Cheesy Grits: An Unexpected Postscript

At the risk of sounding like a commercial for ancestry.com, I've found their service to be tremendously useful. Not only are there lots of historical materials to be pored over, once one has constructed a family tree at their site, automated software runs behind the scenes to ferret out possible connections and links to documents and other trees. I constantly get "hints" about possible relatives or documents that may contribute more to my tree.

The "hints" also contain suggestions pointing to other family trees on ancestry.com. I've looked at some of those trees from time to time, but it simply hadn't occurred to me that other people might be being pointed to my tree as well, even though I haven't made the contents of the tree broadly available.

Cheesy Grits: Grandmother Ralston—Occupation: "Gentlewoman"

And so we come full circle. We've been on the trail of Jane's missing grandmother, her mother's mother. Of whom we dared not speak and of whom a single, simple inquiry by Jane caused her mother to burst into tears. It was the first time Jane recalled ever seeing her mother cry.

We followed the only trail we had: her grandfather, George Ralston. That trail led us first to Westchester County (NY), then to Brooklyn's Midwood High School, then to Savannah and thence to Charleston, SC, where we found the bill of sale documenting the purchase by John Stocks Thorne, Jane's 4th great-grandfather, of her 4th great-grandmother and their son. We found that Jane's mixed-race Charleston ancestors were members of the ante-bellum elite Free Persons of Color, including membership in the Brown Fellowship and Friendly Moralist Societies. We found that her great-great-uncle, John S. Thorne, would become known during Reconstruction as one of the "two black kings of Edisto Island."

We followed the trail back to Savannah and then back to Manhattan, where we found Jane's grandfather again, now a young married man with his wife and two young daughters, the eldest of whom was Jane's mother. We discovered that the missing grandmother's name was Audrey, the same name that Jane's mother went by. Then we discovered that Grandmother Audrey's roots were in the Danish Virgin Islands (mostly St. Croix), and that her ancestors included a former slave named Adeline and a Danish policeman named Jørgen Peder Ferdinand Christensen.

The mystery remained: what became of Grandmother Audrey? Why was she not spoken of?

Cheesy Grits: Things to see in St. Croix

The Wall at Cane Bay

I mentioned earlier that we found something quite fascinating on St. Croix that was completely unrelated to our family history searches. It has to do with the geology of the area, more particularly, the fact that St. Croix and the rest of the Virgin Islands are on the edge of the Caribbean plate. If you remember your plate tectonics, which of course you do, Planet Earth's crust is divided up into huge and more or less flat pieces called "plates" that are moving around and bumping into each other. The places where the plate edges touch are quite lively, geologically speaking, and that is where we generally find "faults" and/or "rift zones," which are the places where most (but not all) earthquakes and volcanoes happen.

Cheesy Grits: What We Know of Adeline's Story (Part II: The Fireburn of 1878)

At some point between 1870 and 1880, Adeline and her family moved away from Frederiksted, where she had lived a great portion of her life, to Christiansted. It's quite tempting to think that her move had something to do with the events of 1878 on St. Croix—events that must have been terrifying for a mother with young children.

The "events of 1878" are often referred to now under the name of the "Fireburn," mainly because much of the town of Frederiksted and many estate houses, sugar mills and sugar fields were burned during the first week of October, 1878.

Cheesy Grits: What We Know of Adeline's Story (Part I)

I don't remember how I first ran across David Lynch's wonderful blog about his Crucian roots. It's called "200 Years in Paradise" and has long been a model for me for its careful documentation and clear writing. If I were smarter, I'd be able to get his home page to appear here on this page, but I had to settle for making the title a clickable link.

Dave gave very generously of his time in helping me piece together some of the stories of Mathilda Dagmar and her mother Adeline/Edlin/Adelaide.

After the jump is another look at the branch of the tree we're currently exploring.

Cheesy Grits: Mathilde Dagmar's Island Haunts

After having spent parts of two days with Ricki Marshall in Christiansted's public library and the St. Croix Landmarks Society Library and Archive at Estate Whim, we thought it was time to explore more of the island itself and look for the some of the places mentioned in the various records.

But in looking back at my earlier posts, I realized that I haven't yet posted a good map of St. Croix so that readers can orient themselves a bit. (Although Mathilda Dagmar was born and baptised on St. Thomas, we had no plans to go there: it's about forty miles north of St. Croix and at that time, one either flew or took a slow ferry across infamously choppy seas—the ferry wasn't nicknamed the "Barf Barge" for nothing. But that's all past tense because the ferry ran aground and service has never resumed.)

Anyway, after the jump, a map.