In memory of Rupert Bodden: Tracer of family roots

Rupert Bodden had a talent for tracking down information on ancestors, both his own and those of members of genealogy group Cayman Connection. His own family tree, which he compiled, contains 57,206 names.

Bodden passed away at his home in Alabama on 27 Dec. He was 93.

He was well known among people in Cayman and overseas who were trying to trace their family roots or find long-lost relatives, and, as the compiler of the Cayman Islands Cemeteries Index, he was one of the go-to people to find out where an ancestor might be buried.

Born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, Wilfred Rupert Bodden Jr. was the son of Wilfred Rupert Bodden Sr. of Bodden Town and Grace Hunter Bodden of Cayman Brac.

He worked as a dentist and later as an emeritus professor at the University of Alabama Dental School. He did relief dentistry work in Cayman occasionally, and also, for nine summers, spent his vacations participating in medical missions in Honduras, providing dental care to remote villages. He also volunteered for several years with the BEAT Project and Habitat for Humanity.

But for many Caymanians, and those wanting to trace their Cayman heritage, he was known for building a family tree that included many of the surnames popular locally.

Jo Ellen Rae-Smith, who, like Bodden, is a moderator of the Cayman Connection genealogy group, met him for the first time when he made his last trip to Grand Cayman, in 2017.

“He was a lovely gentleman,” Rae-Smith said. “He really was a wealth of knowledge.”
She said he had helped trace “all of Cayman” as there are so many connections between local families on island. “You start off with your family and you end up with the whole of Cayman,” she said.

One of his hobbies was woodworking, and on his 2017 trip, he gave gifts of hand-made wooden coats of arms to several people, including Rae-Smith, who still has it hanging on her office wall.

Bodden’s grandson, Patrick Bodden, said the family tree his granddad compiled, with its thousands of names, does not just include Boddens from Cayman but also other branches of the family as well as those who married into it.

The massive family tree focussed more on breadth than on the depth of generations, Patrick Bodden said, as it’s difficult to trace ancestors to before the settling of the Cayman Islands.

“For family trees, a lot of people will go for depth to see how far back you can go, but with Cayman it is very difficult to go back much further than the first residents of the island with any degree of certainty,” he said.

He said the closest connection he could see in his grandfather’s family tree to Isaac Bodden, the first person recorded as being born in the Cayman Islands, in 1700, is that “Isaac is a sixth great-grandfather to my grandfather, although I believe that Isaac may also be a seventh grandfather through another line”.

Rupert Bodden married Elizabeth ‘Libby’ Jean Burke in 1952, and the couple had three children, six grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.

Libby accompanied him on his 2017 trip to Cayman, where the couple celebrated his 90th birthday with a meal at Grand Old House.

Bodden had been a moderator of the 782-member Cayman Connection online discussion group since its inception in the 1990s.

After fellow moderator Rhona Panton announced Bodden’s passing on the site last week, many members paid tribute to him, telling how he had helped them trace their Cayman roots.

Panton said in her post, “His great love of history and family research has been a great help to everyone in this group… I was exchanging information with Rupert up until the last couple of weeks. As always, he was trying to figure out the relationship of persons on his tree.”

Bodden had also worked with the Cayman Islands National Archive on preserving some of his findings.

In a statement to the Compass, the National Archive said, “Over the years, Dr. Rupert Bodden has donated items to the National Archive, which have been used primarily for genealogy research. Staff at the National Archive have also corresponded with Dr. Bodden, as recently as the last quarter of 2020, and remember him fondly as an enthusiastic and knowledgeable genealogist.”

During his visit in 2017, Bodden recorded an oral history with National Archive archivist Tricia Bodden. That audio recording is available in the Reading Room of the National Archive for members of the public to access, and includes topics such as Bodden’s own Caymanian heritage and connections, his initial visit to Cayman to practise dentistry for a summer, and his involvement in the creation of Cayman Connection.

Among his donations is ‘The Bodden and Hunter Family History’ – the version of his huge family tree that he compiled in 1996, which is 119 pages long. As well as Boddens and Hunters, through family connections, local names like Scott, Tibbetts, Foster, Parsons, Ryan, Merren, McTaggart, and Jackson, also feature.

He also donated a summary of the Public Recorder’s Records – the oldest original local records, from the early 1800s, which include entries of wills, deeds, sales and manumissions of slaves, etc., which were voluntarily recorded to be registered as government records – which he helped compile.

“One can only imagine the time taken to produce this summary as it covers records dating from the early 1800s to the late 1940s,” Charisse Morrison of the National Archive said in an email. “It is a valuable contribution to our Historical Collections and is consulted on a regular basis for all types of purposes, but primarily for genealogical research.”

Grandson Patrick explained how this branch of the Bodden family ended up living in Alabama.

“My grandfather’s grandfather and two of his older brothers, on two separate voyages, were lost at sea. My grandfather’s father came to the US because his mother and sisters did not want him working on boats, so he worked on the trains here,” he said.

Cayman was “engrained” in Rupert Bodden, and he owned property on Cayman Brac, his mother’s home island, his grandson said. “It was certainly part of who he was,” he added.

Like many Caymanians, he loved the sea, and his grandkids from a young age associated him with a boat he owned. Patrick, being the eldest grandchild, nicknamed his grandfather ‘Daddy Boat’, a name that stuck, for a simple reason. “I gave him that name when I was 2. He was a daddy who had a boat,” he said.

Bodden was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer just a few days before he passed away at his home, his grandson said, and he spent his last days surrounded by his family.