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.

No matter which of the European countries was "in charge" of what would be the Danish West Indies, the main points of being on the islands were to generate profits on the backs of slave labor and to protect the islands as an extension of European empire.

The demographics of the islands reflect this: the population was mostly slaves. The Europeans who were there were generally either overseers for absentee plantation owners, or military or governmental functionaries.

A small exception will have been missionaries to the islands, of whom the Moravians might have been the most numerous. Still, the missionaries found the "civilizing mission of Christianity" difficult for both linguistic and cultural reasons. One of the cultural reasons was that the European men stationed on the islands quickly developed the habit of taking "housekeepers" (meaning "concubines") from among the enslaved (and later freed) women, and having children with them.

Neville Hall's Slave Society in the Danish West Indies notes the prevalence of this arrangement:

"In the Danish West Indies, such relationships during the eighteenth century became the 'custom of the country,' although the arbiters of the convention were exclusively the islands white males...." (p. 151)

Hall goes on to note that one consequence of these relationships was identified very early on as having produced "a mosaic of color" amongst the peoples of the islands.

When the Kingdom of Denmark took over the administration of the islands in 1755 from the Danish West Indies Company, there were already European rumblings about the general moral unsavoriness of slavery. Lutheran pietists in Denmark argued that at the very least, there should be an effort to promote Christianity amongst the slaves on the islands. While there had been churches on the islands for years, the only real mission effort among the slaves had come from German Moravians.

Whereupon, in 1755, King Frederik V of Denmark issued a three part decree: (a) the Word of God was to be preached to the slaves; (b) slaves were to be instructed in the Christian religion, and—for our purposes most notably—(c) slave children should be baptized "like other people's children."

The decree applied to all the churches on the islands. Baptisms, confirmation, marriages and began to be written into the parish registers; the Lutherans, the Moravians, the Anglican/Episcopals and even the Roman Catholics—began to keep records of all these baptisms and other ceremonies, regardless of whether they were slave or free or, in the case the baptisms, regardless of the status of their parents. The records include names of parents, occupations, birthdates, birthplaces, godparents, witnesses, and so on. And any of you, dear readers, who has done family history will recognize how these parish registers will have become a gold mine for genealogists/family historians.

The Library and Archive of the St. Croix Landmarks Society at Estate Whim is where many of these church records for St. Croix are kept and that is why Ricki Marshall wanted to meet there. I do wish I had thought to take of picture of the library/archive. It is a very modest building behind the main house, but it is blessedly air-conditioned, which is not a small consideration when you remember that you are in the tropics and the heat and humidity are brutal, especially when it comes to paper.

Based on the information from the censuses, Ricki had forged ahead. When we met at the library, the first thing she showed me was the baptismal record for Mathilda Dagmar Christensen's brother, Peter Wilhelm, at the Frederick Lutheran Church in Charlotte Amalie, on the neighboring island of St. Thomas.

Frederick Lutheran Church, Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, USVI
By Smallbones (Own work) [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons

The Frederick Lutheran parish register is a large ledger book, which means that reproducing the entire page as a blog image reduces the text to microscopic size—not to mention that the records are kept in Danish. So here is the entry for Peter Wilhelm Christensen's baptism in sections from left to right:

First Peter section: note his birthdate of 14 August 1866
and his baptismal date, 1 Jan 1867.
T

Second Peter section: this is his father's name. age, and occupation:
Jørgen Peter Ferdinand Christensen, a police officer residing on St. Thomas.

Third Peter section: Repeating his father's occupation, and noting his religious affiliation
(Lutheran), we now see Peter Wilhelm's mother's name: Adeline Degisy
(spellings of both her given and family names vary), her age, 27,
residing on St. Thomas, and her religious affiliation, Lutheran.

Fourth Peter: in the final right hand column, we see the witnesses who stood
with Peter Wilhelm's parents at his baptism. It looks to be a police department
colleague of Christensen's named Jørgensen, and two other persons, one named
F. Hansen and the other Madame Nielsen.

I don't know why, but I found myself nearly in tears when I saw this sheet. Perhaps because it confirmed what had been suggested by the other threads of evidence about Matilda Dagmar's heritage? But the final confirmation in the form of her baptismal record at Frederick Lutheran wouldn't come until later.

In the meantime, Ricki had turned up some other parish records of interest. I'll get to them in the next post.