The Bluenose Press
Washington, DC
1995
Copyright c 1995
The author is continuing to research, correct, update and expand the individual family genealogies published in this series, a list of which is available at the end of this book. Readers desiring a copy of the most recent version of individual genealogies of any Eastern Shore family published or scheduled for publication in this series may obtain them separately from the publisher, either printed and bound in 8.5 x 11 inch format, or as text files on 3.5 inch diskette in ASCII format.
GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES 5 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 10 NOTES FOR A HISTORY OF SHIP HARBOUR 12 SOURCES FOR SHIP HARBOUR RESEARCH 35 THE FAMILIES OF SHIP HARBOUR 44 Beamish 44 Blakeney/Blakley 46 Carash 58 Carter 59 Chapman 63 Coates 67 Cowan 68 Crumm 72 Curry 73 Davis 75 Dean 77 DeWolfe 79 Eisan 86 Fahie 106 Garrett 115 Gilchrist 118 Gould 122 Jamison 123 Keating 125 Kennedy 132 Major 133 Manuel 134 Marks 135 Martin 153 McDonald 157 McNiel 158 Mehl 159 Merryweather 160 Monk 161 O'Bryan 174 O'Melia 184 Peitzsch 185 Powell 188 Power 189 Reardon 192 Robertson 194 Shady 196 Shelnut 197 Siteman 205 Step 234 Thorogood 235 Tracey 237 Tucker 240 Weeks 242 Wilcox 251 Zong 254 APPENDIX A: EARLY POPULATION DATA 260 APPENDIX B: ABBREVIATIONS 261 APPENDIX C: MINISTERS OF RELIGION 262 GENEALOGICAL INDEX 267 EASTERN SHORE FAMILIES: SUMMARY OF THE SERIES 316
This series of publications under the general title of Eastern Shore Families provides brief historical notes for the coastal villages between Eastern Passage and Ecum Secum, in Halifax County, Nova Scotia, the area usually known as "the Eastern Shore," and presents the genealogies of the families who lived in these villages during the nineteenth century. This is a first effort using the genealogical perspective to approach the Eastern Shore as an entire region. These volumes will be of interest to persons with Eastern Shore ancestors who may wish to learn more about their own family history, as well as those with a more general interest in the economic, social or medical history of the Maritimes. Genealogy has been the means of approach to this series of micro-histories of Eastern Shore villages, but it has not been considered as an end in itself.
This series is based on the development of genealogies of the families who first settled on the Eastern Shore before the end of the nineteenth century. The first serious attempts at permanent settlement along the Eastern Shore began in the summer of 1783, and since then there has been considerable and diverse migration to this region -- Royalist dirt farmers from the more southern of the former Thirteen Colonies, disbanded and pensioned British and Nova Scotian soldiers and militiamen, artisans and laborers moving out from Halifax, Irish fisherman (often arriving via Newfoundland), descendants of "Foreign Protestants" from Lunenburg County, farmers moving down the rivers from settlements further inland, and a few immigrants, prisoners of war and shipwrecked sailors arriving directly from Europe. At the same time there was also much emigration from the Eastern Shore communities, primarily to the Halifax/Dartmouth metropolitan area, the other Maritime Provinces, Ontario and British Columbia, the industrial towns of eastern Massachusetts and the lumber towns of Maine. In addition, there were a number of temporary sojourners on the Eastern Shore, individuals, some with families, who came to try their luck on the Eastern Shore, did not prosper there and decided to move on, usually after only a short period of residence. Gold miners and seasonal lumbermen are typical examples of the temporary resident, but there were many who also came to fish and farm but soon moved elsewhere to seek a better fortune. Genealogies of these temporary residents have been included only if these families contained members who intermarried with more established Eastern Shore families, left some of their children behind to introduce their family surnames into the region, or remained long enough to appear in at least two different sets of census or vital records.
For all the "romance" that is being read into the region now that the Eastern Shore has been "discovered" by the North American urbanite seeking vacation real estate offering accessibility, quaintness and a bit of history, for most of the last two centuries the Eastern Shore has been a very marginal economic zone characterized by grinding poverty interrupted by a late nineteenth century boom, the Golden Age, that impacted only marginally on the established inhabitants and left little behind to enrich their lives. Aside from Micmac Indians, fugitive Acadians and a few isolated and temporary fishermen, the Eastern Shore was not settled in any determined way until after the end of the American Revolution, some thirty years after better land elsewhere in Nova Scotia had been taken from the Acadians and redistributed to Protestant newcomers, or hewn out of the wilderness. Except for a small area around Chezzetcook Inlet, the land along the Eastern Shore now is classified as being unsuitable for any agricultural use. That fact did not stop many Eastern Shore families from farming and raising their families on the produce of this very poor soil, but it does suggest the difficulty they had in doing so, adding thin poor rocky soil to a short growing season, bitterly cold weather and salt wind from the sea as obstacles to success.
Inshore fishing was usually plentiful in the early years, but its pursuit did not lead to a life of abundance. The Eastern Shore fisherman, coastal or long distance, as well as the farmer and lumberman, led a very hardscrabble existence. The most prosperous of the Eastern Shore natives engaged in long distance shipping on locally produced craft, and the title of Captain was the most prized local appellation of honor. All too many Eastern Shore ship captains and members of their crews, however, were lost at sea from wrecks or disease; life too was Hobbesian for the seafarer.
Readers born in the second half of the twentieth century may find it difficult to relate their present lives to much of what is recorded in this book. Life on the Eastern Shore, part of the Northeastern frontier of North America, was similar to early life on the Western frontier, yet without the real possibility for a new beginning and success. It was a life without antibiotics, where diseases for which we now routinely receive immunizations in childhood and have been eradicated or controlled in most of North America were everyday killers, where a wife and mother could legitimately wonder each day if all the members of her family would be together again that evening and have enough to eat, or if she herself would survive her next childbirth or succumb to endemic tuberculosis. It was a life where the men would often be away from home for long periods of time. Separations were of days for the lumberman or lobsterman, weeks for the coastal fisherman, months for the mariner, those fishing on the Banks and seasonal laborers, years for South Atlantic whalers and Pacific sealers and the seeker of fortune elsewhere, forever in the case of those who died abroad, were killed in accidents away from home or who just chose to disappear never to be heard from again.
Many children along the Eastern Shore in the nineteenth century were raised in what were effectively one-parent families living at or below what is now considered to be the "poverty line" and dwelling in crowded housing without plumbing. Perhaps the large proportion of Eastern Shore residents and emigrants who did not marry, or who did marry and had no children, made this choice voluntarily because of the memories of being raised in a small house full of hungry, smelly and noisy children, and did not relish a repetition of the experience from the adult perspective.
Family size along the Eastern Shore for most of the nineteenth century was generally at the usual biological maximum (a child every two years over a twenty-year average breeding period). One can note in the genealogies, however, the arrival and effect of human interference, even unintentional, in human biology. The beginnings of the revolution in artificial birth control that culminated a century later in "the pill" can be noted in Halifax as early as the second half of the nineteenth century, but birth control (crude self-abortion efforts aside) did not reach the Eastern Shore until well into the twentieth. In the pre-industrial era, children of stable couples came along every two years with a regularity on which family historians can depend, a regularity controlled by hormonal changes induced by breast feeding of infants. Breast feeding, however, was a time consuming venture not necessarily viewed as a pleasure or possible to use by all mothers. In the 1870s the means to avoid it -- bottle feeding using rubber nipples -- were introduced on the Eastern Shore.
The havoc caused to the natural spacing of births in these families where mothers did not breast feed, and in the absence of other contraceptive measures, is immediately evident in the genealogies for that period. A woman over a 20-25 year period of married life could in the first half of the nineteenth century expect to have some 10-12 live births, but for some Eastern Shore families the birth numbers were reaching towards 20 children late in the nineteenth century. This dramatic increase in family size in the late nineteenth century, accepted but not necessarily wanted, impacted on the economic life of the Eastern Shore residents. For those unusually large families it represented almost a form of ritualized poverty, the consumption of family resources in raising children that otherwise could have been used in capital accumulation, higher education for a smaller number of children, or personal consumption and comfort. These children in the Eastern Shore population bulge also reached working age at precisely the time when the Eastern Shore natural resources-based economy was in serious and permanent decline, greatly increasing the pressures on these same children to emigrate. For these young persons, who were the future of the Eastern Shore, there was no future on the Eastern Shore and many were forced to look elsewhere for work and to build their lives. It induced "lifeboat ethics;" some had to leave so that the others could survive if they stayed. The descendants of both those who left the Eastern Shore and those who stayed today owe their existence to the easy availability of migration destinations in North America in the late nineteenth century, and the resulting easing of the population pressures on the Eastern Shore.
