Oct. 14, 2001 – In spite of early morning rain and the threat of storms for the rest of the day, 19 runners appeared in the drizzle for the 20th running of the Founders Day 5-Kilometer Run. The course from Fort Christian to the University of the Virgin Islands was wet all the way, but Ruth Ann David led the pack with a very good finishing time of 19 minutes 58 seconds.
She was followed by Maurice Kurg, who led the men with a time of 20:39. Brandon Johnson (21:37) and Lucien Wallace (22:02) followed him for second and third places for the men, while Melinda Astran (22:34) and Grace Tuma (22:53) were the other top finishing women.
In 1982, a similar-size group ran the race that led to the formalizing of the St. Thomas Association of Roadrunners. Two of the STAR founders, Wayne Frederick and Roy Watlington, were on hand to award Sunday's ribbons to winners. Other charter members such as Therese Hodge, Frank Jackson, Craig Marek and Genevieve Plunkett participated Sunday as runners or volunteers.
Proceeds from Sunday's race and cash donations made by the participants will be contributed to the September 11th Fund through the United Way of St. Thomas/St. John. STAR invites those who were chased away by the rain to make donations directly to the United Way. A complete list of finishers follows.
For more information call Roy Watlington at 777-8183.
Women
Ruth Ann David, 19:58
Melinda Astran, 22:34
Grace Tuma, 22:53
Stephanie Freihertz, 24:15
Kristy Aitken, 26:28
Carrie Gatlin, 31:31
Margot Murray, 31:41
Debbie Davis, 33:50
Men
Maurice Kurg, 20:39
Brandon Johnson, 21:37
Lucien Wallace, 22:02
Frank Jackson, 22:20
Brad Kappel, 23:14
Jim Day, 24:14
Harold Phelps, 24:17
Roi Simmonds, 24:47
Niles Persall, 25:31
Craig Marek, 31:47
Matt Davis, 33:51

Oct. 14, 2001 – St. John resident Myrna George is playing detective, but instead of looking for nefarious characters, she's hot on the trail of her family history.
She and about 80 million others across the country are hard at work on this task. There are so many people looking for their roots that Utah Sen. Orrin G. Hatch convinced his Senate colleagues to designate October as Family History Month.
"Experts say that in the United States, genealogy is now the second most popular hobby next to gardening," Hatch said in a news release.
Utah, of course, is the home of the world's largest family history research center, which is run by the Mormons.
While George is finding it slow going, she, like other family historians across the territory, will not be deterred.
She first started looking when she realized that, unlike most island families, she had only her immediate family to count as kin. Her family came from Anegada.
"There's a lack of information. No one wrote anything down," she said.
So far, she's learned that her grandmother's grandmother, which means her great-great grandmother, was an African princess, and that her great-grandfather was a Faulkner from Northern Ireland.
And she's turned up a cousin in St. Thomas, Nadine Marchena. The two spent three years corresponding and phoning until a mutual friend finally introduced them at St. John's July 4th Celebration.
Marchena said she learned of the family connection through a St. Croix family member, who told her she also had family in St. John.
David Knight, a historian by trade, said that black people now see that it is possible for them to research their family trees. He has uncovered documents such as the 1803 census of free colored residents in Charlotte Amalie, published as "St. Thomas 1803; Crossroads of the Diaspora," that shows many surnames still in use today.
"Once you can imagine an ancestor in a particular time period it makes history come alive," he said.
Marchena first got interested when she worked on a school project. She trekked off to Enid Baa Library, where the late June Lindqvist helped her find the right resources. Marchena said she and her grandmother, retired children's librarian Beulah Smith Harrigan, often make trips to the British Virgin Islands to search for family documents.
"I spend a lot of time in churches," she said, discussing how moved she was when she found her first family church record.
Carol Wakefield at Whim Plantation Museum has gathered a treasure trove of resources. The museum library has the Danish West Indies census from 1840 until 1911. While most of those records are from St. Croix, there are some from other islands.
