular exercise is to find six degrees…
Published April 22, 2020
I’ve written about a branch of my husband’s West Indian family tree that includes Edgar Oscar Challenger, an historian, scholar, and labor leader from St Kitts. My hubbie is related to the Challenger family through his 3rd great grandparents from the island of Madeira. There’s another Edgar O. Challenger who…
Published December 6, 2019
New York City death records can provide a wealth of genealogical information. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to locate the death certificate of my husband’s 2nd great-grandmother, Ann Marie Richardson. Ann Marie came to NYC from St Kitts about 1900, with several of her adult children. She was part of…
Published September 26, 2019
The 2019 season of the BBC series Who Do You Think You Are features an episode on the ancestors of TV personality Sharon Osbourne. Her Victorian Irish ancestors fled the potato famine, sailing to Massachusetts in hopes of securing jobs in a textile mill that would provide happy, prosperous lives…
Published August 29, 2019
While looking through old civil birth records from St Kitts, I noticed a registration for the child of Carl C. Lyon, a photographer in the capital city Basseterre. The name rang a bell. A photograph has been passed down by my husband’s Kittitian family, featuring his great-grandmother Margaret Johanna Cannonier…
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 December 2, 2018
On my paternal tree, Andrew Colvin of Saugerties NY was listed in the 1850 census as a stone cutter. His grandfather John Colvin was born in Kirkudbright, Scotland in 1752. John immigrated to the United States in 1772, first going to Dutchess County, New York, then settling in Albany. A soldier…
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 2, 2014
My mother’s family tree is composed primarily of German, English, and Scotch Irish ancestors who came to the US as far back as the 1600s. They eventually settled in Western Pennsylvania and Eastern Ohio, but the earliest immigrants among them started out in New England and Long Island. After reading…
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