That is the question that I am currently asking myself, have I in fact discovered the mother and sibling of Christina Chamberlain right there in a Census document that I have looked at several times before?
The document in question is the 1870 Danish West Indies Census, here you can see Christina with Ancilla living next to her “father” Ludwick Chamberlain, and in the house above is Catherine “Caty” Simmons. I’ve seen the name Simmons before, in the trees of people who seem to have the same relatives as I do but they haven’t tested or maybe they have and we don’t match? Whatever it is I never ran across them in my brother’s DNA relatives and I have not seen them in mine.
U.S. Virgin Islands Census, 1835-1911 (Danish Period)
This record alone isn’t enough to say Hey! That’s her Mama, it was the other records that I found that made this even more compelling, here is Caty and Christina in the 1860 Danish West Indies Census, it lists Christina as her daughter.
Danish West Indies, Denmark, Census, 1835-1911
And here in the 1857 Census is Caty with Judy Powlis also known as Judith her other daughter and Judy’s son Carl.
Danish West Indies Census, 1841-1901
In the 1850 Census, I found Catherine, Judith, and Christina in the same place. I have not identified the other people yet, possible relatives? Maybe.
I know I am late to talk about this but that’s because I’ve been waiting to see if they were doing staggered updates. It seems that everyone who was going to receive this update already received it.
If you have no idea what I’m talking about back in January 23andMe added new Ethnolinguistic Groups to their Ancestry Composition, basically they were able to narrow down where in Africa your ancestors might have come from based on the number of Africans you matched with. This is very important to the African diaspora because the majority of us have no idea where our ancestors came from.
The Groups added include Fula & Wolof, Mandinka, Temne & Limba, Mende, Yoruba, Igbo, and so many more, you can read the full blog post from 23andMe here.
When I saw someone post their updated results on Reddit I immediately went to 23andMe to check both my father and my accounts. My father’s results were the first I saw, I was hoping to see where in Ghana our family came from but he did not receive a match for there even though it is his largest percentage. Instead, he received a match for the Yoruba people.
My Father’s Nigerian update
I clicked over to my account but I didn’t seem to have any matches. I assumed they were rolling out the update to newer accounts first but it’s been a month later and I still have no update. I honestly don’t know how they match the profiles because my father has only one full African DNA relative and he is from Angola, not Nigeria. On the other hand, I have three Nigerian and one Ghanaian DNA relative with direct ancestry from Africa.
No updates for me
Interestingly enough, one of my aunts did 23andMe and her results came in just as they released the new groups. She is my maternal aunt and received two groups. Igbo and Yoruba. She’s also mostly African with a small bit of European which further cements the idea that we had Indigenous DNA from my maternal grandmother a tall tale. All my life I’ve been told we had Kalinago ancestry and the fact that there are Kalingao people in Dominica made it seem not unlikely, why would my mother, grandmother lie about such a thing, when I showed my results after phasing with my father my mother told me that one of my aunts said it wasn’t Kalinago but some other Asian, this can’t be true either since it would have shown up in my results, my aunts results, or even my mother and aunt’s first cousin. Both my aunt and their full first cousin show no trace of Indigenous or Asian DNA. So what’s the truth? The truth is more than likely a biracial child they tried to pass off as Asian.
Aunt Nigerian groupsComparing my aunt (left) with her full first cousin (right)
I honestly thought my mother’s maternal first cousin would help separate the DNA relatives and he has in a way but like all small Islands, there are overlaps so I’m still stuck trying to figure out how some of these people are related. All I can do at this point is hope that someone who knows more than I do is willing to share what they know.
As a Caribbean expat I’m always excited when I find something that for me speaks to the Caribbean culture and while I know VitaMalt is not a Caribbean product the fact that I first had it in the Caribbean will always remind me of home. Ever since I was a young child VitaMalt has never been my preferred malt drink, that title is held by Malta India from Puerto Rico, and if you didn’t know the US Virgin Islands has a special friendship with Puerto Rico so we enjoy many of their food, drinks, and mix the languages.
From a very young age, my family has always drunk Malta India over VitaMalt, I often found Vita Malt to be way too bitter for my palette and Malta to be sweeter but since moving to France the only Malt drink I’ve actively drunk has been Vita Malt. I was shocked when I found it to taste about the same as my beloved Malta.
So far I’ve had the original flavor, the Ginger flavored one, and the Coconut and Hibiscus one, it’s kind of hard for me to actually say which is my favorite since they all seem to cater to a specific mood, I love everything Ginger so maybe the Ginger has a slight advantage over the others.
