Danish West Indies, Birth, Marriage and Death Records, 1820-1909

This collection contains sensitive information about enslaved people, as well as outdated terminology describing race.

General Collection Information

The Danish West Indies was a Danish colony in the Caribbean from 1672 to 1917. This collection contains  birth, marriage, and death records dating between 1600 and 1920 from the Danish West Indies. The islands—St. Thomas, St. John, and St. Croix—were sold to the U.S. in 1917 and are now known as the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Many of the records you’ll find in this collection are for enslaved people. Records may be written in English, Danish, or Dutch.

Using this Collection

Birth records in this collection may include the following information:

• Name
• Birthdate
• Birth place
• Baptism date
• Baptism place
• Names of parents
• Names of godparents

Burial records in this collection may include the following information:

• Name
• Birthdate
• Birth place
• Date of death
• Date of burial
• Age at death
• Burial place
• Names of relatives

Marriage records in this collection may include the following information:

• Name
• Gender
• Spouse’s name
• Marriage date
• Marriage place
• Age at marriage
• Parents’ names

The collection is searchable by any of the recorded details. Please note that the dates in the register may refer to the dates of baptism or burial and may not reflect the exact vital dates. 

Many of the records in this collection are those of enslaved people. If you’re researching an ancestor who may have been enslaved, there are many ways to determine their status.

First, records often have a status field indicating whether a person was enslaved or free. In Danish, words beginning with “Fri” or “Frie” (For example, Frimand or Fridomestik) indicate a free person. The word Ufrie translates to “unfree” in English. The term Manqueron refers to an enslaved person with a disability. Busal refers to an enslaved person who had been living in the colony for less than a year.

Names can also offer clues about an ancestor’s status. If the record refers to a person only by their first name without including a surname, it often means they were enslaved.

History of the Collection

Denmark annexed the Caribbean island of St. Thomas in 1672, and St. John in 1718. In 1733, St. Croix was purchased from France to establish sugar cane plantations. An estimated 120,000 enslaved Africans were imported to provide labor for the islands’ plantations. Though the slave trade in the Danish West Indies was outlawed by 1803, it would take 45 years for slavery itself to be abolished on the islands.

When the islands were sold to the U.S. in 1917, the majority of the Danish West Indian archives were to be sent back to the Danish National Archives (known as the Rigsarkivet) in Copenhagen. The collection proved too large to transport back to Denmark in its entirety, so the portion left behind became the property of the United States.

Ancestry has partnered with Rigsarkivet to bring our customers 5 million pages of digitized content from the Danish West Indies.

Bibliography

National Museum of Denmark. “Danish Colonies/The Danish West Indies.” Last modified 2020. https://en.natmus.dk/historical-knowledge/historical-themes/danish-colonies/the-danish-west-indies/

Rigsarkivet. “The Slave Lists.” Last modified 2020. https://www.virgin-islands-history.org/en/history/slavery/the-slave-lists/

Rigsarkivet. “The Records.” Last modified 2020. https://www.virgin-islands-history.org/en/about/therecords/