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.


Rebecca Audrey Ralston at the top left is of course Jane's mother. Adeline is at the bottom right. Although we do have info about Adeline's parents, including another generation makes the names still smaller and in consequence harder to read.

Adeline was born in 1836 in Christiansted to Charles Deguise/Deguizen and Elizabeth Frances. Dave suggested that Frances is not likely Elizabeth's family name, as few slaves had family names before emancipation. Charles was exceptional in this regard; we don't know why just yet.

Both Charles and Elizabeth appear to have been slaves: Charles belonged to a Major Aarestrup of Frederiksted, while Elizabeth and all their children—there seem to have been at least five—belonged to a J. Monsanto.

Here, broken across two images, is Adeline's baptismal record from Christiansted Lutheran Church, which now is known as Lord God of Sabaoth Lutheran Church. It's on King Street in Christiansted.

Adeline's baptismal record. That's her name right in the middle.
To the left is the date of her baptism; to the right is the date of her birth.
Both occurred in 1836.

Adeline's info is in the middle. The left column is her parents' names, along
with the fact that her father belongs to a Major Aarestrup; the middle column
is the names of the witnesses, and to the right is the name of Elizabeth's owner,
who by definition also owned Adeline: Monsanto of St. Thomas. Maybe "Theodore"?

Emancipation came to the Danish West Indies in 1848. It did not come peaceably, as there were frequent slave revolts and rebellions throughout the Caribbean, including the Virgin Islands. (Scott O'Dell, author of Island of Blue Dolphins, also wrote a novel about one of the slave rebellions on St. Thomas. It's called My Name is not Angelica and was published in 1989.)

So the Deguise family was free after 1848. The Virgin Islands census finds them in Frederiksted until around 1860.

Born in 1836, Adeline was of course a young adult by 1860. As I noted earlier, it had long been a custom of European men stationed abroad in the colonies to take common-law wives from amongst the local girls. Social pressures typically prevented marriage, but the arrangements nevertheless did provide some benefits to these concubines in terms of material security. Alas, it also seems to have been the case that when these European men's terms of service were finished, they would return to their home countries, leaving his mixed race family behind without so much as a backward glance. (There must have been exceptions; I'd love to find one.)

By 1862, Adeline had had two sons, Carl and John, by a Danish soldier named Iversen. Then in 1864 came a daughter, Amanda, by a man—presumably English—named Watlington.

Then, for reasons that are not clear, Adeline moved to St. Thomas, where she became involved with our Danish policeman, Jørgen Peder Ferdinand Christensen. Peter Wilhelm was born first on St. Thomas, and then in 1869, our Mathilda Dagmar.

Almost immediately after the birth of Mathilda Dagmar, Adeline returned to Frederiksted on St. Croix, where the 1870 census finds her and the family at 40/41 Strand. Perhaps Jørgen Peder Ferdinand's term of duty was finished and he returned to Denmark? We don't know yet: the project of reviewing Danish records relating to service assignments in the Virgin Islands remains to be done.

Note that the birthplace for the Iversen boys is given as St. Thomas; earlier records, however, claim St. Croix as their birthplace. Locating their baptismal records—presuming they were baptized—would settle the question, as it would for Amanda Watlington. And note that "Edlin"'s birthplace is given as "Baßin", which is the old French name for Christiansted, but written as a Dane might write it.

The 1880 census finds many changes for Edlin and her family, including a move from Frederiksted to Christiansted. That move may have been precipitated by the Fireburn of 1878, when nearly half of the town of Frederiksted was burned down.