In modern times, to have about ten percent of the native-born population living abroad is considered a sign of a "normal" underdeveloped economy. For Nova Scotia as a province, this is about the percentage of Nova Scotians that were living in the United States during the second half of the nineteenth century. (See Robert Kim Stevens, "The Distribution of Nova Scotians in the United States in 1870," Nova Scotia Genealogist, Vol. II, no. 1, p. 23-24, for a more detailed look this aspect.) But taking the Eastern Shore as a region, emigration rates were far in excess of 10 percent during the last decades of the nineteenth century and up to World War I. This is a sign of an economy in deep crisis, in full collapse, not just grinding along in underdevelopment.
The individual family histories presented in this volume have not been edited to neo-Victorian standards, and vital statistics and family relationships are presented as they were described in the contemporary public records, which for the most part were explicit. The information presented relating to illegitimacy, suicide, incest, abortion, genetic maladies and criminal activity has been available for many decades to anyone who cared to look for it. It is difficult to answer many twentieth century social questions with nineteenth century data, but genealogists fare better than other social scientists because the nineteenth-century mind was concerned about recording accurately the course of human biology. It is worth noting here that the apparent mortality rate for children born to single mothers on the Eastern Shore was unusually high compared to that of children born to two-parent families, and that such births seem to have been more prevalent in the elder rather than younger daughters of large families, often families headed by a widowed father.
In the genetic sense, things will never be the same again on the Eastern Shore. The very real physical isolation of the Eastern Shore in the nineteenth century has broken down, the off-shore islands once inhabited now abandoned, the farm at the edge of the woods long overgrown. Children along the Eastern Shore have received free public elementary education on a consistent basis for over a century now, and the automobile - - as the ship, horse and railroad were never able to do -- has opened up the Eastern Shore in both directions. It is easier to get in and to get out, without the choice imposing long term consequences. The result has been a considerable genetic mixing on the Eastern Shore, with natives seeking and finding spouses from a wider geographic area, and new arrivals mixing with the old residents. This has infused an entirely new gene pool into the Eastern Shore, as well created more even mixing of the established gene pool. This can only be a positive development for future generations born on the Eastern Shore who now may escape some of the genetic-based maladies seen too often in the past, but it does make things much more complicated for the genealogist. Even with a total population now smaller than it was in the nineteenth century, the same kind of study of Eastern Shore families being presented here would be more difficult to duplicate for the twentieth. The telephone directory for Eastern Shore localities today contains many surnames not found in the burial plots used by the Eastern Shore pioneers.
The Eastern Shore has been both a place and a state of mind for over two centuries now. This series of volumes, Eastern Shore Families, makes the Eastern Shore more accessible to those of us who care.
The data for this book has been assembled by an amateur historian and genealogist who lives far from the Eastern Shore -- most of it was researched and written while the author was living in Rome, Italy, a wonderful city but not exactly a Mecca for Nova Scotian family history research. That it was possible to assemble so much information about a locale so physically distant from the researcher is by itself a tribute to the persons and institutions in Nova Scotia who have collected and preserved data and documents on the history of the Eastern Shore and its families, and who were willing, often at their inconvenience, to make this data available to other interested parties. I have thanked you individually in the past; now my general thanks to all of you. I hope you find these volumes, while late in coming, made your efforts worthwhile.
The central repository of published and unpublished information on Nova Scotian history, including family history, is the Public Archives of Nova Scotia (PANS). While some recent efforts have been made to expand holdings of vital records from other than Anglican churches along the Eastern Shore, it appears no special effort has been made over the years to seek out and acquisition Eastern Shore material -- even in spite of the geographic proximity to Halifax and the Eastern Shore origins of some of the archival staff. Nonetheless, the PANS does yeoman service within unfortunate budgetary constraints in making available to researchers what it does have in its collections, and makes good allowance for those resident at some distance from Halifax. I was especially well served by Philip L. Hartling (himself an author of a local history and genealogy work on "his" section of the Eastern Shore), who was kind enough to steer me to useful collections in the PANS inventory as well as work out ways in which I could gain access to the information they contained. Julie Morris, the PANS Genealogical Archivist at the time I was most actively researching, was also very helpful to me in resolving research problems. I have donated and will donate to the PANS all the original source material on Eastern Shore families that I acquire from sources other than PANS collections, so that genealogists who may wish to ascertain the source of information presented in this volume or look for leads I may have not presented will have available to them whatever documentation I was able to collect and which served as the basis for opinions and lineages here presented. I recommend that any reader with information that adds to or corrects what is published in this volume to do the same.
For the genealogical researcher not based at Halifax, some of the collections of the PANS, including documents from the county courthouses, are also available on microfilm from the Family History Library (FHL) of the Church of Jesus Christ and Latter Day Saints (LDS) at Salt Lake City, Utah. Copies of microfilms in the FHL collection are not for sale, but can be rented for viewing at any of the many branches of the FHL located in Mormon stakes across North America and in many foreign cities. My special thanks to the volunteer staff of the FHL at Kennsington, Maryland, who put up with me for many hours and who kept the machinery of research working. I thank both the PANS for cooperating with this effort to microfilm Nova Scotian local records, and the LDS Church itself for permitting non-members like myself to use the FHL facilities on an equitable basis.
Many individuals descended from or related to Eastern Shore families provided me with considerable help on individual genealogies. The genealogies to which they contributed would have been far inferior had it not been for their willingness to guide me along research paths they had already investigated and share their lessons learned and data already collected. My particular gratitude to Jennie M. Reid, L. Shirley McCormick, Mary D. Meisner, Cecil Mitchell, Amelia A. Gerard, Nancy Lobban, Lynda M. Conrad, Ray H. Blakeney, Joan M. Durand, Sterling Leslie Prest, Esther Cameron, Lorraine Ernst, Shirley Whitehead, Robert M. Ritcey, William O. Horne, Eugene Smith, Clarence Biggs, Sally Lomas, Richard Walsh, Douglas Johnson, Lyla MacIntosh, Walter C. Mission, Scott Winston Teal, Mildred W. Malafey, David L. Gilchrist, Earle A. Hubley, Rev. Francis J. Melanson, Clifford L. Merck, Daryl Josey, Anna MacDonald, Donald J. Pace, Jennie Webber Siteman, Gary R. Jennex, Douglas N. Borgal, Alan L. Fullerton, Herbert A. Strum and Shirley Floeser.
Special and explicit recognition must go to Terrence M. Punch, the premier genealogist in Nova Scotia for our generation, who has kept in close touch with me over the decade this work has been in preparation, offering sage advice, nuggets from his personal research collection and an experienced editorial eye. He always provided the best "reality check" I could get. Thanks Terry, I hope that seeing this series in print was worth it.
Initial Observations
What follows is a tentative exercise in creating a conceptual framework for the micro-history of Ship Harbour in the context of its Eastern Shore setting. This will be an attempt to break away from the usual format of Nova Scotian local histories and to raise and explore some of the broader currents of events that appear to have influenced the Eastern Shore and shaped events there.
The Eastern Shore has not yet been the subject of much published local history research, and in this volume efforts were made to use the discipline of genealogy to suggest insights into the more generalized social and economic history of the area not available from the published sources. There should be something of interest to the general historian of the nineteenth century in the Maritimes as well as to those who have a stronger interest in the Eastern Shore families whose individual histories are here presented.
If there must be a particular purpose in writing so extensively about the lives of families who lived over a century ago on the margins of a subsistence economy, it could be to demonstrate that while Eastern Shore residents may not have been direct participants in what historians might call the "great events of their time," the lives of ordinary people still do create a history which provides a useful insight into our collective past. History is based on the sum of individual, and individually modest, lives, and all of these lives have validity in our attempts today to understand times past and how and why they are relevant to our current situation. One advantage for the historian of the Eastern Shore is that there are no outstanding public personalities active in or from the area to distract a researcher from the farmers, fisherman, artisans, mariners, hunters and lumbermen who dominated the economic life of the region and who are the font of its real history.
