Part of the reason for our recent trip to St. Lucia was to see what we could learn about my St. Lucia roots. We have a lot of what I call “family lore”, but not much of that is backed up by documentation. My maternal grandmother talked about St. Lucia all the time, and how they were high society there, having servants.
She came to the USA in May 1918, and my mother was born in September that year. I found documentation for those two events, a combination of recordings on calendars made by my grandmother’s uncle David Sexton. And we knew my grandmother’s mother, Henrietta (Hepburn) Sexton Harris. She lived well into her 90s, and I knew her and spent many a holiday when she visited in Rhode Island.
Although, it wasn’t until I made contact with cousins in New York City, the children and grandchildren of my grandmother’s half-sisters that the full story came out. But it came out as family lore. Henrietta was one of six siblings, but the cousins couldn’t agree on who those children were, nor on the name of her father. They agreed on three of the six, but not the other three. So, as the years progressed, I knew a trip to St. Lucia was necessary. But would it be productive?
The answer is yes. The first morning our son and I drove to the St. Lucia archives. It’s not a big building from the outside, and they were in the process of moving from one building to another. But the women working there were friendly and helpful. I paid the research fee, then Charles did most of the talking. He had the names we were interested in, the type of documents we hoped to get copies of, and the years of interest. Meanwhile, the archivists were anxious to see the photos I had, and to scan them. One lady worked on scanning while another did a preliminary check of their indexes to see if maybe some of the documents we were interested in were in the archives. After the public hours closed, they would do a more complete check.
This was actually more than we’d hoped for. I had heard that the St. Lucia archives had few documents, and those disorganized—that many documents were destroyed in major fires in Castries in 1927 and 1948. Maybe some records were lost, but it seemed they had many extant, and an organized system for retrieving them.
We went back the next day to see what they actually found (in many places, sometimes an archive index can be erroneous). This gave us a chance to pick and choose what we wanted to have copies of. While we were doing this, I noticed the receptionist had one huge book open and was transcribing records. I didn’t come up to look over her shoulder to see what the records were. Suffice to say that additional deeds or marriages or birth records or powers of attorney or probate matters were added to the digital archives that day.
Those were the only two days we went to the archives. We paid fees (cash only, though they take US dollars) to receive digital copies of the documents, and they came a week later as email attachments. Family lore was confirmed in some cases, but confusion added by other documents. Oh well, we have time to sort it all out, come up with ancestral link conclusions and working theories of paths for future research.
I’ve researched in a few courthouses in the US, but this was the first time for me to go to a foreign archive in the hope of receiving relevant documents and data. A good experience, though I suspect this was a one-time only experience.
