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.
My Great Grandmother on my father’s maternal side was Valderia Eugenie Petersen, she was the daughter of Maud Hines and George Petersen.
I know a lot about Val’s mother and her mother’s maternal family but her father was a mystery because all I had was his name.
The only reason I even knew his name was because of the index for Valderia’s Social Security Application.
It has taken me 16 years to finally find his family, with the help of DNA relatives on Ancestry and knowing more about genealogy now than I did when I was 19, I was able to build a family tree of only men with the name George Petersen born between 1870 and 1905. I choose those dates because I knew Valderia was born in 1920 and her father could have been anywhere between the ages of 50 and 15. I have seen very young parents in my searches so 15 is not common but not unheard of.
I’m getting a little ahead of myself so let me backtrack a bit, before I even began my George Petersen tree I identified DNA relatives from my father’s maternal side of the family and those who were not related to Val’s mother’s side I separated and focused on building branches for them in my own tree with the hopes that I would find the connection but the higher I got on their trees the more I didn’t recognize the names. It was also more difficult because some of them didn’t have any shared connections! They were puzzles that intrigued me. I could see that they were related to each other somehow but my brother just didn’t have the same shared DNA with each of them.
This is when I got the idea to look for all the George Petersens, and there were so many of them that I just started labeling them I, II, all the way up to XIII. George Petersen XIII (13) was the one!
His full name was George Henry Petersen born on June 26, 1879, to George Henry Petersen and Lydia Gasper. Gasper also spelled as Jasper and Yasper is a name I’ve seen in my DNA relatives’ trees and I got that lightbulb feeling that this had to be him, he never showed up in any of their trees but his grandmother on his mother’s side was the half-sibling of my brother’s DNA relatives’ 3rd Great grandfather, 4th Great grandfather, and through another side, his mother was the sister of these relatives Great grandmother.
St. Croix, Danish West Indies, Denmark, Records of Enslaved and Free People, 1779-1921 for George Henry Petersen
When I entered his information into my tree and attached him as Valderia’s father, I had to wait the next day to check the Thrulines to see if it would show me anything interesting and it did.
I found 3 other DNA relatives, one of them was only 7cM which I didn’t really pay any attention to because of how small it was and they literally shared no common matches so I had no idea they belonged on my grandmother’s side but it makes me feel good because this meant that I had found the right person.
Days like these show me why I love Genealogy and pairing DNA testing with it. Conventional Geneaology can only get you so far it’s the DNA that will help you break those decade-long brick walls.
My focus now will be to find the father of my 2nd great-grandmother, Maude Hines. I know that he has to be a Hynes from St. Croix because I have DNA relatives with the Hynes last name and they share common relatives from my grandmother’s family but they do not match with my grandmother’s father or her most of her maternal side. There’s some overlap which isn’t surprising with the size of the Island but the connection is there and it’s waiting for me, I just have to find it.
This is a question I’ve seen asked by people new to Genealogy all the time, if you are one of these people I’m going to give you the answer to this question you’ve been searching for.
Yes, there are free Genealogy websites!
The biggest free Genealogy website is FamilySearch, the site is available in 30 languages, and is completely free. All you have to do is sign up for a free account and you will be on your way.
I’ve written about using FamilySearch before in my Finding my Roots In The Caribbean and Who are you? Joseph Boldt posts and this site is really essential, not only can you find records that are also available on Ancestry but you can find records that are not on Ancestry. When I’m working on a tree for someone I will usually go to Familysearch and look for the free records before I move over to Ancestry to find the paid sources. If you haven’t created an account on Familysearch I highly suggest you do so today.
Because I mainly focus on genealogy for two specific Islands I’ll share with you the sites I use the most. For Saint-Barthélemy and pretty much all the Islands in the French Antilles I suggest using the Archives nationales d’outre-mer or Anom for short. If you are looking for someone born between 1724 and 1905 chances are very good that you find them on here. I will not lie to you but the earlier records are very difficult to read so I’d suggest you be more advanced in genealogy before attempting to look at those records. I do have to mention that for Gustavia the records only go up to 1904, for Lorient it goes to 1905. I keep hoping that they will add more records; the 1910s for instance but one can only hope.