The Eastern Shore, while geographically isolated and distant from centers of political and economic decision making, was not isolated enough to escape feeling, often to its disadvantage, the impact of distant decisions and events. The original raison d'etre and impetus for the Eastern Shore as an area of settlement came from just such a far-off event, the military defeat of General Cornwallis at Yorktown in October 1781. Others events followed, including other wars (1861-65 in North America, 1914-1918 in Europe) and more mundane events such as the invention of artificial refrigeration, which undercut the market for dried and salted codfish, and the development of central heating, which changed the quality of life along the Eastern Shore.
For a bit over a century the residents of the Eastern Shore were forced by their physical isolation to create and maintain what developed into a distinctive local culture, a conglomerate of diverse ethnic, cultural, linguistic and religious heritages brought to the region by its immigrants, an early mini-version of what is now called the Canadian "cultural mosaic." For the last several score of decades, however, the cultural homogenization of anglophone North American populations brought about by exposure to electronic communications media (especially television), an ever more efficient continental marketing network and an inflow of Haligonians seeking weekend and summer relaxation, has been eroding the distinctive aspects of the Eastern Shore identity. This erosion also has been assisted by the very understandable desire of the Eastern Shore residents themselves to escape as they might from the poverty and hardship that has characterized their existence and stigmatized their region, either by selling off and moving out, or by exploiting the new class of temporary sojourners.
This essay is not intended to glorify the past nor seek to formulate the basis for an argument to preserve the area in which it occurred as an anthropological museum, but to capture some of the past and make it available so that those with an interest in the Eastern Shore will be able to satisfy some curiosities and whet others. This work is of modest scope and there is much still to be done. It will point to the many avenues of research still to be explored, hinting at the pamphlets, one-family genealogies, school papers, studies, monographs and doctoral dissertations yet to be written and published by the amateur or professional historian.
The reader looking perhaps for his own name in the genealogies usually will be disappointed. The chronological scope of the genealogies has been limited intentionally to those persons who began their lives in the nineteenth century. These persons for the most part are dead today. The basic criteria for inclusion as a separate family group in the genealogy section required not only birth on the Eastern Shore, but marriage and the establishment of a family on the Eastern Shore before World War I. To assist in the further research of those many emigrants from the Eastern Shore, the individuals and whole family groups who left seeking to find or to escape, indication of where they went has been included, but the genealogies are intended to pertain only to those who lived at least a portion of their adult years on the Eastern Shore itself. When available by happenstance and as a service to future researchers, some more recent data has been provided, but no attempt has been made to present either full "one-family" genealogies of any of the Eastern Shore families, nor to include much genealogical data after World War I, even for those families still resident on the Eastern Shore.
Preliminaries to Settlement
Like most of the rest of North America, the very early history of the occupation of the Eastern Shore by persons of European ancestry is closely tied to land speculation by wealthy absentee landlords in the metropole well connected with the imperial regime and its representatives in North America. While land speculation has developed an unsavory connotation in modern North America, In Nova Scotia the usual speculative pattern was not necessarily disadvantageous for the early settlers. Given the vast expanses of nearly empty land in North America, and especially in places like Nova Scotia less favored by climate, land itself was of no current value to a landlord with a mercantilist mentality. What made land valuable was what it could produce, and land, even with identifiable natural resources, could produce value only with population on it. Potential settlers had little incentive to purchase land when there was land for the taking, or almost, a short walk away. The owners of large land grants, therefore, had to offer very concessionary terms to the first settlers to induce these settlers to live in the vicinity of land the speculator still held. This was neither altruistic nor damaging to the long term interests of the speculator, who calculated that the efforts of the first settlers to improve their own land would increase the desirability of adjoining land, which then could be sold or rented at a higher price by the landlord to later arrivals. There was therefore a mutual economic interest between early settlers and absentee landlords to have the early settlers remain and prosper.
There were, of course, cases where a speculator was too shortsighted to perceive long term self-interest, where speculative fever resulted in prices being paid unrelated to likely future return from the land or where for some other reason mere profit was not the driving motive. In general, however, the above was and still is the pattern of land speculation in North America, from the undeveloped future farmsteads on the Eastern Shore in the eighteenth century to suburban housing developments and shopping malls in the twentieth.
The area of the Eastern Shore near Ship Harbour, however, was one of those atypical zones where the major grantee, the Earl of Egmont, was thinking in terms other than immediate or future personal financial profit. Egmont was an eccentric even for his day; he wanted to recreate European feudalism in the North American wilderness. Egmont, of course, could not imagine that it would be but he himself at the top of the social and economic pyramid in any new feudal order he created in Nova Scotia, which undoubtedly accounts for the appeal the idea had for him. Egmont's land grants in Nova Scotia, some 72,000 acres, with another 100,000 acres granted to his son, Viscount Percival and his family, did not contain the land on which the village of Ship Harbour now is situated, but did include much of the Ship Harbour hinterland. The village of Ship Harbour itself is located on a part of a grant of 10,000 acres made in 1766 to Admiral Charles Colville, and for which notice of escheat proceedings was published in the Nova Scotia Gazette of 27 May 1783.
Fortunately for those who settled later on the Eastern Shore, Egmont's dreams and schemes, and the speculations of his friends and fellow lords, came to naught. Egmont advertised unsuccessfully in Great Britain and Nova Scotia (Nova Scotia Gazette, 22 Aug. 1769) for settlers in his future domain, which was to be centered on what is now known as Jeddore Harbour but at the time was being called Egmont Harbour. Egmont himself never saw his land, but spent his time in England drawing up plans for a magnificent manor house he planned to build on his American domain. Egmont forgot, however, that however attractive feudalism might be to the feudal lord, it was not equally as attractive a proposition for the serfs. In the eighteenth century even the unemployed proletarian and landless peasant, the flotsam of the British economy, were not so desperate as to sign up for perpetual serfdom when other less onerous opportunities were available, as they certainly were.
Feudalism had been able to sustain itself only when the lords had a monopoly on the land and the military and political means to enforce that monopoly, agriculture was the only employment available and there were more persons wanting to eat than there was land available from which to feed them, given the state of agricultural science at the time. The Black Death changed those conditions, rather dramatically making labor rather than land the scarcer commodity. Coupled with the growth of towns and the creation of alternative urban employments, that meant that the feudal lords could never again exploit the peasants in the same old ways. Egmont, lost in his dreams, apparently thought there were potential serfs just waiting for a lord to set up a new form of quasi-slavery for them. He was wrong. In the end, he lost his Nova Scotian lands when they were escheated for the Loyalists, and he died on 25 Feb. 1822 never having accomplished on the ground the slightest part of his plans for Nova Scotia. Egmont was considered somewhat odd even for his day -- British land policy in North America was more enlightened -- but Egmont was a factor that delayed for some 20 years the settlement of Ship Harbour and the surrounding area. An inland lake bearing Egmont's name is the only vestige left in Nova Scotia of Egmont's plans for the Eastern Shore.
Until the American Revolution generated a significant number of persons needing very quickly new places still under the British flag in which live outside of the newly independent Thirteen Colonies, all the Eastern Shore remained unsettled, excepting a small group of Acadians who had escaped from the expulsions thirty years earlier and recongregated at Chezzetcook Inlet, some seasonal fishing stations on the offshore islands and a squatter here and there. To make room for the refugees from the American Revolution, the empty land had to be re-acquired by the Crown and parcelled out differently than it had been earlier. Large land grants made in the 1760s were escheated when the terms of the grant had not been fulfilled (they almost never were), and this land then redistributed as freehold plots of roughly 100 acres per capita to refugee families and disbanded soldiers. This was a democratic form of settlement and one likely, at least in the case of the farm families, to result in permanent occupation of the land.
Before the decade of revolutionary turmoil to the south that ended with the first North American diaspora, the Eastern Shore was an empty land, returned Acadians, Micmac Indians and squatters aside. (The English always had the special ability to consider land empty if it was not populated with English-speaking Protestants; Roman Catholics, especially those speaking French, not to mention Native Americans, seemed to have had the characteristic of invisibility to official British eyes.) Some of the Acadians who had escaped capture and deportation during the 1750s settled around Chezzetcook Inlet, choosing for themselves the best agricultural land on the entire Eastern Shore. The Micmacs, while causing some annoyance to those whom they considered to be invading their domains and hunting grounds, were soon enough dealt with in ways considered acceptable at the time. Of the squatters very little is known and none remained as permanent settlers.
It was only when it appeared to those who found themselves dumped on the Eastern Shore by the bad fortunes of war that there was no place else for them to go that a permanent population became settled there. This very perception of there being a lack of a better alternative was the key to the beginnings of permanent settlement on the Eastern Shore. The Eastern Shore was left for last, and remained for some time, the "dreary place" described some 60 years later by Rev. Robert Jamison.
