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...."
The "hour or so" gave me some time to explore the library a bit. It didn't take long, as it is small. The population of the entire island is around 50,000. The island is 28 miles long and 7 miles wide and has two towns: Christiansted near the east end and Frederiksted in the west. Only about 3,000 or so Crucians/Cruzans live in the town of Christiansted.

And I learned a bit more about St. Croix and the Virgin Islands: chiefly that the keys to Virgin Islands history are slavery and sugar. (Of course, underneath it all is money, but you knew that.)

The title of a readable (but, alas, rather hard to find) history of St. Croix, St. Croix Under Seven Flags tell us the story right in its title, as the flags of seven different rulers have flown here: Spain, Holland, England, France, the Knights of Malta, Denmark, and the United States. Cruzan placenames reflect the story: "Saint Croix" is French, while the town names of "Frederiksted" and "Christiansted" are Danish. Estate names include "Bonne Esperance" and "Mon Bijou" (French), and "Contentment" and "Strawberry Hill" (English), with "Fredensborg" and "Frederikshaab" being Danish. And of course, Cruzans still drive on the "wrong" (British) side of the road.

As Europeans arrived in the Caribbean, the plantations they started were first growing tobacco and cotton. They soon discovered that there was more money to be made growing sugar cane and exporting sugar because there was little competition from the United States, where tobacco and cotton were going gangbusters. As the demand for sugar increased, the profits from growing sugar cane increased as well, although growing sugar cane was still more labor intensive than growing cotton or tobacco, with "labor intensive" in this setting meaning "chattel slavery." The arithmetic was simple: the more slaves they had, the more sugar they could produce, and the more money they made.

The drive for profits is only part of the story of the demand for slaves in the Caribbean. The other part was that the mortality rates were high because living and working conditions for slaves were horrible: overwork, malnutrition, tropical diseases, and brutality by plantation owners/overseers combined to make death rates among slaves continually exceed birth rates. More and more slaves were imported to make up the deficit (and profits). Ultimately, the slaves imported into the Caribbean numbered in the millions, whereas slaves imported directly into the United States numbered somewhere under 400,000.

Wind-powered sugar mill in St. Croix
Image from Wikimedia Commons

St. Croix was no exception to any of this: it was at one point the premier sugar producer of the West Indies, with over 300 plantations and great houses.

The population figures for St. Croix tell the stark story: in 1803, for example, the population of the island was around 30,000, of whom 26,500 were slaves. The small number who weren't slaves were largely Europeans: a few plantation owners and overseers/managers, and because the islands also were military bases for the colonial powers, there were always soldiers: the forts in Christiansted and Frederiksted are still prominent today.

But enough general history: Ricki Marshall turned up at the library and introduced herself genially as "the library's IT guy..." When she found out where we were from, she mentioned that she had spent some time in the military in the Washington DC area and knew it well.

Ricki of course turned out to be far more than "the library's IT guy." I think of her as my guardian angel for the Cruzan part of my quest: she just generally took me, a complete stranger, under her wing, and knew which questions to ask and where to look for answers in tracking down Frank and Mathilda Dagmar Christensen McCabe, Jane's Cruzan ancestors. I'll always be in Ricki's debt.

The first thing we did was to review the Danish censuses for St. Croix. Based on the age Mathilda Dagmar Christensen McCabe had given for the U.S. federal censuses, we figured she had been born around 1869. So we started with the 1870 Danish census of St. Croix. And there she was:

Mathilda Dagmar Christiansen (surname Christensen) at age 2, born in St. Thomas and living with her mother, Edlin/Adeline, at 40 Strand St. in Frederiksted. Can we find out who else is in the household, which is to say, are there cousins?

At least one, for right above her name in the index listing is the following:

Matilda Dagmar's older brother, Peter Wilhelm, also born in St. Thomas. Were there any more Christensens?

Best to find an image of the original census page rather than just the database extraction. My guardian angel Ricki knew where to look. Here is an excerpt from the 1870 St. Croix census showing some of the occupants at 40/41 Strand in Frederiksted:

Image from 1870 St. Croix census, Frederiksted, 40 Strand

Oh my! Well, there's Matilda Dagmar at the bottom of the page with another confirmation of her birthplace as St. Thomas, and her brother, Peter Wilhelm, just above. But who are all these other good Lutheran babies also listed as the children of Edlin/Adeline? Carl and John Iversen and Amanda Watlington?

As it turned out, this single entry would teach us a great deal about St. Croix's cultural history as well as Jane's family history. And it would make me murmur "God Bless King Frederik V of Denmark!" many times since.

Ricki said we should reconvene the next day at the St. Croix Landmarks Society Library and Archive at Estate Whim, where the island archive is kept. I needed some rest. My head was spinning and it wasn't from the sun.