About the project

Since 2023, we, former National Archivist Asbjørn Hellum and former City Archivist Ruth Hedegaard, have been digitizing old West Indian records from the Danish colonial period in now US Virgin Islands. The goal is to digitize as many as possible of these important records that were left behind on the islands, after they were sold and transferred to the United States in 1917.

The project has been made possible thanks to the main sponsors: Civil Engineer Knud Nørgaard and his wife Grethe Nørgaards Foundation and Tage Nørgaard and Ulrik Nørgaards Foundation which provides support for travel, accommodation, equipment, and more; and the Danish National Archives, which has supplied us with the essential technical equipment and has been responsible for training and ongoing professional support. Ernst Andersen and Tove Dobel Andersens Foundation has supported with equipment and other things. Importantly, the National Archives also handles the crucial long-term preservation of the digital copies of the records and provides public access via ArkivalierOnline on the Internet.

The digitization is carried out by us on a voluntary, unpaid basis in close collaboration with the Danish National Archives, the local authorities in the U.S. Virgin Islands, and with assistance from other volunteers in Denmark and locally on the islands.
We are on St. Thomas and St. Croix twice a year, each stay lasting about two to two and a half months.

By the end of our most recent stay in April 2025, we had digitized 222 volumes comprising 84,430 pages. So far, the project is expected to run through 2029. We have now digitized the police court records from 1841 through the early 1880s, along with many other materials, which are continuously being cataloged in the collections of the Danish National Archives and can be found using their registry. Our digitization supple-ments  and fills gaps in the National Archives' holdings.

Machine Reading and Recognition of Gothic Script
We are steadily continuing our work with the program Transkribus for machine recognition of the Danish Gothic handwriting.
We are discussing possible collaboration on broader dissemination of machine recognition and thereby possibly opportunities to upload machine-recognized documents on The Danish National Archives "Rigsarkivets" website for further review by volunteers. 

We have a few volunteers helping us working with the text recognition program Transkribus. More about that is mentioned under Voluntary help