Loyalists and Soldiers: The First Settlers
Ship Harbour and the nearby areas were settled by people left over after the major Loyalist settlements in Nova Scotia had been organized by the fleeing anglophone elites of North America. The refugees who had been or who thought they were somebody in the Thirteen Colonies, the office holders, Anglican clergy, rich merchants and military officers, put themselves first in line for dividing up what was left of the British Empire in North America after the cessation of active hostilities. After they had arranged to be given what they thought was the best, then land grants were given to disbanded soldiers (British, Hessian and American), often organized in blocks reflecting the makeup of the military units in which they had served. But the disorganized rabble at the bottom of the social structure, the freed slaves and those European-born dirt farmers who made their personal bets on the outcome of the Revolution and found themselves on the losing side at the end of the war, were not the favorites of the Establishment when it came to providing for their futures. The Blacks had chosen freedom from slavery, not the Union Jack, and even though free in Nova Scotia were subjected to the racial discrimination usual for the times. As bad as it was, it was better for them in Nova Scotia than it was further south, but not good enough to want to stay when other opportunities, including Sierra Leone, became available. The farmers, mostly recent and poor German and Irish immigrants who had been sent on sponsored migration schemes to the interior of South Carolina, were not so much Loyalist in any ideological sense as unlucky enough to have been caught up in a war that did not much concern them and for which neither side seemed to offer much potential for benefit in the future. In the wrong place at the wrong time, they made or had forced upon them a choice, but they had guessed wrong about the eventual outcome of the conflict. Last in line, they got what no one else physically present in Nova Scotia had ever wanted, and that was the Eastern Shore.
An ad hoc group of refugee farmers calling themselves the Associated Loyalists of South Carolina, the core of those who made the settlement of Ship Harbour, affiliated themselves in Halifax with Captain Thomas Green. Green, the son of a leading Halifax merchant and brother of the Treasurer of Nova Scotia, was at this time a retired British Army officer with 24 years of service in the 5th. and 27th. Infantry Regiments, followed by eight years in the Royal Nova Scotia Volunteers. Renown in Nova Scotia as a successful recruiter of troops, after the war he put together a settling party from among discharged soldiers who had served under him in the Royal Nova Scotia Volunteers, and also drawing from the refugee rural proletariat dropped off at Halifax by the ships from Charlestown and New York at the end of the war. Green had an entrepreneurial instinct and organized a disparate band of potential settlers -- Irish immigrants who had done garrison duty in Nova Scotia, and Irish and German backlanders from South Carolina -- and petitioned for and obtained a grant of land extending from East Ship Harbour to Owls Head, to be divided between those in his party.
Green was not to be an absentee landowner; with his wife and a Negro wench he joined his settlers. He can be considered the organizer of a speculative venture on a much lower level than the former absentee landlords, and of a different nature. Green was not thinking of rents (land was granted in freehold to his settlers) but of residuals, and he borrowed heavily against these anticipated returns. He was granted 700 acres, including what was then known as Greens Island (now Laybolts Island), in the estuary off Lower Ship Harbour. Like many of his soldiers, he left little mark on the area and made no fortune from his enterprise. Thomas Green died at Ship Harbour less than two years after he established the settlement, in debt for ú856. There were rumors that Green had gone insane and had been shot by the Ship Harbour settlers, but no inquest was ever held. His debtors, which included some of the new Ship Harbour settlers, were invited to make claims in a notice published 11 April 1786, and the sheriff sold Green's land and personal property at auction.
Many of the Associated Loyalists of South Carolina moved from the Halifax/Dartmouth area out to Ship Harbour in the summer of 1783, the first opportunity after their arrival from Charleston in November 1782. Provisions were provided from the government commissary to carry them over to May 1786, by which the they were expected to be self-sufficient. A list of persons and groups of settlers provisioned out of government storehouses between 8 October-17 Dec. 1783 (PRO, ref W.O.60/25 pt. 1) includes the party of Thomas Green (with 76 men, 12 women and 13 children) as then settled at Ship Harbour. (These numbers for those settled in 1783 compare with the 77 men, 25 women, 28 children over age 10 years and 19 children between ages 2-10 years on the 2 June 1784 muster list. Many of the women and children spent the winter at Halifax.) The rest of Green's party of settlers, with the families of those who had them, sailed out of Halifax on 2 June 1784 and spent their first night on the Eastern Shore at Sleepy Head, near Clam Harbour, before moving on to Ship Harbour the next day. This delay in formal settlement of another year and growing season related to the delay in disbanding Green's military unit (his troops were not discharged until October 1783) and the delay in the escheating of the land at Ship Harbour and its being granted again to the new arrivals.
Once settled at Ship Harbour and on their plots of land presumably selected the previous summer on the not unreasonable expectation that Green's petition for a grant of land, which he made on 12 October 1783, would be approved -- a part of Green's attraction as a leader of this group undoubtedly was his clout with the colonial administration -- the mists of history close over the settlement at Ship Harbour for many years with only the most occasional written record (land transfers, baptisms and marriages aside) referring to its existence. Some settlers kept up their ties with life outside the Eastern Shore, as published notice of letters arriving at the Halifax post office for Ship Harbour residents attest, but this fell off soon enough. Even the physical remains of these early years of settlement would be difficult to locate; a few cellar pits in the ground would probably be the best an archeologist could uncover. No large wooden houses like those erected by Loyalists at Shelburne were ever built at Ship Harbour; the settlers at Ship Harbour had not lived previously in such homes and had no means to erect them now. Their building materials were still standing in the forests when they arrived, and it was not until the erection of sawmills some decades later were anything more complex than small log cabins constructed in the village. No architectural relics dating from the early years of settlement remain, attesting to the absence of any structures thought worth saving by the inhabitants as well as the need to recycle building materials.
The new settlement of Ship Harbour took a while to sort itself out. The settlers actively traded lots and bought and sold land to each other as each settler sought to find the particular locale best suited to his taste and intended economic activity. Most of the former soldiers did not remain beyond the provisioning that had been given them, providing support to the thesis that soldiering did not much prepare single men to be permanent settlers in a wilderness. Of those families who had come to Nova Scotia from farms in North America, mostly Germans from the 96 District in South Carolina, more than half were gone by the end of the decade, gone from Nova Scotia as well as Ship Harbour. They presumably returned to the United States to appear as virgin immigrants heading west. These were not men who could fit, even uncomfortably, back into a familiar village life. They could not filter back into old their old Massachusetts and Connecticut townships like those fleeing a Port Roseway in full economic collapse. For those at Ship Harbour life had not been comfortable in Germany, in the Carolinas and now in Nova Scotia -- they had had nothing to which they could, or could want to, go back.
There is only sketchy evidence about the economic activity in which these pioneer Ship Harbour settlers engaged, but that evidence nevertheless suggests similarities with other experiences better documented. Pioneer existence by its nature must be much the same regardless of the locale. Land had to be cleared of trees to obtain the raw material to build shelter, cooking fires and for heating in the winter, and to create the fields in which to plant crops. Crude dwellings, enclosed lean-tos or small log cabins, needed to be built before the first winter arrived -- and the winter of 1784/5 turned out to be an especially fierce one at Ship Harbour. Between the stumps, crops (grain, oats, potatoes, squash) had to be planted early in the season. Small boats had to be built from local hand-hewn lumber for fishing and for transport along the coast of people and goods. The dry provisions initially made available by the government had to be supplemented by hunting wild game and catching fresh fish, and both sources of protein needed to be preserved by drying, smoking or salting for family consumption during the winter months and for sale in Halifax. Once subsistence was sustained, the pioneer family, by now usually in its third year on the land, could begin to think about expanding its economic base with some sort of activity that would bring in cash to purchase goods that could not be produced at home. This would mark the beginning of a shift from a mere subsistence to the quasi-market economy that characterized Ship Harbour's first century of existence.
On the Eastern Shore there were limited opportunities available for entering into the market system. The most evident was lumbering for cordwood. Wood was the fuel used for cooking and winter heat, and Halifax formed a nearby market about a day away from Ship Harbour by sail. One of the fundamental local economic arrangements, called "freighting by halfs," was that the proceeds from sale of cordwood in Halifax were split 50-50 between the Eastern Shore lumberman who cut it and the Eastern Shore mariner who transported it to market. Coastal fishing was the next apparent source of hard currency, with Halifax merchants serving as middle men for the purchase of locally produced fish and fish products, advancing for some profit the "means of production" to those on the Eastern Shore who wished to become sharecroppers of the sea. As the years went on livestock became a renewable source of income, with the stock walking itself (in two days from Ship Harbour) to the nearest market at Dartmouth, or livestock products being taken to Halifax by sea.