This was an interesting flavor, I didn’t think I would like it but it’s nice, I only have the Acai flavor left to try.
I’m still waiting to try the Acai flavored one, I’m really interested in seeing what it tastes like because, with the Coconut and Hibiscus one you can’t really taste the Hibiscus, I would be very hard-pressed to say that you can taste it at all. It definitely has a very Coconut flavor but there is a hint of something else. I’ve actually had it again since this post and I can see us drinking whenever we find it in the store because it’s so hard to find things that remind me of home.
At the end of October, I received from one of my sisters by way of an aunt who got them from my step-grandmother the baptism records for not only my grandfather but also two of his sisters. This was like a gift from the universe because I had pretty much given up on this side of my family tree with little to no information forthcoming. I was at a dead-end and just did not know how to move forward. I put this branch of my tree on the back burner and turned my attention elsewhere.
I think it was last month or maybe even earlier than that Familysearch released a bunch of indexed records for several Caribbean Islands and Dominica was included, I helped with the indexing but only got records from St. Kitts so I was pleasantly surprised to see Dominica had been included. Unfortunately for me the records included seemed to only be for Saint Patrick parish which I don’t know if either one of my grandparents had family from there. I know they both were born in Roseau which is part of the Saint George parish. I did find a few Xavier in the Saint Patrick parish with a few of the names looking very familiar, one seemed to show up in my brother’s DNA relatives but of course, I have no idea how they are actually related so now I’m attempting to triangulate and group-specific people according to how they are related to my brother and each other. I really need to do my Ancestry test and send it off for that extra connection.
You will need to sign in to actually search the records, if you don’t have an account it’s very easy to sign up for a free account.
Here are the baptism records I received (I tried to improve them so it would be easier to view the information, they were very blurry and hard to read before, some of them still are):
In order of age, we have the baptism record of Olive Xavier, child of Joseph Xavier and Jane Xavier née Augustus born in Roseau on the 18th day of December 1914. She was baptized in the Catholic Church on the 7th day of February 1915. The other names are really hard for me to make out but it looks like her sponsors were Ludovic Oscar and Marian S…?
The next baptism record belongs to Mabel Xavier, child of John Xavier and Marian Xavier -Augustus born in Giraudel Dominica on the 16th day of April 1919. She was baptized in the Catholic Church on the 18th day of May 1919. Her sponsors were James Samuel and Josephine S…? I think it’s the same last name from the first record but I can’t really make it out.
The last baptism record belongs to my grandfather, Norbert Anthony Xavier, child of John Xavier and Jane Xavier born in Roseau on the 12th day of June 1931. He was baptized in the Catholic Church on the 12th? day of July 1931. His sponsors were Michael T…? and L…? Nicholson?
I’m left with so many questions after seeing these baptism records, Are Marian and Jane the same person? Are Joseph and John the same person? If so then John has another name to add, my grandfather told me his father was also called Roderick so here we have a John aka Joseph aka Roderick Xavier who was married to a Marian who might or might not be Jane Augustus.
I’m hoping beyond hope that Familysearch transcribes the church records from the Saint George parish, they do have it but it’s a film and I have no way of getting to a Family History Center so the only way will be an index. Next year maybe? Possibly? Please?
Welcome back to #CrucianwithMami, today I’m going to talk about Dey or They as they say it in Standard English.
In Standard English, They have five forms (They, Them, Their, Theirs, and Themselves) but in Crucian it only has four (Dey, Dem, Dey-own or Dey’s, Deyself or Demself).
No doubt you’ve noticed by now that we pronounce the th sound as d which is called Alveolar stops, it’s more than likely a carry-over from our Irish Overseers, it’s actually hilarious and interesting. The other day I was scrolling through Tiktok and came upon some Irish videos and I’ve always loved the accent so I said why not? sounds good to me. Going through several videos I landed on one of someone talking about accents from Northern Ireland and how hard it can be to understand and I paused…
What’s so hard about it? I thought to myself, I understood everything!
Anyway, here are some sample sentences:
They don’t belong here.
Dey dohn belong ya.
Are you going to the party with them?
You goin tuh deh jam wih dem?
The red one is their house.
Deh red one is dey house.
Are you going to pay for theirs too?
Yu goin tuh pay fo dey-own too?
Yu goin tuh pay for dey’s too?
His parents are going to blame themselves.
He parents dem goin blame deyself.
He parents dem goin blame demself.
