Crucianize

Tag: US Virgin Islands

  • Lessons in Crucian: Ih and Ain

    Lessons in Crucian: Ih and Ain

    Welcome back to #CrucianwithMami, today I’m going to talk about the 3rd thing Pronoun Ih or as they say in Standard English It.

    Ih is an interesting word while it means “it” it can also be used to say “there’s”. With Crucian it’s really best to learn by listening since there really aren’t any formal rules you just hear and repeat. I guess this is why our writing system is so fractured everyone writes the words in their own interpretation to how it sounds.

    As for Ain, it seems to only be used in the negative form in specific situations. I haven’t really figured out what those situations are yet.

    In Standard English, It has three forms It, Its, and Itself. Ih also has three forms in Crucian, Ih, Itz, and Itself.

    Here are the sample sentences:

    SE: It was just on the floor over there.

    Ih wuz jus on deh floor ova deh

    SE: Can you dig a hole and cover it?

    Yu co dig a hole an cova ih?

    SE: Is that its tail?

    Iz dah itz tail?

    SE: Did you see that dog free itself?

    Yu see dah dawg free ihself?

    SE: It doesn’t have anything to do with me.

    Ain gah nuttin tuh do wid me.

    In the next lesson, I will focus on 1st person plural We.

  • Lessons in Crucian- S/He

    Lessons in Crucian- S/He

    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.

    Here are the sample sentences:

    Subject Pronouns

    SE: He is not going to like this one.

    He’n gon like dis one.

    SE: She is not a fan of this color.

    She’n a fan of dis cula.

    Object Pronouns

    SE: Is that him over there?

    Das he ova deh?

    SE: Is that her dancing in the corner?

    Das she dancing in deh corna?

    Possessive Adjectives

    SE: That’s his chain.

    Das hiz chain

    SE: That’s her children.

    Das ha children

    Possessive Pronouns

    SE: That car is his.

    Da cyar is he own

    SE: That child is hers.

    Da chile is she own.

    Reflexive Pronouns

    SE: You see all of that? He did it by himself.

    You see all ah dat deh? He did it all by heself.

    SE: She made that dress all by herself.

    She make dah dress all by sheself

    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.

  • Lessons In Crucian: Yo -Yu

    Lessons In Crucian: Yo -Yu

    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)

    SE- Is that yours?

    Das yo’s?

    SE- Did you do it by yourself?

    Yu do it by yoself?

    You can listen to the audio clip here:

    In the next lesson, I will talk about the third person pronoun (male) He.

  • Lessons In Crucian: I – Me’en

    Lessons In Crucian: I – Me’en

    Welcome to the first lesson of #CrucianwithMami, I originally wanted to start with the word “Deh” but I’ll leave that for the next lesson.

    Today we are focusing on the two forms of I that are used in Crucian, the affirmative form I and the negative Me’en.

    There are no strict rules when using I but Me’en is never used in the affirmative form.

    If you wanted to say I’m home in Crucian you’d say – I home or I deh home

    If you wanted to say I’m not home in Crucian you’d say – Me’en home or Me’en deh home

    Another way you’d say that in Crucian would be – I’n home or I’n deh home

    Unlike other languages, there are no informal or formal forms as the entire language is considered informal. Using either Me’en or I’n just seems to be a personal preference.

  • Beginning Crucian with Mami

    I originally posted about this on the Facebook page and realized that I had not posted about it on the blog, I sincerly apologize for that.

    You might notice a new tab on the blog’s menu “Crucian with Mami” well that’s there because I started a mini-series in an attempt to teach my children Crucian.

    On December 19, 2020, I decided I was going to do something about the fact that my son doesn’t speak the local creole from where we were born, this is what I posted on Facebook:

    Being an Expat parent is not easy especially when your child speaks only the community language and not your mother tongue so today I’m starting a mini-series: Crucian with MamiIn Crucian (the creole of St. Croix, US Virgin Islands, where I’m from) we call our mother’s Mami. My son stopped calling me Mami when we moved to France in 2015, social pressure, everyone calls their grandmother Mamie and their mother Maman. It’s an indescribable feeling going through a terrible pregnancy, waiting 9+ months for your child to finally call you Mami, and then just like that in the blink of an eye, it’s taken from you. It felt like he forgot me. I understand fitting in when out and about in public but I had hoped that we could still keep a little of our culture at home. As it is now my son doesn’t talk to any of my family, he says he doesn’t understand them because he only speaks French. I don’t want this for my children so from today, we are going to be doing Crucian classes with Mami. My classes will teach the difference between standard English and Crucian, we’ll listen to Crucian music, hopefully, eat Crucian food, and read Crucian literature. As we say in Crucian “Leh we go!” (Let’s go!)

    Crucianize

    I started going over the language and trying to figure out the most important aspects of it so that I could teach the children. I decided I would start with the word Deh, I recorded a sound clip and soon realized that it would be much better to start with pronouns in Crucian.

    For the first lesson, I covered the two forms of I used in Crucian.

  • 23andme Update and More!

