Soon after Dr. Angel Smith was appointed to oversee the government’s archives last year, he was assessing old records when he found a series of documents that shed new light on the history of land ownership in the territory. The story started in deed books, where Dr. Smith found records of enslaved people buying their freedom as far back as the 1700s — decades before emancipation in 1834.
“So it’s a slave society,” Dr. Smith told the Beacon. “There you had enslaved people, you had the white planters, and you had free black and coloured persons. Now, that brings us to the next point, where in the records we are finding that free black men and women are literally out there purchasing land in the early 1800s.”

On display
Copies of such records were among the displays at a June 21 exhibition held to observe National Archives Day at the Archives and Records Management Unit at the base of Russell Hill.
Themed “From Property to Proprietors,” the exhibition included lists of several property transfers from the early 1800s.
One of the documents on display showed that a free black man, James Beel, purchased five acres of land in Virgin Gorda for £14.04 on Aug. 6, 1803. Then, on April 5, 1807, he gifted that land to his daughter, Rose Taylor.
Such records illustrate a “legacy of land ownership in the BVI” where land is often passed down to family members, Dr. Smith said, adding, “We can see the genesis of that even within the records.”
While Ms. Taylor, a free black woman, was given land, free “coloured” women also bought land, according to other records on display. At the time, “coloured” was a legal designation for people considered to be of mixed race, explained Dr. Smith, who was appointed director of the archives unit last year.
The records state that Rebecca Lake, a free “coloured” woman, bought a house lot in Road Town from John and Martha Pasea for £0.05 on July 6, 1801.
Another free “coloured” woman, Bethia Coakley Dracott, bought a “house and land” in Road Town from John Dracott for £0.10 on Dec. 13, 1803.
“So [Mr. Dracott] would have probably been her father, who then made this land and property available to offer a basic rent — a basic cost,” Dr. Smith said.

Archives’ condition
There are many other important lessons to be learned from the national archives, but most of the territory’s oldest records are not accessible to the public.
Instead, they are sealed and locked away in a temperature-controlled “strongroom” in a “section up in the back of the Old Administration Building,” Dr. Smith said.
He added that he found the land records while assessing some of the documents to see if there were any that could be handled.
“I started going through [the documents] to get a feel as to what it was that I was working with,” he said. “And then as I came across some that were not as fragile as the others, … I took an opportunity to go through them and took digital images as I went.”
But countless other archives going back at least as far as the 1700s are in a poor state and too delicate to be handled after years of neglect that included damage to some of them during Hurricane Irma in 2017.
Restoration hopes
Once these records are restored, they can be digitised, according to Dr. Smith.
“This is a judgment day project,” he said.
But to even assess what is needed to complete the project, he added, the unit would first need to hire an archivist.
That archivist would be able to properly assess the number of conservationists needed, the time it would take to preserve and digitise the documents, and the needed budget, according to Dr. Smith, who stressed that he himself is not an archivist but a historian.
“Most of [the documents] have already been assessed, and they’re sealed until the time when we have a conservationist to come and work with them,” Dr. Smith said. “We’ve had persons who’d offered to come in and digitise them, but it is not just digitising: They have to be restored first.”
But restoring these documents is a “painstaking process,” he added.
“Once you start it — you move a page, you have to fix that page because you can’t do anything else with it,” he explained. “It has to then be stabilised so that you can use it.”
In addition to the resources and personnel needed for the project, the archives unit is also in need of a proper space to carry out the work.
“A conservationist needs a specialised space to work in, in terms of a laboratory to be able to test and treat [the documents],” Dr. Smith said.
Currently, however, there are only three people working in the archives unit, and two of them – including Dr. Smith — are there on a “rolling basis,” he explained.
“I’m literally just keeping [the archives unit] open. And because I’m a historian, then I have to do what a historian does,” Dr. Smith explained. “I want to be able to see what the records are actually saying and then make that information public and useful for others.”

Understanding history
Dr. Smith stressed the importance of the restoration project to better understanding the history of the Virgin Islands.
The archives, he added, have already “yielded some very fascinating information, which begs the question as to what else is there.”
Photo project
In the meantime, Dr. Smith’s team is working to add to the archives as well.
An example of this endeavour was on display at the Archives Day exhibit, which also featured photographs taken in different parts of the VI showing how the islands have developed over the years.
Then and now
In making the display, Dr. Smith said, he realised the importance of capturing photos of the landscape.
He added that he plans to add current photos of the VI to the archives, so they can be beneficial to future generations.
“This is fascinating because if we do that now, that means 50 years from now somebody would have this,” Dr. Smith said. “I never saw the importance of it to that extent, because … some of the areas I know very well, and I can see it in my mind’s eye. But now, putting it together, you know, it stands out.”