Celebrities with Kittitian Roots

Kittitians, Nevisians and their two islands

A Kittitian is a native or inhabitant of St Kitts, and a Nevisian one of Nevis.^[5][6] According to Merriam-Webster, the word was first used in 1945, and its ending was probably modeled on Haitian.^[5] This page covers ancestry from both islands. Under the constitution of 1983, “the island of Saint Christopher (which is otherwise known as Saint Kitts) and the island of Nevis shall be a sovereign democratic federal state”.^[7] Nevis, the smaller, round island, lies 2 miles (3 km) southeast of St Kitts across a channel called the Narrows.^[1]

Christopher Columbus sighted both islands on his second voyage in 1493. He named St Kitts Saint Christopher after his patron saint, and English settlers later shortened the name. Nevis takes its name from his description of the clouds on its peak as las nieves, “the snows”.^[8] The government’s investment agency gives the Kalinago name of St Kitts as Liamuiga, “fertile island”. The highest mountain on the island, called Mount Misery in colonial times, carries that name today.^[9][10] The National Archives in Basseterre take a different view and write that the names the Kalinago gave the islands “were erased from history”.^[11]

A colony shared by England and France

Around 1600 Kalinago people set up a community on St Kitts and on Nevis. According to the National Archives, Thomas Warner and a small group of English settlers landed at Old Road Bay on January 28, 1623.^[11] Britannica calls it the first successful English colony in the West Indies.^[8] Other accounts date the landing to 1624.^[12][9] The investment agency calls St Kitts the “Mother Colony of the West Indies”.^[9]

French privateers under Pierre d’Esnambuc found refuge on the island in 1625. A year later the English and French settlers joined forces against the Kalinago. The Kalinago leader Tegreman was killed. Those who escaped fled by sea, and only a few Kalinago remained on the island.^[11][12] The site of the massacre, west of the village of Challengers, is still called Bloody Point.^[12] On May 13, 1627, the settlers divided St Kitts between them. The French took both ends of the island and the English the middle.^[11]

The Treaty of Utrecht gave the whole island to Britain in 1713.^[8] In 1727 the seat of government moved from Old Road to Basseterre.^[11] The national coat of arms shows a Carib head between the French fleur-de-lis and the English rose.^[13]

Sugar, slavery and Brimstone Hill

The first enslaved Africans were brought to St Kitts in 1626, probably taken from a Spanish ship. Around 1640 de Poincy, governor general of the French colonies in the West Indies, introduced sugar cane.^[11] European traders bought captives along the African coast from Senegambia to Madagascar, most of them in West Africa. By 1707 enslaved Africans outnumbered the people of European descent on St Kitts. In 1807 the island held 26,000 enslaved people and fewer than 2,000 whites.^[14] In the 2022 census, 88.0% of residents were counted as being of African descent.^[2]

Two genetic studies included St Kitts among eight English-speaking Caribbean islands and give figures for all eight together. In the 2013 study of 420 people, ancestry averaged 77% West African, 15% European and 7.7% Native American.^[15] In the earlier study of 2007, nearly 10% of the people tested had a non-African maternal line. On the paternal side, the European share came to nearly 30%.^[16]

British engineers designed the fortress on Brimstone Hill, and enslaved Africans built it. The British first mounted a cannon on the hill in 1690 to drive out the French, and their garrison left in 1853.^[17] French forces captured the fortress in 1782, and a treaty of 1783 returned the island to Britain.^[8] UNESCO made Brimstone Hill a World Heritage Site in 1999. It calls the fortress “testimony to European colonial expansion, the African slave trade and the emergence of new societies in the Caribbean”.^[17]

Slavery ended on August 1, 1834. A period of apprenticeship followed, another form of unfree labor for a fixed term.^[18] Estate workers on St Kitts downed tools in protest. Apprenticeship ended on August 1, 1838. The Basseterre Sugar Factory opened in 1912 and shut down on July 23, 2005, which ended the sugar industry on St Kitts.^[11] Tourism has since become the leading sector.^[1]

Nevis and the federation

English settlers came to Nevis in 1628, and the island soon became one of the most prosperous in the Antilles.^[8] Nevis later relied on small farms growing cotton and other crops. St Kitts depended almost entirely on sugar until the early 2000s.^[19]

From 1882 St Kitts, Nevis and Anguilla formed a single colony with its administration in Basseterre.^[19] The three islands became a state in association with the United Kingdom on February 27, 1967. Anguilla expelled the St Kitts police in May of that year, came under direct British rule in 1971 and formally left the union in 1980.^[1] Nevisians have long described the relationship with the larger island as one of domination. On August 1, 1970, the government ferry Christena sank in the Narrows, and 223 people died, most of them from Nevis.^[19][11]

St Kitts and Nevis became independent in 1983 as a federation in which only Nevis has its own assembly and government.^[19] Under section 113 of the constitution, Nevis may leave the federation if, among other conditions, a referendum on the island approves by “not less than two-thirds of all the votes validly cast”.^[7] On August 10, 1998, 61.7% voted for secession, short of that threshold. No second referendum has been held.^[19]

Leaving the islands

Both islands have long seen high emigration, which has kept the population fairly stable.^[1] The census of 1921 counted the lowest population on record, and the count of 1960 remained the highest until 2022.^[2]

A crisis in the sugar trade sent cane workers from St Kitts and Nevis to the growing sugar estates in the east of the Dominican Republic, along with migrants from Anguilla, Antigua and Tortola. Dominicans called them tortolos at first and later cocolos, a word that was then an insult.^[20] UNESCO notes that the word is now used with pride. In 2008 it added the Cocolo dance drama, which blends African music and dance with figures from the Bible and medieval European tales, to its list of the intangible heritage of humanity.^[21]

Tracing ancestors in St Kitts and Nevis

Most records in the National Archives in Basseterre date from 1728 or later. Local records of the 17th century seem to have been destroyed in the battles between the English and French. The archives hold civil registers of births from 1859 and of marriages from 1881, both up to 1930. Baptisms before 1859 are held by the churches. Certificates come from the Registrar General.^[22] The archives also keep Wesleyan and Moravian marriage registers for 1845–1874, deeds, old newspapers and the slave registers.^[23] Census returns and migration records are not among their holdings.^[22]

The civil registers of Nevis are kept in Basseterre as well, while all land records stayed on Nevis.^[22] The Nevis Historical and Conservation Society holds parish registers in its Nevis Island Archives. With Hamilton College it has digitized baptisms of St Paul’s (1824–1873), St James (1839–1877) and St Thomas Lowland (1827–1873).^[24]

The first register of enslaved people on St Kitts was drawn up in 1817. Later returns recorded births, deaths, manumissions, transportation and escapes.^[25] Copies for both islands, up to the returns of 1834, are held by The National Archives in Kew in series T 71.^[26] The registers list names, age, sex, color, place of origin and occupation, and on rare occasions family ties.^[27] The National Archives in Kew remind researchers that not all enslaved people had surnames.^[28] For the archives in Basseterre, the registers are “the first documentation of a people who had previously been made to live, work and die without an identity”.^[27] University College London’s Legacies of British Slavery project traces estates and their owners, so that enslaved people can be linked to the places where they lived and worked.^[18]