The museum library also has the 1917 census for the entire territory, some special census records including that of the free colored in 1831 and 1832, St. Croix church records, and some very early tax information. Wakefield also has compiled files on some St. Croix families.
She said that people researching their family roots are usually willing to share information with others bent on the same task.
Wakefield suggested that people looking for their ancestors start with family members still alive. Inquire about brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, their parents, and their grandparents.
"It's a wonder to have a family member with a good memory," she said.
Ask them to pull out old documents – birth certificates, death certificates, Bibles and the like – to document their oral history.
While you're grilling your living relatives on family members, take a few passes through the Internet. "Genealogy Internet sites are some of the most popular sites on the World Wide Web," Hatch said.
Marchena uses the Internet all the time. She said her searches turned up an ancestor mentioned in a ship captain's log. The man had been richly reward in cash for his rescue of some people who foundered on the treacherous Anegada Reef.
A site called www.rootsweb.com has bulletin boards chock-a-block with messages from people – they mostly live on the mainland – who are looking for their family here. Click on "message boards, localities" to find boards for Caribbean islands, including St. Thomas, St. Croix and St. John. In fact, through the St. Thomas board, this reporter sent a St. Maarten woman to someone living here but born in St. Kitts who was able to put the woman in touch with her long-lost family in St. Kitts.
One of the most useful sites for beginning genealogists is www.cyndilist.com. It claims to have links to more than 106,100 sites that can help you find your family history.
Keep in mind that once you get past the basic sites such as the Social Security Death Index, many sites charge for the information, so gather all the information you can from people still alive.
Marchena also suggested you join the V.I. Genealogical Society, a group of people who are looking for their roots. She said the group shares information on how to do research, places to look and on family histories.
"Here in the Virgin Islands you might be working with your cousin and never know it," she said, referring to the interconnectedness of many Caribbean families.
After you're at this a little while, you'll need to organize your data. While you can keep track of it in a notebook, computer programs make the job easier. There are many for sale, but you can download a good one for free at www.legarcyfamilytree.com.
For information on the Genealogical Society, call Marchena at 777-8399 or Myron Jackson at 776-8605. To reach Whim Plantation Museum's Family History Center, call 772-0598.

Oct. 14, 2001 – Her name is Meka. She is 7 years old, and she has come to her tutoring session in the village of La Vallee on the St. Croix North Shore between Rust-Op-Twist to the east and Cane Bay to the west. She doesn't understand what happened on Sept. 11 in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, but she does understand that she is going to get some help doing her homework today.
Dressed in a neat skirt and blouse, her hair slicked back and held with colorful braided elastics, she is ready for her lessons.
Meka doesn't know how come she is getting help with her homework, either, although she knows well the three people responsible for providing this opportunity to the children of the village. Everyone knows them in La Vallee, a village down a rutted road off the North Shore Road that seems to head into the bush. And there, they are held in high regard.
Of the three founding members of the tutoring program, Melba Williams, has been in the village the longest — her entire life. A sturdy, handsome woman, her looks belie the fact that she has 12 children, who also call the village home. Meka is her granddaughter, and Meka attends class with her aunt, Williams' daughter "Baby," who is the same age as Meka.
"All of us who live here are related — we have some family that live over the hills there," Williams says, pointing toward Mount Eagle and to the south. "But we don't see them a lot," she adds. "They aren't really a part of the village community."
Being family in the village is a plus in that family ties produce strength in the community — and a minus in that family disagreements tend to be centralized more than if members were geographically apart.
In 1995, when Kelly Gloger moved to St. Croix after years of living and working on the Texas gulf coast, in Vermont and in California, he knew nothing about La Vallee. An architect and a biologist with a master of science degree in fisheries and wildlife, he had been hired to build and manage a hydroponics farm at Estate Bethlehem.
"When that program ended, I joined Caribbean Infra-Tech," Gloger said, to work with company president Onaje Jackson on projects throughout the Caribbean involving "sustainable infrastructure design, photovoltaics, energy conservation and environmental master planning."
