Returning to the Gray and DeCamp branches of my maternal grandfather’s family tree, I was recently reminded of John DeCamp and Susannah Gray, my 5th great-grandparents. According to an 1874 newspaper obituary of their son George DeCamp Sr., John and Susannah lived in Winchester, Virginia in the early 1770s, and…
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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…
I have written about a brother of my husband’s great grandfather who was a Catholic priest in Northern Ireland. Father Henry Boyle was actually the half brother of Maurice John Macauley, a physician who was educated in Ireland but eventually settled in England. They shared the same mother, but had…
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…
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…
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…