Ah the lovely deyself, it is Crucian for theirselves which is a non-standard way of saying themselves. You might hear theirselves said in some dialects but it is almost never written. In Crucian it is perfectly fine to say and write deyself and I find it more natural to say deyself vs demself. Like every other nuance in Crucian, these differences just comes down to personal preferences.
Welcome back to #CrucianwithMami, in the last lesson I mentioned that I was going to focus on the 3rd person pronoun He but I felt like it made more sense to talk about both He and She since they are very similar.
In Standard English, He and She both have four forms (He, She, Him, Her, His, Hers, Himself, and Herself) in Crucian He and She also have four forms (He, She, Hiz, Ha, He own, She own, Heself, and Sheself).
As you no doubt noticed we don’t say Him or Her it’s He and She, once more I don’t exactly know why but I’m sure there’s a reason for that.
While I was doing this lesson I realized that sometimes instead of Hiz or Ha I sometimes will use He or She, I hadn’t noticed until I started forming the sentences. I find that very interesting because by itself I will say Hiz for his and Ha for hers but in a sentence, it is more natural to say He or She.
In the next lesson, I will talk about 3rd thing, It or Ih as we say in Crucian.
Welcome back to #CrucianwithMami, today I am going to talk about the Crucian second person pronoun Yu sometimes said as Yo.
In Standard English you have four forms (You, Your, Yours, and Yourself) in Crucian there are also four forms (Yu, Yo, Yo’s, and Yoself)
I wish I could offer an in-depth explanation as to why we say Yoself in Crucian rather than Yurself but I feel like I’m learning about my own language alongside you!
Here are some sample sentences:
SE- You are a student.
Yu a student.
SE- Wash your hands.
Wash yo hand dem. (I will explain dem in another lesson)
Like my previous posts, which you can find here, here, and here, I’ll be showing off my new Ancestry Composition (AC). In the last post Phasing my 23andme, you read about how my AC changed when I got a test kit for my father and he finally got his results. This update is, interesting to say the least. My AC I felt was improved but my father’s…well I guess it was improved a bit but the percentages and the categories they ended up in was less than ideal. I know that it is difficult to separate French & German from British & Irish and then you add in the small percentages of Spanish & Portuguese as well as Italian. It makes sense when you think about how often borders have shifted but my father’s AC. I’ll just show you below.
His F&G and B&I quite literally switched positions and for someone who just got a DNA test, it would seem like his father wasn’t actually his father! It is nice to see most of the Broadly gone and I hope in future updates they can attempt to break down the African regions because there are so many different ethnic groups in Ghana alone. Just by statistics alone, you’d assume that Ghanaian ancestry would be Akan but there’s just no way to tell. Try searching for records you say? That is nearly impossible when you have no idea who the father of your great-grandmother was or not being able to go past a certain point. For instance, my Father’s mother was born in the US Virgin Islands, her mother in St. Croix and her father St. Thomas, her father’s line is a giant mystery. I have been able to track back to my Great Great Grandparents Joseph Alexander Boyles born about 1869 but I have a dead-end there, I don’t know where he was born or who his parents were and I don’t know why the last name went from Boyles to Boynes. Sarah Holm is also a complete blank, she was born about 1880 but I don’t know where or who her parents are. I keep looking in my DNA relatives but those names don’t appear to be shared with anyone else. Makes you wonder. For my other Great Great Grandparents, one side is more researched than the other, George Petersen born in St. Croix (assumed) around ?, I currently have a George Petersen born on August 29, 1881, to Thomas Petersen and mother is unknown. Thomas was born in St. Croix around 1856. Here the line stops, Petersen is a very common surname on the Island and everyone assumes that they are all connected but there’s no proof to this, I don’t even have any DNA relatives with the last name. The more researched side belongs to Maud Hines born in St. Croix on July 28, 1899, to Ann “Annie” Eliza Dorothea Boldt (See the baptism record below)
Unfortunately, Maud’s father is unknown and the baptism record provides no clues. Ann was born on August 8, 1872, the daughter of Joseph “Joe” Boldt born about 1842, and Christina Chamberlin born about 1846 (Baptism record below)
I have a lot of DNA relatives for my Boldt line so I was able to verify that I had the right parents. Joe and Christina were married on October 28, 1869, just two months after the birth of their first child Ancilla, who was born on August 7, 1869.
So all my Dansk Vestindien lines end here and I have no idea how to break these walls…yet.
