The Caribbean Genealogy Library (CGL) on St. Thomas had its Annual Membership Meeting on Sunday, Feb. 9. The event was held virtually only. Email the library for more information on attending via Zoom at: caribgenlibrary@gmail.com
CGL is pleased to have as part of the annual meeting, the lead historian and archivists working on a new research project called “MAPPING FREEDOM: From Slavery to Freedom in the US Virgin Islands”. Presenters include Gunvor Simonsen, Associate Professor at the University of Copenhagen, alongside Niklas Thode Jensen and Barbara Revuelta-Eugercios, both of them archivists at the Danish National Archives.
MAPPING FREEDOM will provide a decisive research tool for documenting the effect of legal freedom on the lives of formerly enslaved people, enslavers, and their descendants.
First, it will allow an ability to understand how parents’ pasts of enslavement shaped their children’s lives in both economic, social, and cultural terms and to also look at the fate of white enslavers once slavery was abolished.
Second, focusing on the entire population, the database will allow us to place the DWI in its regional and Atlantic settings. Who came as migrants to the islands? How did migrants integrate into island families? Who left the islands, and why? These are questions that will be answered through the systematization of data provided by MAPPING FREEDOM. The database will be the first of its kind concerning not merely the DWI but the region.
The database is made possible by the exceptionally high quality of the records from the Danish West Indies; some record series are listed in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register.
The MAPPING FREEDOM database will contain reconstructed life trajectories and family relationships of virtually all individuals who lived in or visited the Danish West Indies from 1841 (just before emancipation in 1848) to 1917 when the islands were sold to the USA.
The database will include data from censuses, parish records, and passenger lists, providing information on more than 150,000 individuals. The database will contain key information about individuals and events in their lives, such as birth, gender, age, marriage, occupation, family relations, migration, and deaths.
The project will take place over two years, 2025-2026. The project lead is Gunvor Simonsen, Associate Professor at the University of Copenhagen. Collaborators on the project include the Danish National Archives, Denmark, and the Caribbean Genealogy Library, St. Thomas.
The “MAPPING FREEDOM” project is made possible by a generous grant from the Carlsberg Foundation.
The project’s investment in digital research infrastructure and capacity building will be foundational for future historical research on the processes of abolition in the former Danish West Indies and the Caribbean region.
The Caribbean Genealogy Library’s annual membership meeting on February 9th, 2025 at 1pm, will also include the election of the 2025 board of directors and a review of activities and projects undertaken by the organization during the last year. Anyone interested in becoming a member of the Caribbean Genealogy Library is encouraged to visit the membership page of the organization’s website at www.cgl.vi.
The Caribbean Genealogy Library’s mission is to identify, preserve and provide access to Caribbean genealogy, history and cultural heritage information resources for the Virgin Islands and the Caribbean. The library houses unique and rare books on Virgin Islands history and culture; funeral booklets, microfilms; and provides access to church records and other documents. The library is in Al Cohen’s Plaza (at the top of Raphune Hill).