One day, "Wasi, a friend of mine, took me to the village," he related. "I noticed kids playing with bicycles, many of which needed to be repaired, and I decided to try to organize a bicycle club."
Seeing a need inspires an idea
Gloger began visiting the village from time to time, taking three recycleable bikes with him each time and helping youngsters to fix their broken ones. One day, he asked the youngsters to write down lists of what they needed in the way of replacement parts. He discovered that one boy, Marlin, the seventh child of Melba Williams, was unable to do that.
"I wondered if there were perhaps others who had problems with writing," Gloger said, "so I went to Melba and asked if I could work with Marlin and perhaps others to improve their reading and writing skills."
Williams readily agreed, and they discussed possibilities for increasing the learning opportunities for children in La Vallee.
Gloger and a couple of other volunteers started working with some of the children — out of doors at first. Then they built a garden with six raised beds and held the tutoring sessions there.
"We inaugurated the garden with prayers and a local party," Williams said. Teens weren't much involved, but the young ones contributed mightily.
It soon became evident that building space was needed for the tutoring, though.
Most of the village buildings are old slave quarters, built to survive hurricanes but with few modern comforts — no running water, for example. A water truck delivers water for the village once a week, and the inhabitants fill bladders to supply their households until the next delivery.
Kelly accepted the offer of Melba's brother Larry to let the tutoring sessions take place temporarily in a building he had been using mostly for storage. One day, one of the students was seated on the outside steps there when a portion of the roof collapsed on her. Although she was not badly injured, it was clear the building needed serious repair.
Gloger and other volunteers repaired the roof and walls, cleaned up the interior, added several well-used but still useful chairs and a couple of writing tables, and installed two computers. The result was a rough but serviceable work space.
While on the Internet one day, Kelly "met" Donna Duffy, a teacher at Country Day School. From Queens, N.Y., to Puerto Rico in 1970, she came to St. Croix in 1998. Soon after, they met in person, and for more than a year Duffy has volunteered her time as a tutor for the La Vallee children — four or five times a week during the summer and at least two hours a week during the school year.
Strategic approach is succeeding
"I see a real difference in the students since they started the program," Duffy said. "Although initially they were very open to studying, they were poorly focused. Now, they seem to value education more."
Gloger and Duffy agree that a key for the program to succeed is to tie the tutoring into something of particular interest to each youngster. "In Marlin's case, for example," Gloger said, "his tutor, Duane, is using the test questions for getting a driver's license as the basis for improving his reading skills, because more than anything else, he wants someday to get a license."
Since Duffy signed on as a tutor, other members of the community have followed suit. Eight tutors are currently involved. With 15 students, seven more could immediately be put to work — and that's just to meet current needs.
Plans are afoot to build a La Vallee community center that would include not only classrooms and computers but also a neighborhood meeting area and a kitchen. Lisa Ferreira, an architect, has produced a design, and it's hoped that construction can begin soon. In the meantime, new classes are in the making. There are drums available for a drumming class, but they need to be repaired. Barbara Carmichael, recently retired from the security staff at the University of the Virgin Islands, has offered to conduct classes in making roti. And if some local benefactor will offer free Internet access, increased computer availability will round out a program that offers the students knowledge of the arts stretching from the earliest days to the present.
"We welcome volunteers to help with the tutoring," Gloger said. And for those who would see that as a sacrifice, Duffy adds, "It's an exciting way to contribute to our community, and it's a lot of fun."
Thanks to such efforts, when Meka is older, she will have the opportunity to study the history of her own community, making it part of the history of her world, along with such events as those of Sept. 11, 2001.
Anyone interested in volunteering to tutor in the program can reach Gloger at 778-4266 and Duffy at 719-5512.

Oct. 12, 2001 – Ever heard of the pond apple? If you haven't, you're not the only one. However, this botanical specimen is a good candidate for the Virgin Islands endangered species list.
"At the next hearing, it will go on there," promised Donna Griffin, an environmental specialist at the Fish and Wildlife Division of the Planning and Natural Resources Department.