Two conclusions about the economic history of Ship Harbour can be drawn from the evidence available. One is that those who remained on the Eastern Shore obviously survived, however rudely, demonstrating that a sustained economy at least at the subsistence level could be and had been achieved. As observed early on (Novascotian, 4 Jan. 1837), the Eastern Shore was not a place for idlers, but a hard working man could usually keep his family alive. Man here is used in the gender-specific sense -- there do not appear to have been any single women living on the Eastern Shore for the first hundred years of settlement, and widows either soon remarried, had grown sons at home, returned to live with their parents or left. This seems to be less related to inherent sexism than it was in recognition of the unfortunate but obvious fact that at this stage in the economic development of the Eastern Shore, it was hard physical labor that kept it going, and there were not enough surpluses generated to create a demand for non-physical labor. (There does not even seem to have been a prostitute available on the Eastern Shore in the nineteenth century, though this may reflect pressures from amateur competition rather than lack of resources or interest.)
The other conclusion drawn is that whatever investment there was in improvements to land must have been minimal, as land was as easily abandoned as it was obtained, with there being considerable geographic mobility within the Eastern Shore in the early years. Agriculture was usually concentrated on a few acres at most, with the much larger extent of the lots granted needed to provide space for a regenerating source of cordwood. One is not too sure to what degree can be accepted the complaint of one Ship Harbour settler (Michael Eisan), who in petitioning in 1796 for more acreage to the interior side of his existing grant stated that growing grain was hard close to the sea because of the sea breezes. The Eastern Shore, even under the best of circumstances, never became nor could it become a breadbasket; potatoes are the natural crop. It is hard to think of land in Nova Scotia less suited to agriculture, despite it having been used for that for some 200 years.
Development of Community Life
Education and religion, the two principal cultural activities of rural life in the early nineteenth century, were scarce along the Eastern Shore during the first half-century of settlement. Officially included in the Halifax parishes of the major denominations, the number of visits before 1840 by clergy of any denomination to minister to the Eastern Shore population were minimal, one short visit a year at most. Ship Harbour residents seeking religious services (such as marriages and baptisms) were forced to travel to Halifax to obtain them. The Anglican Bishop Charles Inglis visited Ship Harbour on 22 July 1805 in the first visit by a clergyman after the settlement of the village two decades earlier. Rev. John Burnyeat, a SPG missionary based at Truro, began to make annual summer visits to Ship Harbour starting in 1822, and he conducted a number of baptisms at Ship Harbour in 1830 and 1832, the latter his last year for his visits to the Eastern Shore.
Anglican Bishop John Inglis visited Ship Harbour for the first time on 22 Aug. 1834 to consecrate the new church that had been raised by the local inhabitants on their own initiative by assessing themselves from ú4 to ú5 per family -- to much for many of them to afford, noted Rev. John Stevenson later, who witnessed the plight of these families aggravated much by their religious zeal. There were 19 families then living in Ship Harbour, and all 19 families were members of the Anglican congregation. These 19 families represented 160 persons; Ship Harbour was and generally has remained solidly Anglican. Inglis noted that there were another 50 persons or so present living nearby who were Roman Catholic. These probably lived in what we now know as Lower Ship Harbour and East Ship Harbour, heavily Roman Catholic thanks to the concentration there of Irish fishermen, later with a sprinkling of Presbyterians also.
Starting in 1833 Rev. John Stevenson made annual summer visits from Halifax to preach at Ship Harbour, and it was partly in his honor that the church consecrated the following year at Ship Harbour was named St. Stephen's. Stevenson commented in 1834 on the lack of men in the Eastern Shore villages during the summer season -- they were away fishing -- and decided to make his next visit in the winter. The first clergyman ever to make a winter visit, he was at Ship Harbour on 1 Jan. 1836 and held services for some 90 persons. In the later 1830s Rev. Stevenson was assisted in his visits to the Eastern Shore, which focussed on Ship Harbour as the center of Anglican influence in the region, by the young seminarian Robert Jamison, himself a recent convert from the Presbyterian faith. Shortly following his Anglican ordination, Jamison was assigned in 1840 by the SPG to be the first resident Anglican clergyman on the Eastern Shore, living at and centering his activities on Ship Harbour. Bishop Inglis returned for a second pastoral visit on 10 July 1843, preaching to 200 persons at the new St. Stephen's and confirming 33 persons. The next visit of an Anglican Bishop was in 1852, when Rev. Hibbert Binney came to Ship Harbour. Because bad weather then prevented people from arriving at the church by sea, there were only some 70 persons present, probably a fair indication of the Anglican population of the village of Ship Harbour itself at that time. He noted that most of the 21 persons confirmed were female. The Bishop came again to Ship Harbour on 3 Aug. 1861, keeping up a roughly once-a-decade schedule.
Even after Rev. Robert Jamison took up his permanent residence at Ship Harbour, however, many Ship Harbour families continued the tradition of sending off marrying couples and new-born infants to the churches at Halifax, demonstrating that religious blessing of human events from a non-local source was a desired commodity. While a difficult imposition for those involved (as well as an exciting adventure not often repeated), it did at least result in the records of these families being preserved for the historian and genealogist. While their comments have to be viewed with the evident self-interest with which they were made, outside clergy visiting the Ship Harbour area commented on the religious interest that they found in the population, and the enthusiasm with which their presence was greeted. The inhabitants of Ship Harbour, while perhaps physically isolated from the religious ferment and awakening present in other more developed parts of the province, maintained an active interest in religion and it appears to have played a major part in their intellectual lives.
Education fared less well. Even taking a very low standard for literacy, Ship Harbour was an area with declining literacy rates throughout the first 30 years of its existence. The first reference to a formal school at Ship Harbour places its establishment on 1 Aug. 1814 by the initiative of the Siteman, Weeks and Marks families, with Daniel Sutherland being hired as schoolmaster. Sutherland's presence at Ship Harbour can be documented as early as 1 Aug. 1815. He had been hired by Ship Harbour parents for the fee of ú12.10 per semester, and remained teaching at Ship Harbour through 1820. The European-born settlers were for the most part literate when they arrived at Ship Harbour, having learned how to read before coming to America. The first generation born in America was probably taught after a fashion at home by a literate parent -- but on the Eastern Shore there was little time for either parent to teach and too much demand for labor to permit much attention to be paid to learning. These ill-schooled children when they became parents themselves would be quite unprepared to offer to their own children the kind of home-schooling they might have had the opportunity to receive from their parents. Hence the need perceived for an outside schoolmaster. The year 1815 would be just about the time when the second generation born in America for most Ship Harbour families would be coming of schooling age.
The first education initiative at Ship Harbour petered out in 1820, with Daniel Sutherland making a futile effort to obtain provincial government support for his continued presence there (he then moved on to South East Passage), and the parents feeling unable to support further education from their own limited resources. At various times during the next decades (1832-33 under Andrew Huggan and 1839-40 under George Robertson), school was held at Ship Harbour, but that was the end of formal efforts until the 1860s. George Robertson married a local widow and stayed on in the area for another decade, and George Crockett, an Irish immigrant, also taught lessons in the homes of Ship Harbour residents, but these efforts remain undocumented as to their extent and regularity. It was not until the late 1880s that permanent public schools were established at Ship Harbour and education began to become a part of the normal expectations of all parents and children. In 1881 Jeremiah Willoughby was the school teacher at East Ship Harbour, and his name is carried on in many families there.
As happens so often on the Eastern Shore, the timing was bad for this too. The economic downturn of the 1890s that affected the Eastern Shore and drove many more children and whole families to emigrate meant that the freshly educated were provided the means to prosper elsewhere, and the economic investment made in the education of those Eastern Shore children was lost to the Eastern Shore communities from whence they came and who, through taxes, footed the bill -- an early version of what became known a century later as the "brain drain."
