Cheesy Grits: More about Adeline Deguizen and her household

Having found Mathilde Dagmar Christensen's brother's baptismal record in the parish register for Frederick Lutheran in Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, Ricki, my guardian angel, went back to the 1880 St. Croix census. There, we found that Adeline/Edlin had moved from Frederiksted in the west end of St. Croix to Peters Farm Hospital, which was indeed a hospital on the south edge of Christiansted, nearer the east end of St. Croix.

Cheesy Grits: "God Bless King Frederik V of Denmark!"

My Crucian guardian angel, Ricki Marshall, had suggested we reconvene at the Estate Whim library and archive just outside of Frederiksted, about twelve miles west of the public library in Christiansted. We were in search of the larger story behind Mathilde Dagmar Christensen and the houseful of siblings she lived with at 40 Strand who had several different family names: two Christensens, one Watlington, and two Iversens.

As it turned out, what Ricki was going for was the parish records of the various churches on St. Croix and St. Thomas. And how those records came to be in the first place is something we owe to Denmark's King Frederik V.

Cheesy Grits: When in Doubt, Find a Library

Not knowing where any records were on St. Croix, my first destination was the public library, because reference librarians generally love queries and quests like the one I was on. I asked at the front desk of the Florence Williams Public Library on King Street in Christiansted and the person there (alas, I didn't note her name) knew exactly who to point me to: "Oh, you need to talk to Ricki Marshall. She knows all about those things. She'll be here in an hour or so...."

Cheesy Grits: And Onward to the Beaches of St. Croix [Updated]

Truth be told, I hate the beach. You get slathered up with suntan lotion and are all sticky. Sand gets into everything and sticks to everything. There are flies. They bite. Hard. It's too bright to read. If you have food, the seagulls steal it. You go into the water to try to get into the spirit of things, but you've been baking in the sun so the water feels like ice water. Your parts pucker and retract. You step on something underwater and—Egad!—it moves! The water washes all the suntan lotion off. When you come out, you have to put it all back on again. Now you've got a paste of lotion, salt residue and sand all over you. You lie down on your sandy towel again, only now it's all wet, too, and you shiver until you notice that your feet are turning pink because you forgot to put lotion on them. The sandy crud is everywhere: in your shoes, your socks, your underwear, your ears, your hair, your personal crevices. It's all over your car seats and floormats. Gremlins come into your hotel room and sprinkle sand all over the bathroom floor and into the bathtub. And you're supposed to get up the next day, find clean towels, and do it all over again. What fun! Give me a library or an archive any day.

Cheesy Grits: To the Caribbean and Beyond!

As if Savannah and Charleston were not sufficiently exotic in our family tree, we'd turned up a line—Jane's maternal great-grandmother, Dagmar McCabe—that appeared to lead to the West Indies. And not only the West Indies: Dagmar told the 1930 census taker that while her mother was West Indian, her father was Danish!

And here I thought that with Augustus Walbus/John Anderson (Remember him? The Dane who converted to Amish and married the bishop's daughter?), my side of the family had the corner on Danish ancestry. Not to mention that I wasn't completely sure which of the West Indies we were talking about.

Cheesy Grits: To the Caribbean....And Beyond?!

You'll remember that the person that started the whole Cheesy Grits exploration was Jane's missing maternal grandmother. You'll no doubt further remember that Jane's mother burst into tears when asked about her mother.

So here we are, some sixty-one posts later and we still don't know who Jane's grandmother was. Well, we did know from the 1920 census that her name was Audrey—same as her daughter/Jane's mother—and that the family was living on W. 99th Street in Manhattan. But where to go from there?