    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)

    https://www.ancestry.com/imageviewer/collections/61567/images/31974_B018842-00011?pId=180825

    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)

    https://www.ancestry.com/imageviewer/collections/61567/images/31974_B018798-00047?pId=34581

    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.

    https://www.ancestry.com/imageviewer/collections/61567/images/31974_B011989-00116?pId=900209832
    https://www.ancestry.com/imageviewer/collections/61567/images/31974_B018795-00023?pId=40889

    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.

  • 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.

  • Phasing My 23andme With My Father

    Hello there!

    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.

  • The last of them

    Leen

    That’s what my grandfather would call me. Said in his Dominican (Dominica) accented English.

    I have so many wonderful memories of him and with him. I can still hear him calling my brother Andre Champagne or hear him playing the guitar with us children gathered round in that little house in Peter’s Rest.

    I can see his photography hanging on the walls of my parent’s home. It was through him that I developed a love of photography, I always hoped that I could someday be as good as he was, I haven’t used my camera in a very long time and that makes this so much worse to me.

    I remember the Werther’s candy he always had for us kids. I loved them and will always think of my Grandpa when I see them. They don’t taste the same but I’ll buy a pack the next time I see one and just pretend for a moment that it’s the same one you used to share.

    I remember that one year when you had so many Sonic the Hedgehog tops, my brothers and I would color on a piece of paper, cut it out to fit on top of the top, and watch the pretty patterns it would make as it spun in a circle.

    I remember the last time I saw you, 2015, my mother brought me and my son to see you before we left the island for France. You held onto us and prayed for our safe journey.

    I didn’t grow up knowing my great grandparents but I’ll be damned if my children don’t know about their great grandfather Norbert.

    My grandfather was my last living grandparent, he fought that cancer for 18 long months, every message from home I dreaded those words, I knew it was coming but still…

  • My Truths: Learning To Accept My Asexuality

    This is going to be a heavy piece, it will involve speech about molestation, if that’s one of your triggers I’d suggest skipping this post, with that said I’m going to talk about something that I’ve talked a little about before but never in my blog. I want to change that, I want to speak my truth so others can understand certain aspects of my life and how I’ve processed it.

    So, here we go…

    This is a memory that is clear as day in my head even though it happened over twenty years ago.

    Imagine if you will, this thin, small child, five almost six years old, quiet, she doesn’t say a thing. Expressionless the whole day. This vulnerable innocent child was me.

    It was a new school, new people, new everything, I was in first grade and still mute even though they said children are only shy at first. The class was about twenty students maybe more maybe less, the size didn’t important, the children aren’t either, except for two. A boy and a girl.

    I had no interactions with these two, never sat near them, never played with them, but these two affected me in a way nothing else has ever done.

    It was not a normal day, we were not in class, no, we were in the school’s cafeteria. There was an event going on but I can’t remember what it was about, doesn’t matter, I was sitting at a table far away from everyone except for the boy E and the girl K. I can’t remember the names of the other students but I remember these two, I don’t know how I feel about their names, a curious thing, I don’t hate it but I won’t speak it. Ever.

    I don’t know why but K decided to notice me that day, maybe it’s because we were so far apart from everyone else but she was sitting right next to me.

    It’s going to get a bit graphic and I apologize but she stuck her hand under my skirt and fondled me, she pulled her hand out and said: “smell yourself”. I had never had the inappropriate touch talk, no, that came later, so, as you can no don’t tell I was confused and didn’t know what to do. The boy E never touched me but he did not tell her to stop either, instead what he did was laugh and I didn’t understand that either.

    I never told anyone about what happened, not my best friend, not my parents, I think I wanted to forget it ever happened. I buried it so far that I just never thought about it. That is until I was in my early 20s. I was talking to someone about rape and molestation and it was like opening a door. I remembered everything all at once.

    It explained why I had an aversion to being friends with girls, why I never felt comfortable around them, why I felt different from my peers.

    I talked about being The Useless Sibling but now I knew why. I up to this day have trouble accepting hugs and being touched, I still feel a little uncomfortable around women and I honestly don’t feel attraction. I honestly thought I was asexual because I’ve had people I thought were attractive I’ve never envisioned anything other than being friends, I had one or two I’ve called boyfriend but in truth, it was just in name. I have never wanted to be physical with any of them.

    The day I met my husband was like being awakened, it’s corny as hell but I often wondered what it would feel like just to be held. We lived in different countries then so there was no way to find out. The day he asked to visit, I swear I almost fainted, I asked my parents and they were fine. Yes, I still lived at home so when my husband came to visit he met all my family at once.

    That first day was full of nerves, this guy I’d spent two years chatting to was finally here, the first time in my life I felt like a woman and I wanted to explore.

    Demisexual, you don’t feel attraction until you’ve formed a deep connection, I now had an answer for my lack of interest in guys other than being friends.

    On the subject of friends, although I’m still a little uncomfortable, I now have a few women I call friends.

    I won’t allow a girl who was most probably being molested herself to dictate who I can and can’t be friends with.

    Oh, if you’re not following the Facebook page be sure to click the link button below, I had mentioned that I would do a special post for Father’s day so be on the lookout for that.

    Crucianize Facebook