To put this in context, however, education in the nineteenth century did not mean the same thing as it does to us today. Literacy was largely associated with religion -- being able to read the Bible. However desirable this may have from the perspective of personal religious salvation, there was not much need in an economic sense for literacy on the Eastern Shore in the first half of nineteenth century. There was nothing to read other than religious works, nothing on which to write and no one to whom to write nor the means of delivery. There was little published material that would have enriched the practical or technical knowledge of Eastern Shore residents, and reading for pleasure was a luxury for which there was no time or enough light. Literacy was not equated with intelligence as it is today, and the expectation of literacy not as persistently present in everyday life at it was to become in this century. Before applying the standards of today to the Eastern Shore then, we should consider if perhaps the Eastern Shore had available the kind of education it needed for its existing economic structure. The skills needed to live on the Eastern Shore during the first half-century and beyond could not come out of books. Yet at another level, the lack of education perpetuated endemic poverty and permitted narrow-mindedness to develop and prosper, a shrinking of intellectual horizons that may have resulted in economic longer-term opportunities to be missed when they did come during the Golden Age. While difficult to judge from this distance in time, education (or lack of it) may also have played a part in inhibiting the development of local cooperative efforts, which, in retrospect, could have been a key to launching sustained development.
Ship Harbour was isolated, but not isolated enough from the rest of the world to escape disease and periodic epidemics. Spread by human contact rather than animal or insect vectors, the killing diseases that reached Ship Harbour were a disadvantageous side-effect of Ship Harbour's access to the lines of maritime communication and the profits made by long-haul transport of basic goods on Ship Harbour vessels. For the many families who lost children to disease, it was small consolation that at least Ship Harbour was small and isolated enough to prevent human-vector diseases from becoming endemic there. This meant that those most at risk were the young, those born since the last contagation and who had not developed antibodies through exposure in infancy to defend themselves from the new bacteriological and viral infections when they arrived. During the winter of 1836 an epidemic of scarlet fever raged at Ship Harbour, smallpox in January-February 1861, diphtheria in August 1862, November 1863 and April 1871, typhoid in Oct. 1872, influenza in February 1867, whooping cough in October 1873 and June 1876. Public health measures were non- existent, and so were medical doctors (who had no effective treatments for these diseases to offer in any case). In a development reminding readers today of scenes from Lord of the Flies and perhaps picked up from the Micmac, the population of Ship Harbour by mid-nineteenth century had taken to the use of charms to ward off disease, much to the disgust of clergy. From the medical viewpoint, at least this was no less effective than prayer to a Christian God or resort to European medical practices, and if coupled with use of native herbs, could even have been the best remedy available at the time.
The Golden Age?
The mid-nineteenth century began with what has often been called the Golden Age of the Eastern Shore, a period of apparent prosperity that lasted for three decades. This prosperity was based in part on the exploitation of surface quartz-matrix gold deposits first discovered on the Eastern Shore during the summer of 1860 at Tangier, but mostly came from forest products being taken out at faster than the renewal rate. Recalling the 1980s, it was a boom time made possible only by taking out a large mortgage on the prosperity of future generations, a boom not based on basic economic growth but on ephemeral circumstances. Ship Harbour had began to look like a "normal" place, with churches of its own (starting off with St. Stephen's, rebuilt and enlarged in 1859, and with a Presbyterian meetinghouse and a Roman Catholic chapel as well), resident ministers, a schoolhouse with school being taught by a resident school teacher, the rudiments of industrial activity based on processing local forest, agricultural and maritime products. The processing of forest products was the leading edge of industrial growth, and a developed base of agriculture and fishing provided more than enough food for large families and left something over for marketing in the nearby metropolis.
The slowly developing local economy, however, was soon overwhelmed and destroyed by the deadly combination of technological change and outside exploitation, coupled with bad luck in the weather and business cycle, and lack of a locally developed vision and political system to defend and promote local interests. It was the Golden Age that tipped the economy of the Eastern Shore, Ship Harbour with it, from gradual sustained and sustainable economic growth to a cycle of boom and bust. No one saw the bust coming when the first boom years arrived, and undoubtedly most Ship Harbour residents calculated that gold could be dug indefinitely and forests over-cut forever, all this being shipped out and other products being brought in on locally produced sail-driven wooden schooners. Another one-time event impacted heavily on the Ship Harbour economy: in the early 1860s war to the south distracted New England labor from production at the same time there was increasing demand for the product of labor. Prices rose for the basic products of Nova Scotia and the Eastern Shore -- lumber, wool, fish -- and Boston became a major destination for local skippers.
The boom was varied enough in time and product to keep the bandwagon rolling for 25 years, or about half the working lifetime of the residents of Ship Harbour. While never a major boom-town itself like Tangier, Ship Harbour developed into the central locality between Halifax and Sheet Harbour, eclipsing Musquodoboit Harbour until the coming of the railway much later changed the balance. Having a deepwater harbor helped, even though silting was always a problem. This had much to do with the geography of land transportation; the inlet at Ship Harbour was a major obstacle to land transport along the coastal route, and the "good" (everything is relative) road from Halifax ended at Ship Harbour. In 1841 and 1842 the residents of Ship Harbour banded together to petition for the dredging of a channel in the Charles River to Lake Charlotte. Coming by land from Halifax, travel beyond Ship Harbour was problematical until after 1860, but Ship Harbour had a ferry before gold was discovered. Petitions were written and delivered to Halifax in 1855-56-57 seeking government aid to develop a ferry service across Ship Harbour, and finally James O'Bryan was hired in 1858 at a salary of ú8 a year to establish and operate a ferry service. The system of lakes on the Charles River also provided access to the interior woodlands with a water route to float out the products of the woods, making Ship Harbour a natural center for the processing of these forest products. Apparently key, however, to Ship Harbour being able to exploit the extractive industrial boom going on around itself was the sense of cohesion and community, at least among the Anglicans, perhaps a vestigial memory of the Associated Loyalists and uncharacteristic of the "independence of spirit" that marked the Eastern Shore.
The end of the 1861-65 hostilities brought about the first crisis following the boom years of war-time profiteering for the Eastern Shore. Fish and fish products were a major export commodity from Nova Scotia to New England during the war years, and prices nearly doubled during the period of the war. Peace brought back New England competition on the fishing grounds, and for either natural reasons or from the sudden overfishing, the fishing season of 1867 was a disaster that did not change during 1868. Robert Jamison reported in 1868 that the fishing families of his parish were "half-starved" and "destitute."
Ship Harbour families, while touched by the economic boom that characterized the Golden Age, were unable to seize it as their own and make it sustainable locally. That is, they were the passive and temporary beneficiaries of an economic boom made by outsiders, but neither made the boom times nor took control of the economic base of the boom to control their own economic destinies. Basically, the economic frontier reached Ship Harbour and then washed over it, moving to new virgin land. When it moved on there was nothing left for Ship Harbour -- little in developed transportation and communications infrastructure, no sustainable industry, no native residents who had become wealthy or others who were committed to local interests -- nothing on which a real future could be based. The gold fields and forests had been raped by economic interests which having taken what they wanted moved on, leaving the Eastern Shore denuded of its non-human resources and losing even these at a rapid rate. Gold is not a renewable resource, but timber is. The forests have grown back, growing slowly in the cold climate, but the barren clear-cut hills that show in the old photographs of the region are testimony to the degree that the Eastern Shore was exploited as if there would be no tomorrow. Tomorrow for the outsiders was somewhere else, but for the Eastern Shore residents, tomorrow was to be on the Eastern Shore, and the vision was bleak as they looked at it.
The residents of the Eastern Shore had always excelled in one pre-industrial craft, that of hand-building small to medium-sized sail-driven wooden cargo and fishing watercraft. During the Golden Age, this artisan craft also boomed and shipyards sprouted, taking advantage of the abundance of sawn lumber. But the days of commercial use of the wooden ship were about over, reaching their end at about the same time as the gold mining and forest cutting did. The artisans who built the wooden schooners that made the bluenosers well-known up and down the western Atlantic and Caribbean lacked the capital, experience and perhaps foresight to develop with the revolution in shipping that coal-fired steam-powered iron ships brought. Rather than develop shipyards of their own to build the new kind of ship, using their experienced labor with new, if imported, raw materials, they chose instead to leave the Eastern Shore, labor migrating to jobs rather than vice versa. This is a very sensible personal decision when taken at the individual level, but produces very negative long-term results when viewed at the level of Eastern Shore society as a whole.
