Crucianize

Tag: Françaises

  • Finding My Roots In The Caribbean

    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.

    There’s a really nice blog about my great grandfather that you can read here: Capitaine Simon Joseph Turbé

    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:

    St. Thomas and St. John Government (archive no. 693), Reports of births, St. Thomas and St. John, 1859-1918 (nos. 30.1.1-6) and St. Thomas and St. John Government (archive no. 693), Reports of marriages, St. Thomas and St. John, 1828-1918 (nos. 30.2.1-7), these two have proven very very helpful.

    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.

  • Stuck on Sick: My third Hyperemesis Gravidarum pregnancy

    It’s official, I’ve been stuck on bed rest since 4w5d and I’m now 6w5d. I’ve passed every hour of every day either throwing up, stuck on a continuous loop of nauseated, or sleeping the sleep of the undead.

    Yes, we’re pregnant again and yes I’m suffering once more from Hyperemesis Gravidarum.

    I knew better, I knew I would never be able to experience pregnancy like a happy person, I knew I’d be sick every waking hour. I have so many boxes and boxes of medications and I’m still so sick.

    My lips are dried and peeling, my skin is dry as is my hair.

    This is my third pregnancy dealing with this and I don’t know what I was hoping for but I definitely didn’t find it. I’m so close to the mark where we lost the last one that I just decided to come out with it.

    If you’re local to me chances are you will not see me again until after the birth. I can barely climb the stairs in my own home.

    I don’t know who you are unborn baby but I’m trying everything I can to meet you.

  • Carrefour Haul!

    Carrefour Haul!

    Coucou !

    Today we went shopping at Carrefour, I really wanted to get some of those press-on nails that they had and see what hair supplies were available but I only accomplished one of those goals.

    There were no press on nails to be found anywhere! But I did manage to get the entire line of Garnier Ultra Doux Richesse D’Argan as well as some other things.

    Since my move here this line has been my holy staple and it is very hard to get my hands on all the products when I need them. They fly off the shelves so fast!

    I also picked up Garnier Ultra Doux L’huile Merveilleuse aux huiles d’argan et de camélia which is also another one of my favorites, if I’m not using abierto one of Garnier’s oils. You can probably tell I adore Garnier’s products. What can I say? They work really well for my hair and they are inexpensive.

    My last purchase was a Gel Micellaire Nettoyant from Le Petit Marseillais.

    Gel Micellaire Nettoyant Fraîcheur de Rose

    I’ve used Eau Micellaire from Cien which I’ve spoken about here and Eau Micellaire from U which I’ve also briefly spoken about here. This is my first time using a Gel Micellaire and I’m really interested in seeing what the difference is. The scent is the same as the 1 Minute Masque of theirs that I recently used and spoke about here.

    All in all, it was a pretty good haul and didn’t cost that much money.

    If you’re lucky you can find all these products at your local Carrefour and you don’t have a Carrefour in your location then you might be able to find one of two items at a Super U, Lidl, Netto, or other supermarché. You can also try looking on Amazon, I can’t guarantee that the price will be pocket-friendly though.

    And now I leave you to do some reading.

    Talk to you later!

  • My thoughts on the dry shampoo from Super U

    Hey everyone!

    So today I finally gave my Dry Shampoo a chance to do its stuff.  I had my hair in twists all week and didn’t wash anything and over the weekend I was ill so no wash day still.  I decided to try out my Bamboo and White Grape Dry Shampoo from U that I recently picked up in Super U which I spoke about here. I’ll do a little review for you to see if it’s something you might think about adding to your wash day routine.

    This Dry Shampoo is for Tous types de cheveux which is French for All hair types. I didn’t want to pick up the others because I wasn’t sure how it would interact with my hair.  This one just settled the safest bet.

    So I’m just going to translate the most important parts of the instructions:

    Use on dry hair.  Shake well before use.  Keep the can at a vertical position of 15 cm from the hair and spray at the roots.  Leave it alone for 2 minutes before rubbing in the powder residue.

    When I first sprayed this it was a pretty strong scent but it quickly faded to a much more pleasing scent.  I could definitely feel the alcohol interacting with my scalp, not in a burning way but just to let me know that it was present. There was no white residue left behind after running it in.

