As a young man Charles Jeffers travelled all over the Caribbean, and even lived in Tortola, in the British Virgin Islands, in the 1970s. The one place he never went was his father’s birthplace, St Kitts and Nevis.

His father, Hubert Henry Jeffers, died from a massive stroke when Charles was eight.

“At the time of his passing in 1950, he had a shoe repair shop on Angle Street, directly across from the Church of God building,” Mr Jeffers remembered.

But he did not know why his father came to Bermuda from Nevis as a young man.

“I never had the chance to ask him about his early life there, and my mother never really talked about it,” Mr Jeffers said.

He finally visited the island federation of St Christopher and Nevis for the first time in 2003.

“As soon as I arrived a strange feeling came over me,” Mr Jeffers said. “I just felt at home. I felt like this was where I belonged.”

His wife, Juneia Jeffers, who also has family ties to St Kitts and Nevis, felt a similar sense of connection to the place.

“My grandmother on my mother’s side, Caroline Amelia Hazell, hailed from Nevis,” Mrs Jeffers said.

Mr Jeffers, 82, spent many decades running Heritage Educational Funds International, helping parents save for their children’s university education. Mrs Jeffers, 73, runs a business called Pink Pillars Vision.

They liked St Kitts and Nevis so much they bought a condo there, and settled there permanently two years ago.

“We just felt that this would be a good place for us at this stage,“ Mr Jeffers said.

They live in Frigate Bay, St Kitts, 15-minutes east of the capital of Basseterre.

“It is an area that serves the residents and tourists very well,” Mr Jeffers said. “Almost at the end of our street is the St Kitts Marriott Resort & The Royal Beach Casino.

“There is also the Royal St Kitts Hotel, and several first class restaurants. We do not even have to catch a taxi to go to the grocery store. We can just go out of our gate and make a left. There is also a golf course across the street.”

While in the country, they have enjoyed exploring their family history.

Mr Jeffers’ father went by Jeffers in Bermuda, but was born with the surname Byron, so they are now researching those surnames.

“Jeffers was his stepfather’s surname,” Mr Jeffers explained.

Grandchildren and children of Kittitians are entitled to citizenship. The catch was that in order for Mr Jeffers to get his, he had to first find his father’s records.

This proved to be a little complicated as they did not know the names of Hubert Jeffers’ parents. “We were on the wrong track entirely,” Mrs Jeffers said.

They found some answers in the Gingerland Methodist Church in Manning, Nevis, where Hubert Jeffers’ 1906 baptismal record could be found.

“They were able to find it for us,” Mr Jeffers said.

His mother’s name was Geraldine Rawlins and his father was James Byron. That took them back to the registry’s office where they found that Hubert Jeffers’ first name had not been entered on his birth certificate.

“It just said ‘male child’,” Mr Jeffers said. “In those days you had to register quickly and sometimes people had not picked a name out yet. When the child was baptised, you were supposed to go back to the registrar’s office and put the name there, but, in this case, they did not.”

Mrs Jeffers was recently able to trace her husband’s maternal grandfather, also from St Kitts, Charles Francis.

“We now have his birth and baptismal record,” Mr Jeffers said. “Hopefully, our next trip to Nevis will result in the tracking of the birth and baptismal certificates of my paternal grandfather, James Byron.”

So far, they are loving their life in St Kitts.

“We are getting involved in the community, church and neighbourhood,” Mrs Jeffers said. “We were very involved in things back in Bermuda, from an early age, and now we are picking up the banner here.

“In Bermuda we have an organisation called Keep Bermuda Beautiful. Here, I keep Frigate Bay beautiful.”

They have fit right into the community.

“The people here might as well be our cousins,” Mrs Jeffers said. “When I go downtown, on any given week, people will say ‘hi!’, and take my hand. I look like the people here. However, the moment I speak, they know I am not from here. They will say ‘where you from, where you from?’.”

Not everyone in St Kitts is familiar with Bermuda. Sometimes when Mr and Mrs Jeffers send mail back home it ends up in either Barbuda (the smaller island of the nation of Antigua and Barbuda), or even in St Lucia.

A few years ago, Mr Jeffers bought several of his grandchildren to St Kitts and took the ferry over to Nevis.

“It takes about 45 minutes, although there is a fast ferry which takes a different route,” he said. “We took the grandchildren to the Methodist Church in Gingerland, where my father was christened in 1906. We took a picture of them all there.“

The grandchildren took the trip to their ancestral church in stride, but it was an emotional moment for Mr Jeffers.

“I did not know any of my grandparents,” he said. “They were all born in the Caribbean. On my father’s side they were born in Nevis, and on my mother’s side, they were from St Kitts. I do have one grandmother born in Antigua, but she grew up in St Kitts.”

Nevis is 36 square miles, and St Kitts is 68 square miles, with a total population of around 48,000.

“The island used to be a sugar producer,” Mr Jeffers said. “When they got out of the industry in the 1990s a lot of property was just left sitting there. They now have a shortage of people.”

The Jeffers occasionally help other Bermudians get citizenship or renew their passports. Children and grandchildren of Kittitians qualify.

There is a small community of Bermudians permanently settled there, such as saxophonist Lloyd Williams and his family.

Mr and Mrs Jeffers recently helped Mr Williams, a Nevis resident, celebrate his 80th birthday.