It had long been thought by Eastern Shore residents that key to the development of their region was land transportation, i.e., roads. Petitions were generated at Ship Harbour from 1825 on asking the legislature to appropriate funds for the construction of a road along the Eastern Shore, and as early as 1835 plans were being discussed in the Legislative Assembly for a road from Dartmouth to Sheet Harbour. No concerted or organized effort seems to have been made to construct such a road, but various pieces of it gradually came into being through a variety of local efforts. As early as 1852 it was possible for Bishop Binney to consider an overland approach to Ship Harbour for his pastoral visit; he came part of the way by wagon and arrived covered with mud. The harsh winters did not help preserve the road, and in 1855 considerable damage to the road, including to the bridge over the Salmon River (at Jeddore) was reported. The Eastern Shore road was mostly passable to wagons as far as Ship Harbour by 1860, but beyond Ship Harbour was very problematical. The discovery of gold at Tangier increased pressures for development of overland transportation routes to the gold diggings. In 1869 surveys were being made through East Ship Harbour properties for a new road. Roads mean bridges, with the Eastern Shore choke points being across Porters Lake, the Salmon River at Jeddore and the Charles River at Ship Harbour. The Ship Harbour ferry service -- a rowboat on duty with an oarsman -- was fine for foot passengers but could not carry horses or wagons, which had to make a 23 km (14 mile) detour to reach the opposite shore of the inlet at Ship Harbour, the Charles River estuary.
The eventual construction by Provincial authorities of a bridge at Ship Harbour was he result of pressure from Ship Harbour's major employer, a large lumber mill situated on the eastern side of the Charles River. It claimed a need for the children of its employees to gain access to schooling at Ship Harbour, and used the argument that the annual taxes the company paid exceeded many times over the cost of a bridge, a structure that would be useful not only to the company but to all Eastern Shore inhabitants. The Legislative Assembly finally appropriated the money and the bridge was built in the early 1870s.
This company, Benjamin Young & Co., started as a local Eastern Shore enterprise, a water-driven sawmill, and was nearly a monopoly employer in the Ship Harbour area. In 1871 it provided work for 12 men for 9 months out of the year, turning some 4000 logs into $20,000 worth of lumber. It was capitalized at $10,000, a giant compared to the $800 capitalization of the only other Ship Harbour industry recorded in 1871, a stave mill run by James Cowan that was only open for 2 months out of the year and produced some $350 worth of staves a year. During the 1870s Benjamin Young obtained large grants of interior timberland, and in 1877 his company employed 30 men in the mills and 60 men in the woods, and made a major economic impact on Ship Harbour. Benjamin Young apparently lost control of his enterprise, however, and in 1881-91 was back fishing in Petpeswick, his place of origin. The sawmill burned down in 1896 and was not rebuilt. For the later half of the nineteenth century, the economic history of Ship Harbour (in any industrial sense) was the history of the company bearing the name of Benjamin Young. This was a m ajor locally owned business and could have been the launching pad for Ship Harbour economic development, but for reasons still to be explored, the owners acted in ways to inhibit rather than spur local development and control over local resources.
The opportunity for Ship Harbour during the Golden Age was lost for a least a century more when Ship Harbour failed to develop into a local economic hub using Benjamin Young & Co. as its anchor. Halifax probably was too close and too overwhelming, siphoning off the lucre, absorbing in its banks the profits of Eastern Shore labor and enterprise -- and then facilitating the transfer of this wealth out of the province to the international capital markets rather than reinvesting back into the Eastern Shore. (A small personal vignette will illustrate: my great-grandfather invested half of his capital in a British company installing residential electricity in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, some 30 years before his own house on the Eastern Shore had electricity.) This was good business for the banks and, at a private level, good for the individual Eastern Shore resident, but not for the Eastern Shore as a social whole. As Halifax had absorbed the cordwood and fish of the Eastern Shore for a century previous, it did so now with the capital that came from the exploitation of its remaining natural resources. At the time, such economic colonialism was just considered normal, and it probably never occurred to Ship Harbour inhabitants that it could be otherwise.
Ship Harbour held the natural geographic position for development, but development did not happen. To understand why perhaps is the key to understanding the subsequent lack of development of the Eastern Shore as a region. Were opportunities seen and local efforts made, only to be suffocated by outside economic interests, or was it an attitude of running while the running was good, or rather, cutting (the trees) and running afterwards? We are much more aware now of the nature of economic development and its pre-requisites, but understanding the economic philosophy and psychology of the leading Ship Harbour families at the time is key to understanding what did not happen, and perhaps could open avenues for those who might want to re-create opportunities today. Unfortunately, written documentation to assist in this investigation has not survived, if it was ever created. There are many similarities between the attitudes that appear to be have been present along the Eastern Shore and those found in the subsequent century in the Canadian and American West -- a combination of political and social conservatism mixed with strong desires for government economic intervention, perceiving that the needs were greater than private interests could develop and maintain.
The Aftermath of Exploitation
Whatever the explanation, the Golden Age resulted in the depletion of the Eastern Shore's human resources, which had always been its potential strength. A review of the genealogies for Ship Harbour support the intuitive and census evidence of increasing emigration from the Eastern Shore at the end of the Golden Age, the last two decades of the century. The brute numbers in the census enumerations hide the real toll that this period was taking on Eastern Shore natives, because it also marked a time of migration to the Eastern Shore of temporary sojourners, workers with no family or economic ties to the Eastern Shore other than their jobs and what family they brought with them. They were the geographically mobile proletariat of other rural and even urban economies. During this time the old Ship Harbour families were decimated many times over by emigration. Some of those leaving went to the Halifax/Dartmouth area, but most ended up in eastern Massachusetts, in the industrial towns of Essex County and the sweat shops of greater Boston. Ship Harbour names are among the most distinctive on the Eastern Shore, sometimes unique to the village, and therefore relatively easy to locate among masses of census and migration data. The ship passenger arrival lists from Halifax to Boston after 1880 read like a Who's Who of Ship Harbour. Whole family groups vanish from Ship Harbour only to reappear in New England. And this talent, this labor, was lost forever to the Eastern Shore; the emigrants made occasional return visits to see relatives but seldom returned to live in their productive years. Descendants of emigrants often claim that it was the best who left; this is an unfair comparison, but it is fair to say that the most impatient, those with the most internal itch, found it easier to leave than to stay. The population pyramid of Ship Harbour shifted its weight upward with the turn of the century. The baptismal registers of St. Stephen's, Ship Harbour, available for a run of over 100 years about evenly divided by 1900, have the vast bulk of their entries before the turn of the century.
It has not been a secret that the Eastern Shore became depopulated of its young persons and fell into economic somnolence. Adding to the economic inducements to emigration, Ship Harbour families seem to have managed to avoid dying for British imperial interests the Boer War, but sacrificed their sons very heavily in World War I and again in World War II. In World War I British generals liked to use the "colonial" troops for the toughest assignments, and the corpses of Nova Scotians littered the battlefields of France; Nova Scotians were used as cannon fodder in the most literal sense of the word. The Nova Scotians were good, tough and brave soldiers, but their lives were wasted by bad and unimaginative generalship, and not even their own at that. World War I, with the anti-German hysteria that went with it, impacted heavily on Ship Harbour as an area of ethnic-German settlement, and I suspect that there were some additional decisions to leave based on heavy-handedness by the RCMP against families with Germanic surnames who had preserved some of their original culture intact. In World War II, most of the Eastern Shore casualties came from maritime transport losses caused by German submarine warfare in the North Atlantic against merchant shipping between North America and Great Britain. a vitally necessary (for the British) function for which Eastern Shore natives were disproportionately well suited for service on both the merchant vessels themselves and the surface naval protective units. Both World Wars impacted on Nova Scotia several years before they did on the United States, and some Nova Scotians (my grandfather included) preferred to leave Nova Scotia for the United States rather than leave Nova Scotia as soldiers fighting against persons of their same ethnic heritage for the benefit of British imperial interests of very unclear benefit to the Eastern Shore.
Ship Harbour's young women, with the advent of public education, opted out of the life of a farmer's or fisherman's wife and went heavily into teaching, nursing and missionary work, traditional upscale female occupations for the period. This meant, however, that again emigration would be a must -- there were no hospitals to staff and fewer children to teach or convert on the Eastern Shore. Upward mobility, or simply survival, meant getting out of Ship Harbour. The gross statistics hide the human cost of such a situation, but the individual genealogies highlight it -- one of the benefits of genealogy to the micro-historian.
It is difficult to assess over a century later the real role of religion in the lives of Ship Harbour residents during and after the Golden Age. There could be a tendency to exaggerate its place in life, as most of the written records we have from the period were either created by clergy or were written about religious matters. The anecdotal evidence, however, does incline us to credit the sources, if being somewhat exaggerated, as being at least representational of some of the things that people alive then were thinking and talking about.