Speaking of Dansk Vestindien, I’m kind of surprised that 23andme still doesn’t have an option for there in the Recent Ancestors in the Americas category. They didn’t have Saint-Barthélemy before but I spoke about it on the forums and they added it. My father and I don’t have that but I have Dominica and Trinidad and Tobago. My father has no regions for the Caribbean at all and I find that weird because you’re suppose to have at least 5 DNA relatives with all 4 grandparents from that area to get the region but he has more than 5 for Saint-Barthélemy and he doesn’t have the region. What gives 23?
I know of relatives in Trinidad and Tobago from my father’s side but to actually get the region is surprising until I checked it, I have as many relatives on my mother’s side as I do on my father’s, who knew!
I’m assuming most of the people from Trinidad and Tobago are from my father’s paternal side because there were a few people who left Saint-Barthélemy and moved to Trinidad. I was contacted by one a few years ago and it was a revelation to me, I had always thought that most left St. Barts for either the States or the Virgin Islands, I was wrong, so wrong. I learned about those who left for Australia, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, those who moved back to France. They are quite literally everywhere.
Here’s my AC update, like I said it was an improvement unlike my father’s.
Yes, I have Nouvelle-Aquitaine and Occiataine regions for France just like my father, imagine when I first took my test I only had 3.3% French.
I look forward to seeing what the future will show because they almost always offer something interesting to look at.
I was thinking how crazy it is that I began my genealogy journey in 2006, that’s 14 years ago, way older than my oldest child. I was barely a child myself, 19 years old and I had no clue what I was doing. I just jumped on Ancestry and started putting in names my parents gave me. I hit a huge brick wall because there were so many people with the same name and people frequently used only their middle names or nicknames. I did a google search for my great grandparents’ names which lead me to a thread on Ancestry about a family with that name. It looked correct so I put it in my tree. Biggest rookie mistake ever!
Luckily for me, it was the correct couple and that lead me to a distant cousin who had all kinds of information on my grandfather’s mother’s family. This was the first time I’d learned that her name wasn’t Josephine but Marie Josephine. The tree of this cousin took me all the way to Joseph Simon Turbé my 5x great grandfather. I assumed he was born in St. Barts as well since everyone else seemed to have been also, another rookie mistake. I did another google search which leads me to Anne Marie Danet’s post on her blog 3 – First French in the Antilles, you can see on line 24 there is a Joseph Turbe who married Anne Rose Greaux and he is the ancestor of all Turbe on the Island. This Joseph is my great grandfather. This suggested that he was from Nantes but he wasn’t born there which was a brick wall I had for a long time.
To break this wall I scoured all over the net, looked at several family trees, and then I found a reference somewhere that said he was born in Couëron, I had never heard of this place before.
Couëron is a commune in the Loire-Atlantique department in western France. It is part of the historic French Brittany. Couëron is one of the 24 communes of the Nantes Métropole.
It makes a bit of sense why he would be considered a Nantes native but it is very unhelpful for a novice. So, I now knew where he was from but I had no idea where to find information about his parents. I asked a question on Wikitree in 2018 asking if anyone could help me find his Acte de naissance or Acte de baptême. A very helpful person pointed me in the right direction and I found not only his Acte de baptême but that he had a brother! I haven’t explored much of his brother’s descendants, maybe I should do that sometime soon.
Now I work on all the families of Saint-Barthélemy, sometimes I find a link to my family and realize this stranger suddenly became a distant family member. I spoke a bit about it in my post about my Saint-Barthélemy Project last year, I actually have an update on that post that I just never posted about. I now have the ancestry of my 3x great-grandparents Anne Louise Chapelain and Pierre LaPlace thanks to the author of The Saint-Barth Islander. He was very helpful and I was able to make connections on those lines in my brother’s Ancestry DNA tree. The Joseph Chaplin that I thought was my grandmother’s brother was in fact her brother and someone made a typo on his age.
For now, I’m working on the Governors of the US Virgin Islands/Danish West Indies. It is much more challenging work compared to researching my French ancestry. A lot of them were descendants of slaves and those records are not so easy to go through.
If you’re also looking to do some research in the Dansk Vestindien I suggest this site Caribbean Genealogy Library or CGL for short, I find myself using the records for St. Thomas a lot when working with my French side because many of them left St. Barts and ended up in the Virgin Islands. I’m particularly fond of the:
For census records, during Danish time you can find those on Ancestry which of course requires a subscription to use but you can also find the St. Croix census on the Dansk Demografisk Database by Rigsarkivet (Danish National Archives), all you do is enter a name and it will bring you up all instances of that name appearing in the Census records.