For the Danish West Indies, I use Virgin Islands History, there are so many records here that it should be one of your first stops when looking for family members from the Danish West Indies, most of it is not indexed but some are, so all you have to do is type in your surname and see what shows up.
If you are looking for more recent family then visit FamilySearch or Ancestry sometimes you will have to use both as FamilySearch has Church and Census records that Ancestry just doesn’t seem to have.
I hope this was helpful, and if you have any questions please feel free to leave a comment or visit my Instagram page and send a message there. You can find me on Instagram here :
I wrote about Joseph Boldt before in this post and this one as well. Since those posts, I have done a lot more fact-checking and some stuff is just not accurate anymore. Genealogy as you might not know is very fluid and things you thought you had checked and double-checked could always use a triple check.
First things first, Joseph and Christina’s first daughter was not Adelaide as I had assumed but Ancilla Boldt, this was not a middle name or nickname but her actual name. Ancilla was born on August 7, 1869, and she passed away on March 18, 1881, when she was 11 years old.
Burial records 1881 St. Croix, Danish West Indies
This record was the reason I went back through the records I had for Adelaide and realized that there were records for 3 people. There was Ancilla born in 1869, Adelaide born in 1883, and another Adelaide Boldt born in 1853. I now have Ancilla and my Adelaide accounted for but have no idea who the older Adelaide is. I’ve been trying to build a mirror tree for her but she is a complete mystery to me and I’ve shelved it for a little while. I’m more interested in Joseph and what secrets he has for me.
So, Joseph, I know was born in the 1840s and his mother’s name was Precill or something close to it so I focused on looking for birthdates with names close to it. I came across this entry:
Baptism records 1842 St. Croix, Danish West Indies
The name Sames made no sense to me so I looked at the record more closely and the name is obviously James.
Joseph was born on April 3, 1842, parents are James and Priscilla from Mt. Stewart.
This could be his parents, this could be my 5th great-grandparents but I’m not sure. They both have no surnames so I’m assuming they are slaves. I viewed a Session during RootsTech Connect that said slaves took names that had a meaning to them. The name of their master, their master’s mother, or grandmother, whoever it was the slave knew them and took the name for themselves during slavery and kept it. I’m now tracking every Boldt I can find on the Island. Somewhere there has to be a clue.
Very recently I found some new records that suggest there was another daughter named Rebecca, there’s no image available to view but the Household number leads me to believe this was one of my great aunts.
1880 Census St. Croix, Danish West Indies
Unfortunately, she passed away in 1900 before she could turn 23.
Burial records 1900 St. Croix, Danish West Indies
She’s old enough to have had children but I haven’t come across any so far.
As for Christina, I think I found some of her family, possibly her father and two aunts. I was looking over the 1870 Census when I noticed a familiar last name, Chamberlain. Family in the Danish West Indies almost always stuck close to each other so it’s telling that the only other family I found with this last name lived right next to Christina and Ancilla.
1870 Census St. Croix, Danish West Indies
Going back to Joseph’s parents in the 1870 Census Priscilla shows up as Precill Karen. She’s an Invalid living with her son Joe and sister Magdalene Karen who is also invalid.
1870 Census St. Croix, Danish West Indies
In the 1880 Census, she is Percila Boldt, there’s no image available for this record so I have if I look at the household number it’s safe to assume she was living with Joseph and his family.
Percila is very close to Priscilla so even if these specific people aren’t my great grandparents I’m going to refer to Precill as Priscilla from now on.
I haven’t had much luck finding any other Karens on the Island so it just might be a misspelling. So far the closest names I have found are Caren, Cairnes, Cairns, Karn, Kern, and Keron.
My Boldt Collection:
After going through the Census records which include Baptism, Burials, and Marriages I have collected quite a few Boldts to see if I could find a link to my family.
James Boldt born on 28 November 1854 in St. Croix, Danish West Indies, he went by the name Bolde while becoming Naturalized in Massachusetts.
I have not found a baptism record for him. I did find him in the 1870 Census living in a house owned by Sarah Jane Boldt. I’m still doing research into who this might be.
I’m now trying to work downwards from the connections I have made but it is very slow going because I’m not sure if they went to other Islands or other countries.
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 