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…
Category: <span>Uncategorized</span>
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…
One of my grandfather’s first cousins was Robert Gere Vosler (1904-1968) of Ellwood City, Pennsylvania. Before entering the navy in 1942, Robert worked as a musician, touring the northeast and mid-west of the United States, playing the trumpet and saxophone with the dance band The Keystone Serenaders. He enlisted in…
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…
In honor of the approach of Halloween, I’ll look at the only story of an accused witch that I’ve found in my family tree. On my maternal grandfather’s side of the family, the DeCamp family of New Jersey and Western Pennsylvania go back to colonial era Quakers on Long Island,…
I have written quite a bit about the Cannonier family history in St Kitts, Montserrat, and Dominica. This includes a connection between the Cannonier and Chambers family names in St Kitts that I’ve been able to flesh out somewhat recently. There is a St Kitts vital record from 1899 that…
The Carte de Visite was a type of photograph popular during the Civil War in the United States, mainly because it was relatively inexpensive to produce. It came in particularly handy for those with friends and family serving in the war, as they were produced in multiples and could be…
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…
A distant cousin of my husband was labor leader, historian, and scholar Edgar Oscar Challenger (1905-2000), through a shared ancestry of two Madeiran sisters who immigrated to St Kitts. I recently stumbled on a fascinating collection of letters that Challenger wrote in the 1930s to someone he always addressed respectfully…
One of my maternal 3rd great grandfathers was Christian Geyer, who was born in 1795 in Germany and immigrated to Ohio with his large family in 1842. My 2nd great grandfather was his son Edward. Edward had two brothers named Ernest and Gustavus, who both had an important notation next…