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 two islands lie only about 40 miles apart in the Caribbean, and there was clearly movement between them in the nineteenth century. The three surnames from St Barts I’ve come across in my research of St Kitts are Laplace, Ledé, and Lyon.
The Laplace name connects to my husband’s Cabral ancestors through his 2nd great-grandmother Eliza de Meneses Cabral, who came to St Kitts from Madeira. Eliza’s daughter through her second husband married Ernest Augustus Laplace in 1890. The Laplace family were merchants and auctioneers in St Kitts, but their prior roots were in St Barts. Ernest Laplace’s parents were August Laplace and Marie Adelaide Ventre, who came to St Kitts in the 1860s. Multiple Catholic marriage records identify August and Marie as “natives of St Barthelemy”. When August died in 1880 in Basseterre, St Kitts, a local newspaper stated
“Mr. Laplace was a native of the neighboring isle of St. Bartholomew and came to this island at the early age of ten years… by degrees he won the esteem of all those with whom whilst growing up as a young man business brought him into contact…. The deceased was a very warm friend and a genial companion, and though very stern in business a friend to all those without respect to race or creed who needed the helping hand of some ‘good Samaritan’. In the defense of his right as a citizen, though sojourning in a foreign clime, the land of his adoption, he was unflinching and uncompromising wherever justice fixed her seat, yet he was possessed nevertheless of a forgiving spirit to his legal opponents.”
I came across the surname Ledé from St Barts in reference to a marriage in the Catholic church at Basseterre between Anistair Ledé and Louisa Henrietta Cannonier. The Ledé surname is identified multiple times in the Catholic parish records as coming from St Barts. In Alistair and Louisa’s 1882 marriage record, he was described as the “legitimate son of Gabriel Ledé, and Eurelia Alexis, from the island of Saint Bartholomew”. He worked as a baker during his years in St Kitts. The Ledé name is apparently quite common today in St Barts – a man named Xavier Lédée is the current political leader of the island, with the title President of the Collectivité of Saint-Barthélemy.
Finally, I’ve done a fair amount of research on a traveling photographer who was born in Saint Barts but spent most of his life moving back and forth between New York City and St Kitts. Carl Constantine Lyon was born in St Barts in 1835 of Swedish parents. He applied for US citizenship in 1856, but spent the next forty-odd years sailing between the United States, St Barts, and St Kitts. In the early 1860s he was working as a daguerreotype photographer living in Brooklyn, NY. He continued his life as a photographer in the West Indies and Brooklyn, until his death in 1914 in Basseterre. His connection to my husband’s family isn’t genealogical, but rather historical – a photo was taken of his great-grandmother and her two sisters in St Kitts in the early 1880s. The picture is labeled on the back “Photographic Artist C C Lyon, St Kitts West Indies”.
Sources
- StMaartenNews.com, Xavier Lédée: From local roots to the Presidency of Saint-Barthélemy, 2026
- C. C. Lyon – A West Indian Photo Artist, unpublished manuscript by Gösta Simmons, 2023
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