Related to the soursop and the sugar apple (sweetsop), this relatively rare tree grows only in a few locations in the Virgin Islands. Griffin said there are stands on St. Thomas near the Renaissance Grand Beach Resort, at Coki Point, at Magens Bay and in Nadir near the "Bridge to Nowhere."
"They grow where they have lots of fresh water," Rafe Boulon, chief of environmental resources at the V.I. National Park, said.
Toni Thomas, natural resources agent at the University of the Virgin Islands Cooperative Extension Service, said the trees also grown in St. John's Coral Bay, on St. Croix and on Jost Van Dyke. She is worried about some of those stands. The one behind the Renaissance Grand Beach Resort on the road to Coki Point looks ripe for someone to want to clean up. It has hurricane debris and looks rather swampy, the kind of habitat people often don't value, she said.
"But if you get rid of the water, you get rid of the plant," Thomas said. She has higher hopes for the stand at Magens Bay, because she doubts the area will be developed. She said it lies off the left side of the road just past the turnoff to Peterborg as you drive to Magens Bay.
According to information from Fish and Wildlife, pond apple trees grow in coastal swamps behind stands of mangroves. They reach up to 20 feet in height with trunks up to six inches across. Leaves are waxy, 3 to 6 inches long. The tree flowers in the spring and bears fruit in the summer. The fruit looks like a sugar apple, to which it is related, but has almost no taste.
The pond apple is also known as "corkwood," "alligator apple," "monkey apple" and, in Puerto Rico, as cayur, coyur and corcho. Its scientific name is Annona glabra.
Boulon, who previously worked as endangered species coordinator at Fish and Wildlife, said there are pond apple trees on about four acres of land near the "Bridge to Nowhere." This is a far cry from the hundreds of acres of stands that used to stretch all the way to the Clinton E. Phipps Racetrack.
The area was once a delta that stretched from Turpentine Run to the sea. All manner of plants and trees grew there, but they, like many other species across the Virgin Islands, are now lost to development. "It was a wonderful area," Boulon said.
He said that if the Federal Highway Administration finishes the "Bridge to Nowhere" project [see "When bridge connects, gas station will be gone"], the last of the pond apple trees in that area will be probably be casualties.

Oct. 14, 2001 – St. John resident Myrna George is playing detective, but instead of looking for nefarious characters, she's hot on the trail of her family history.
She and about 80 million others across the country are hard at work on this task. There are so many people looking for their roots that Utah Sen. Orrin G. Hatch convinced his Senate colleagues to designate October as Family History Month.
"Experts say that in the United States, genealogy is now the second most popular hobby next to gardening," Hatch said in a news release.
Utah, of course, is the home of the world's largest family history research center, which is run by the Mormons.
While George is finding it slow going, she, like other family historians across the territory, will not be deterred.
She first started looking when she realized that, unlike most island residents, she had only her immediate family to count as kin. Her family came from Anegada.
"There's a lack of information. No one wrote anything down," she said.
So far, she's learned that her grandmother's grandmother, which means her great-great grandmother, was an African princess and that her great-grandfather was a Faulkner from Northern Ireland.
And she's turned up a cousin on St. Thomas, Nadine Marchena. The two spent three years corresponding and phoning until a mutual friend finally introduced them at St. John's July 4th Celebration.
Marchena said she learned of the family connection through a St. Croix family member, who told her she also had family on St. John.
David Knight, a historian by trade, said that black people now see that it is possible for them to research their family trees. He has uncovered documents such as the 1803 census of free colored residents in Charlotte Amalie, published as "St. Thomas 1803: Crossroads of the Diaspora," that shows many surnames still in use today.
"Once you can imagine an ancestor in a particular time period, it makes history come alive," he said.
Marchena first got interested when she worked on a school project. She trekked off to Enid Baa Library, where the late June Lindqvist helped her find the right resources. Marchena said she and her grandmother, retired children's librarian Beulah Smith Harrigan, often make trips to the British Virgin Islands to search for family documents.
