Analyze an Amerindian Stone Ax found at Little Cruz Bay, St. John
Activity Type: Artifact
Through research, archeologists have found signs that suggests that the first people arrived in the Virgin Islands around 2500 to 3000 years ago. In the Virgin Islands, over 210 sites belonging to Amerindian cultures have been uncovered and identified. Some of the important village sites found and studied on…
Analyze a Painting of St. Thomas by Camille Pissarro
Activity Type: Artwork
Jacob Abraham Camille Pissarro was born on July 10, 1830, in Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, Danish West Indies. He is well known for his contributions in the field of art. He was an impressionist painter. Impressionist artists paint an impression of what the landscape, person or object looks like…
Analyze the Handle found at an Amerindian Site in Salt River, St. Croix
Activity Type: Artifact
Artifacts, in general terms, are items made by humans. Items made by humans in the past are often uncovered by accident when later people are digging in the ground to farm or to build things. They are also found when archeologists conduct studies of areas identified as possible historic…
Running Against the Odds, Sarah of St. Croix
Activity Type: Artwork, Map, Written Document
During the time of slavery in the Danish West Indies enslaved Africans regularly attempted to escape. At times, they succeeded. Danish West Indian authorities issued laws, such as the slave code of 1733, to sanction and punish such behavior. Slave owners used island newspapers to notify the community that…
What does handwriting have to do with historical research?
Activity Type: Written Document
Many historical documents from past centuries are handwritten. How we write differs by country, and in general it has changed over time. We have come from using an ornate script to not using script writing, or handwriting, much at all. Today we use keyboarding to write. A historian or…
Map of part of Charlotte Amalie on St. Thomas
Activity Type: Map
Bluebeard’s Castle is the name given to a historic Danish period watchtower that was built around 1689, on St. Thomas. It is located on a small hill, overlooking Charlotte Amalie harbor. Originally the watchtower was part of a fortification system used to watch over and protect the harbor. The…
Census Record 1850, Charlotte Amalia, Crown Prince Quarter 10B General Gade belonging to Valentina Ricardo
Activity Type: Written Document
Official population censuses are the primary sources of information about the composition and distribution of a specific set of people over time. The Virgin Islands is fortunate in having available for research a total of fifteen, near-complete censuses for the period 1835 to 1940. They document in a variety…
Census Record of Free Blacks from 1803
Activity Type: Written Document
Proceedings and Register of Free Blacks is a census conducted in 1803 on St. Thomas. It counted and listed the islands’ free people of color. The census contains age, occupation, where the person was from, how they got to St. Thomas, how they came to be free, and other…
Manumission by Will, St. John, November 2, 1796
Activity Type: Written Document
Prior to the general emancipation of all people who were unfree on July 3, 1848, enslaved people in the Danish West Indies gained their individual freedom legally through a legal process of manumission, whereby they were freed in writing by their owner and then issued a Free Letter by…
St. John to BVI, Running away to “Freedom”
Activity Type: Written Document
The Danish West Indian archives contain a vast amount of documentation about police matters, including correspondence, reports, and cases that demonstrate unrelenting resistance to enslavement, as well as actual crimes. Although most of it is rendered in the Danish gothic script, some of the correspondence, like these two letters,…
Analyzing a Record of Ship Arrival from 1804
Activity Type: Written Document
Since the 1760s, St. Thomas, benefiting from free port status and one of the finest natural harbors in the world, has been a hub of Atlantic maritime trade and commerce. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a vast variety of trade goods from the far reaches of the Atlantic…
Analyze Petroglyphs and an Amerindian Swallow Stick
Activity Type: Artifact
The various groups of people who first inhabited the Virgin Islands had no written system of communication. However, we can learn directly about their lifeways and beliefs through the surviving elements of their material culture, which include settlement sites, pottery, stoneware, food remains and various kinds of carvings, all…