Show Household will display everyone that lived in the household.
Show all Fields will show you all the information about the person you were looking for.
It is a pain because you have to search for everyone one by one but it is free so I can’t really complain. I should note that not everyone can be found this way, the record you are looking for might not have been transcribed or the name is spelled differently than you are looking for.
For the more recent Census records you can find them on Ancestry or you can look on FamilySearch, FamilySearch is free to use, you just have to sign up for a free account. It is a very useful site because you can also look up their free world tree to see if your relatives are already on there. If they are you will be notified when you search for records about them. You can see it circled in the photo attached.
There are not that many of us doing Caribbean genealogy on Wikitree so if you are interested in helping I’d suggest joining and helping put our Islands on the map.
As you guys have read about before here, here, and here. I took the 23andme test in June 2018 and got my results back on July 18, 2018. I was left very underwhelmed, there was not much to learn from the results.
Take a look for yourself:
Over 100€ for that, I thought my brother’s Ancestry test was much more informative. It was fine though, a couple of months after there was an update and it broke down the African. It still wasn’t the best but at least it wasn’t just West African anymore. My .3% African Hunter-Gatherer was gone while Nigerian, Senegambian & Guinean, Congolese, and Sudanese were separated from the broad West African category. Coastal West African while narrowed down from just West African is still a broad category not to mention the Broadly West African, Broadly Congolese & Southern East African, and Broadly Sub-Saharan African. Just a lot of Broadly.
My European stayed mostly the same. Scandinavian at .4% was added send it made sense since my brother had Norway and Sweden which I assumed came from my Father’s mother. My grandmother’s family has been in the Danish West Indies since the first slaves were brought there. There’s also a mulatto ancestor with the surname Boldt, I admit it’s not much evidence but a cousin who descended from that same line also has Norway and Sweden. Unfortunately, Ancestry DNA doesn’t have a Chromosome browser so I can’t see where that Norway and Sweden are located and if my brother and this cousin match on that same chromosome. Since doing my research on my grandfather’s place of birth Saint-Barthélemy, I realized that Swedish could come from that side since the Swedish colonized the Island from 1784 to 1877.
I should note that my African went up and my European went down, not by much but I found it interesting nonetheless. My Native American stayed the same and I gained Western Asian and North African.
In May 2019 my results went through another update, they called this a Beta update, my African portion was broken down, even more, I lost the Sudanese but gained Ghanaian, Liberian & Sierra Leonean, the Congolese & Southern East African got a break down showing Angolan & Congolese but there were still those pesky Broadly categories.
My European had a revamp, the Iberian category was renamed to Spanish & Portuguese, I lost the little bit of Italian I had. My Native American once again stayed the same. Strangely, I had Central & South Asian added at 0.1%, seeing how categories at that level seem to vanish I didn’t expect to see it at the next update.
Now we’re at my most recent update before I phased with my father. It was updated around September 2019 but if you remember I was pregnant and sick during that time so I didn’t see the update until April of this year. My African Hunter-Gatherer is back at the same percentage too. Southern East African was added at .1%. My Western Asian & North African went up. I had a location for France, Nouvelle-Aquitaine which lines up perfectly with my paper trail, and I had a Caribbean location Dominica, which is right on the money since both my Mother’s parents were from there.
For Father’s Day, I decided I was going to buy my father a 23andme kit, it wasn’t a surprise since I had spoken to both parents about it and they were interested, my father got his kit in July and his results were ready earlier this month. I’m not going to lie but I didn’t expect anything in his composition other than European and African. What he received shocked me.
My father apparently has Native American ancestry. Never in my life has anyone ever mentioned him having Native American anywhere in any of his family lines and since both his parents have passed I have no one to ask about it and will probably never find out where it comes from. Even better?
My Native American comes from him. All my life I was told my Mother’s mother had Kalinago ancestry and when I saw Native American in my composition I assumed it came from my Grandmother, jokes on me though, it could have come from a Grandmother, just not the one I thought.
My Father has two regions in France and six in the United Kingdom. Nouvelle-Aquitaine and Occitanie line up perfectly with our paper trail but all the United Kingdom regions are a mystery.
Here are my results after phasing with my father. My African Hunter-Gatherer is gone once again. Italian has reappeared. My West Asian & North African has gone down again, this time they are trace ancestry.
I guess my course of action now is to test my Mother and see what secrets her DNA is hiding.
Crucianize 