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>St. Kitts</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,…
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 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…
My research continues on the surname Cannonier in my husband’s family tree from St Kitts. One Kittitian named Andrew Cannonier came to the United States in the 1860s and fought in the Civil War. A newspaper clipping that recently popped up online gave me more information about the route that…
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 a Cannonier relative on my husband’s family tree from St Kitts. She was born Blanche Wentworth Cannonier in 1862, daughter of Thomas Tobias Cannonier and Anna Maria Gould Cannonier. Blanche was married in 1894 to a Kittitian planter (sugar estate manager), whose name…
A very interesting document I saw during a recent visit to the St Kitts and Nevis National Archives was a will from the year 1886, written by a widow with a married name that I’ve done extensive research on. Her name was Mary Cannonier (maiden name Delves), a woman of…