October is Family History Month and people can celebrate their ancestors by learning about them. The Caribbean Genealogy Library (CGL) on St. Thomas will offer a Genealogy Workshop at 2 p.m., Sunday, Oct. 27. The focus is on researching family history in the British Virgin Islands.
Whether you are a beginner or an expert or somewhere in between with your British Virgin Islands (BVI) family history research, this is the event for you.
Nadine Marchena Kean, an avid genealogist and author of “The Ties that Bind… A Virgin Islands Story,” is the host of the workshop. She is knowledgeable about records, including government and church records, that are available for researching family history in the British Virgin Islands.
The workshop is free as part of the Caribbean Genealogy Library’s Family History Month celebrations. It is open to any and all interested in tracing and documenting family history with ties between the U.S. Virgin Islands and the British Virgin Islands.
If just beginning, the library encourages people to do a little homework and bring to the workshop. Where to begin: Take a sheet of paper and start with yourself, add your parents; if you know your grandparents add them too. Ask the elders in your family for additional names that they may remember; also, write down dates such as birthdays (even if you just have the year, that’s a helpful start), religions of your ancestors, and which island in the BVI they are from, and which area. These facts are important for getting started with genealogy research.
Those who have done some family history work already, should bring what they have plus their research questions. Information on how to get started can be found at: CGL Getting Started.