"I spend a lot of time in churches," Marchena said, discussing how moved she was when she found her first family church record.
Carol Wakefield at the Whim Plantation Museum on St. Croix has gathered a treasure trove of resources. The museum library has the Danish West Indies census records from 1840 until 1911. While most of those records are of St. Croix residents, there are some from other islands.
The museum library also has the 1917 census for the entire territory; some special census records, including those of the free colored in 1831 and 1832; St. Croix church records; and some very early tax information.
Wakefield has compiled files on some St. Croix families. She said that people researching their family roots are usually willing to share information with others bent on the same task.
She suggested that people looking for their ancestors start by interviewing family members who are still alive. Inquire about brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, their parents, and their grandparents.
"It's a wonder to have a family member with a good memory," she said.
Wakefield suggests asking them to pull out old documents -– birth certificates, death certificates, Bibles and the like -– to document their oral history.
Another excellent resource today is the Internet. "Genealogy internet sites are some of the most popular sites on the world wide web," Hatch said.
Marchena said she uses the Internet in her research all the time. She said her searches turned up an ancestor mentioned in a ship captain's log. The man had been richly reward in cash for his rescue of some people who foundered on the treacherous Anegada Reef.
A site called www.rootsweb.com has bulletin boards chock-a-block with messages from people -– mostly on the mainland — who are looking for family in the Virgin Islands and elsewhere in the region. Click on "message boards, localities" to find boards for Caribbean islands, including St. Thomas, St. Croix and St. John. (In fact, through the St. Thomas board, this reporter directed a Sint Maarten woman to someone in the Virgin Islands but born in St. Kitts who was able to put the woman in touch with her long-lost family on St. Kitts.)
One of the most useful sites for beginning genealogists is www.cyndilist.com. It is promoted as having links to more than 106,100 sites that can help users find their family history.
Once you get past the basic sites such as the Social Security Death Index, many sites charge for the information, so gather all the information you can from people still alive.
Marchena also suggested local residents join the V.I. Genealogical Society. It's a group of people looking for their roots, and members are glad to share information on how and where to do family history research, she said.
"Here in the Virgin Islands you might be working with your cousin and never know it," she said, referring to the interconnectedness of many Caribbean families.
After you're at this a little while, you'll need to organize your data. While you can keep track of it in a notebook, computer programs make the job easier. There are many for sale, but you can download a good one for free at www.legarcyfamilytree.com.
For information on the Genealogical Society, call Marchena at 777-8399 or Myron Jackson at 776-8605. To reach Whim Plantation Museum's Family History Center, call 772-0598.

Oct. 13, 2001 – The University of the Virgin Islands board of trustees approved a resolution Saturday to increase UVI employee salaries and benefits with funding from a $3.2 million appropriation UVI is due to receive from the V.I. government.
The board unanimously approved the resolution, submitted by the Finance Committee, to allocate $3,273,933 from the university’s FY2002 appropriation for increases in employee salaries and benefits plus pay $550,000 in increased premiums for UVI’s group health insurance program.
The resolution specified that salaries for associate professors at UVI be raised to a minimum of $40,000 annually, according to a release from UVI.
The board also passed a resolution, submitted by the Student Affairs Committee, to add a new Associate in Applied Science (A.A.S.) degree to the university’s degree offerings. UVI Provost and Senior Vice President LaVerne Ragster, a member of the Student Affairs Committee, said the development of the A.A.S. degree is in response to suggestions by UVI stakeholders, who felt UVI needed to provide preparation for technical employment.
The addition of an A.A.S. degree advances the vision and goals of the university's Strategic Plan, Ragster said, by meeting the developmental needs of the Virgin Islands workforce.
The A.A.S. degree program will provide training in areas including the hospitality industry, allied health, information technology and processing technology.
The trustees also got an update from the Development Committee, which reported that the UVI Annual Fund surpassed by $1,000 its goal of $650,000 for the 2000-01 academic year and set a goal of $650,000 for the 2001-02 UVI Annual Fund.
