Caribbean Genealogy Library Hosts Online Lecture
The Caribbean Genealogy Library (CGL) based in St. Thomas, USVI, will this week host an online lecture by IN THE SAME SEA Postdoctoral Fellow Felicia Fricke. You can sign up to attend here. CGL is a not-for-profit organisation and therefore asks for a donation of $5 for non-members to attend its events. The event is free for members.
IN THE SAME SEA followers can also attend for free by using the Promo Code: 606 during registration and check out.
The Bigards of St. Barths: A Maritime Family
Who were the people who lived in Gustavia, St. Barths, in the early 1800s? Many of them came from merchant or sailing families and were the important links between St. Barths and the surrounding islands. In this presentation, Dr. Felicia Fricke (University of Copenhagen) will discuss one of these families, the Bigards. Much previous historical work on trade networks and sailing communities in the Caribbean has focused on the 1700s and on larger islands and empires. However, recently scholars have become more interested in trade relations between the smaller islands and in the imperial powers of Northern Europe. Dr. Fricke’s work is part of this trend, but it also contributes a new focus on the maritime family that gives a human face to these trade networks. Using shipping data from newspapers, it puts the French Caribbean Bigard family into the larger trade context to assess their reach and impact. It also uses manuscript sources to complicate the internal workings of the family network, providing an intimate picture of early 1800s small island trade that is grounded in the agency of the maritime family.