    So far my scalp is tingly and smells wonderful but will it do anything for my hair?

    I guess tomorrow we’ll see. I’ll be sure to update this post with how my hair turned out after a night with the dry shampoo.

    As promised I’m updating this post to include what my hair looked like after using the dry shampoo.

    To be honest, I really shouldn’t have used the dry shampoo at this point in time because of the build-up of gel in my hair but it wasn’t too bad just not really effective at doing much of anything. My hair ended up pulled back in a puff after all.

    The most I can say is that you can’t see the build-up which somehow the dry shampoo masked a little?

    I promised myself that I was going to do a wash day on Wednesday when I don’t have anywhere to go and finally use this new product that I bought a few weeks ago. I’ll probably give you a little review of it later this week.

    Until next time!

  • 23andme: My Changing Ancestry Composition

    I don’t know if I ever mentioned before that I took a DNA test with 23andMe on here but I took one back in June 2018. The main reason I took it was to discover who my father’s family was, my father was adopted when he was young, and while we knew the names of his parents I didn’t know anything else. My paternal grandfather passed away when I was 13 years old and in all that time I had never even met him, my two older sisters stayed over at his house but never me. I’m always told that I look like his side of the family so it was a pretty hard blow to never know him or about his family and wish that I had been given that chance. I have no pictures and very few stories to even remember him by so I took to genealogy to try to learn something.

    My grandfather was born in Gustavia, Saint-Barthélemy, Antilles françaises in 1920. He was the son of Vitalis LaPlace and Marie Josephine Turbé. My grandfather left his home to stay with an aunt in St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands where a lot of French people migrated to in the late 1800s. While my father was born in St. Thomas he grew up in St. Croix where I was born and I didn’t visit St. Thomas until I was well into my 20s thanks to one of my older sisters.

    One of my younger brothers did an Ancestry DNA test in I want to say 2017 but Ancestry doesn’t ship to France so I went with 23andMe. Looking at my brother’s results I had an idea of what my Ancestry  Composition could look like and I was excited waiting for my results.

    I got my results back on June 18, 2018:

    The African portion was pretty underwhelming and my French & German was pretty small for someone whose grandfather was a French man.  What I have since learned is that some of the British & Irish, Iberian, Italian, and Broadly categories were hiding a good portion of my French DNA and it was nearly impossible for 23andMe to separate it from the other areas of Europe because of migrations over the ages.

    Sometime around October 23andMe updated their African categories and I had a brand new Ancestry Composition to look at:

    My West African was broken down into Nigerian, Coastal West African, Senegambian &Guinean, Congolese, and Sudanese. My African Hunter-Gatherer category disappeared. My British & Irish went up, Italian went up, Iberian went down, and Scandinavian appeared. Western Asian & North African categories appeared. Everything else remained more or less the same.

    In December 23andMe once again updated their categories:

    The Coastal West African category was broken down into Ghanaian, Liberian, & Sierra Leonean. Iberian was changed to Spanish & Portuguese. Everything else remained the same.

    Yesterday 23andMe invited their V5 customers to try out a Beta Update to their composition:

    My Ancestry Composition went through a lot of changes!

    Central Asian & South Asian was added

    My African categories were all decreased with the exception of Congolese and Sudanese. I gained a new category as well, Southern East African. My European increased Spanish & Portuguese now being my highest category at 6.6% British & Irish decreased from 8.9% to 6.0% my French & Geerman went from 3.3% to 5.6% I completely lost the Italian I had which doesn’t worry me much since I never had any Italian paper trail. My Native American remains unchanged through all of these updates.

    It has been so fascinating watching all of these changes and I can’t wait to see what other changes happen later on.

    On the paper genealogy front, I had a really big breakthrough yesterday as well. I have a brick wall 3x great-grandmother Anne Louise Chapelain who I couldn’t find any information on her parents or siblings but yesterday I decided to go back over my work to see if I missed anything and while going through my 2x great-grandfather’s second marriage I found an uncle named Joseph Chaplain in the witness section. This Joseph Chaplain would have been 35 in 1888 so born around 1853 give or take, I think he might be a half brother because Anne Louise was born around 1835, that’s a good 18 years older and depending on her mother’s age might have been way after her childbearing age. I haven’t found anything on him so far but I have hope.

    Until Next time!