The board also discussed the possible need to rezone the Sugden property on St. Croix, which the university owns, to use it as a telecommunications center to support the Research and Technology Park.
Eleanor Thraen and Alex Moorhead were re-elected to the board of trustees. Auguste Rimpel Jr. and Moorhead, the current board chair and vice-chair, were nominated as chair and vice chair for 2002.
Following its regular session, which was held at 9 a.m. at the UVI Sports and Fitness Center, the board moved into executive session.

Editor's note: For more on the University of the Virgin Islands, visit the website atwww.uvi.edu.

Oct. 13, 2001 – Gov. Charles W. Turnbull announced the appointment of four new private-sector members to his eight-member Tourism Advisory Council in a release from Government House Friday.
Turnbull's appointees are Lisa Schmidt, Cape Air marketing director; Susan Chandler of the V.I. Charter Yacht League; William Cherubin, LIAT local manager; and Al Franklin of Our Town Frederiksted.
Tourism Commissioner Pamela Richards chairs the council. The other members are Leona Bryant, former director of tourism under the Economic Development and Agriculture Department; Claire Roker, St. Croix district manager for the congressional delegate's office; James O' Bryan, the governor's assistant for public affairs and policy; and Mario Carroll, V.I. Taxicab Commission executive director.
Although the council has already had one meeting, the private-sector members were not announced until Friday. The governor said in his release that the body had met to discuss the upcoming $6.5 million "Sea to Shining Sea" advertising campaign recently announced by the Tourism Department. He said the council will meet monthly.
The council has been fraught with controversy since its creation earlier this year. In an effort to appease the private-sector tourism interests after he vetoed a semi-autonomous Tourism Authority included in the 2001 Omnibus Bill, Turnbull in April appointed four representatives from the territory's chambers of commerce and hotel associations to represent the private sector on his new Tourism Advisory Committee.
The presidents of the four associations flatly rejected the offer. Wendell Snider, St. Croix Hotel and Tourism Association president; John deJongh, St. Thomas-St. John Chamber of Commerce president; Carmelo Rivera, St. Croix Chamber of Commerce president; and Richard Doumeng, St. Thomas-St. John Hotel Association president, issued a joint press release at the time saying, "Our past experience with tourism advisory committees has not been fruitful or productive. As a consequence we have instructed the executive directors of our four organizations to neither attend nor participate in the Tourism Advisory Committee."
DeJongh said then that a tourism advisory committee has "no teeth." It is "non-committal and a very weak handshake towards a true partnership."
Instead de Jongh said, "I am hopeful that at some point we can get the senators and governor together" to discuss a Tourism Authority. This has not occurred.
Rivera said at the time, "There was an amazing consensus across the board that we couldn't be part of an advisory board. It hasn't worked in the past and it's not going to work now. If we didn't reject it, we would have been giving tacit approval to the idea of an advisory board."
The measure Turnbull vetoed called for the semi-autonomous tourism authority to replace the Tourism Department. The governor's veto drew the ire of not only the private sector, but several senators. Sen. Alicia "Chucky" Hansen vowed to override it, which has not happened.
In Friday's release, the governor quoted Richards as saying that the council members "have an important responsibility to assure that our tourism plans … are maximized and effective for our tourism industry."
Neither Richards nor Turnbull gave any specifics what the council's role will be.

The Division of Planning and Natural Resources will close on Tuesday, Oct. 16, on St. Thomas and St. Croix.
The staff will attend the 2001 Coastal Zone Management Commission Workshop. Regular hours will resume on Wednesday, oct. 17.

The Division of the Department of Planning and Natural Resources will close on Tuesday, Oct. 16, on St. Thomas and St. Croix.
The entire staff will attend the 2001 Coastal Zone Management Commission Workshop. Regular hours of operation will resume on Wednesday, Oct. 17.

The pubic is invited to the presenetation of the new Computerized Piano Lab at E. Benjamin Oliver Elementary School at 9 a.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 18, at the school.
The presentation is expected to last 45 minutes.