For the Anglicans, Rev. Robert Jamison was a dependable and solid link with the past. The longest serving clergyman of any denomination on the Eastern Shore ever, (with a pastorate stretching from before his ordination in 1840 to his death at Ship Harbour in 1884), Jamison established a solid foundation for Anglicanism at Ship Harbour. His presence at the various churches under his charge (extending from Jeddore to Popes's Harbour) was both reliable and predictable, important factors for a congregation where many parishioners would have to come long distances by rowboat to hear him preach. Reports by ministers of religion to those who pay their salaries generally tend to be upbeat under any circumstances, but there is no reason to doubt the letters sent by Robert Jamison to the SPG saying that his congregations were growing. The rare visit of the Anglican Bishop to Ship Harbour would draw congregations in excess of 200 persons. He also did not guild the lily about his surroundings, describing, in one letter written to the SPG in 1849, the Eastern Shore as being a "land with the exception of a little spot here and there ... barren and dreary to the extreme."
In 1852 Robert Jamison noted that a parsonage house for his family was in the process of being built with the help of SPG grants, and that within his area in 1852 there were Anglican churches at Pope's Harbour and at Jeddore, plus "two Romish chapels and one Presbyterian meetinghouse." One of the "Romish chapels" was the Roman Catholic chapel at Lower Ship Harbour, served out of St. Anselm's, West Chezzetcook, until about 1857 when a glebe house was built at Lower Ship Harbour and occupied respectively by Revs. D. O'Connor, Alexander McIssac, Thomas Daly and Martin Maas, the later a Belgian missionary. The chapel and glebe house burned down on 5 Feb. 1871 and were not rebuilt; Rev. Maas was replaced by Rev. Thomas Butler who resided instead at Sheet Harbour. (Genealogists will want to know that the parish registers for the Roman Catholic chapel at Ship Harbour were saved and can be found among the records of St. Peter's, Sheet Harbour.) The other Roman Catholic structure within Rev. Jamison's parish probably was at Tangier, the site of today's St. Martin's. The Presbyterian meeting house would have been at Lower Ship Harbour (today St. James United Church), served out of Musquodoboit Harbour, a rival center for Nonconformist worship.
Investigation into the history of Ship Harbour yields no surprises, but is important not because it provides unique insights but because it is so much like the history of all villages up and down the Eastern Shore, and to some extent like those in other parts of Nova Scotia. By examining it in detail, through the lives of the persons who lived there, we can develop an understanding of some of pressures to which the families of Ship Harbour reacted, and in seeing how they reacted as individuals, better understand and interpret the wider currents of history for their century, the age of transition into modern times.
Source material for the study of Ship Harbour and its families is not as scarce as it is scattered and difficult to locate. Because specific source citation for each piece of datum used in the genealogies would have been visually cumbersome and rendered the family histories difficult to read, I have only cited sources in the text when I had some reason to think that a competent researcher might not think to look in the particular place where it was found.
In lieu of specific source citations, I have prepared the following essay on sources useful for genealogical and local history research on Ship Harbour. I have broken these sources down into three categories: those generic to the Eastern Shore, Halifax County or Nova Scotia; those specific to the Ship Harbour area; and those specific to a single family. The family-specific source citations have been included at the end of each family history, and, as noted above, person specific citations are sometimes noted in the genealogies at the appropriate place. Research results should be capable of being duplicated by others, and even without specific footnotes a researcher using the information below should be able to locate the sources used and verify the information presented. When different sources did not provide the same information on the same event, in the absence of a logical explanation for error I accepted as being the more legitimate that record created nearer in time to the event in question, and preferred the official over the private family record, considering published secondary sources to be the least reliable. In general, even when very specific, I have found that birth data from death records is very unreliable, and dates carved in stone, sometimes even death dates, should be accepted only when they can be verified from another independent source.
Generic sources relative to the Eastern Shore are few indeed. It is an area of Nova Scotia long ignored by academics, local historians and (a few families aside) genealogists. There is some early descriptive data on Ship Harbour in general works on Nova Scotia, such as Anthony Lockwood, A Brief Description of Nova Scotia, London, 1918. Marion Gilroy, Loyalists and Land Settlement in Nova Scotia, Halifax, 1937, reprinted 1980, contains much land grant information, but omits most of the Loyalist grantees at Ship Harbour and Sheet Harbour areas, the two major Loyalist settlements along the Eastern Shore. An important effort to publish source material for local history was pioneered by the now-defunct Marine Highway Historical Society (MHHS), which between 1976 and 1985 produced 12 volumes under various titles compiling and presenting ephemerae relative to Eastern Shore history from Petpeswick to Mushaboom, much of it from the private collections of its members. For the genealogist, the most useful part of this effort was the creation and publication of transcripts of Eastern Shore cemeteries, many of which were not otherwise available in transcription, but these volumes need to be consulted by the non-genealogical researcher as well. There is a small volume detailing the architectural history of surviving older buildings along the Eastern Shore, Lakes Salt Marshes and the Narrow Green Strip (Heritage Trust of Nova Scotia, 1979), but only one entry relates to Ship Harbour. A photographic architectural history of Eastern Shore churches, among others, is available in M. A. Gibson, Churches by the Sea, Halifax, 1958; Ship Harbour is included. The most recent significant effort, Philip Hartling, Where Broad Atlantic Surges Roll (Antigonish, 1979) covers specifically the area from Beaver Harbour to Ecum Secum, but his excellent historical introduction to his collection of family histories provides much generic to the other parts of the Eastern Shore as well.
Specific to Ship Harbour, there is one unpublished short history of Ship Harbour (Agatha Ganong, "History of Ship Harbour," undated (1952), 42 pp.), a copy of which is available at the PANS. This appears to be the only effort at compiling even a minimalist Ship Harbour history, even though it lacks any effort as synthesis. Annabelle (Siteman) Ells, though she was very diligent in collecting material that seemed destined for a definitive history of Ship Harbour, does not appear to have written anything based on her extensive work of accumulation.
There is an abundance of archival material available on the history of Ship Harbour and its families, but very little of it is available published on paper. Members of Ship Harbour families are fortunate that in years past Ship Harbour was a local administrative center as well as one of the centers of attempts to maintain literacy along the Eastern Shore, and material pertinent to Ship Harbour is disproportionately represented in the surviving archival material relative to the Eastern Shore in the nineteenth century.
While Micmac Indians, squatters, fishermen and Acadians were familiar with the Ship Harbour area, and the land had been granted early to absentee British landlords, the first permanent and official settlement under British dominion began in the summer of 1783 with the settlement on and granting in 1784 of land at Ship Harbour to Loyalists and disbanded soldiers, with many of the Loyalist families being ethnic-German from South Carolina. Most of the disbanded soldiers of the Royal Nova Scotia Volunteers moved on, but about half of the Loyalist families remained at Ship Harbour -- a high proportion compared with Loyalist settlements elsewhere in Nova Scotia. For the earliest period of settlement the muster list of Loyalists at Ship Harbour on 2 June 1784 is available in the Ward Chipman papers at the National Archives of Canada (NAC), as are microfilm copies of the claims made to the Loyalist Claim Commission by Ship Harbour residents. Land survey, grant and transaction records are available in the PANS, useful for sorting out the early settlement patterns. The parish registers of St. George's and St. Paul's, both in Halifax, are the major sources for recording early Ship Harbour family formation before the opening of St. Stephen's at Ship Harbour.
The first two decades of the nineteenth century are the "dark ages" of Ship Harbour history from the genealogical and local history perspective. There were few visitors who left records of their impressions and no local diarists. The census of 1818 provides only gross numbers for the settlement (the heads-of-family-only detailed population schedules did not survive for the Eastern Shore communities), school records refer to a school at Ship Harbour in 1814-20 but include no pupil lists and there are some petitions from residents, but in general there is a paucity of information other than baptismal and marriage records in Halifax relating to Ship Harbour families during the late formative years of the community. While some families maintained a steady flow of newly born infants to the baptismal fonts of their preferred Halifax or Dartmouth church, others became more lax in their religious practices. There is one set of records of Anglican baptisms performed Rev. John Burnyeat along the Eastern Shore in 1830-32 to be found in the registers of St. John's, Truro. Roman Catholic records for baptisms after 1800 at Ship Harbour can be found at St. Peter's, Halifax, St. Mary's, Halifax, St. Peter's, Dartmouth, St. Anselm's, West Chezzetcook and St. Peter's, Sheet Harbour, but no other block of early religious records pertaining to Ship Harbour residents seems to exist. Lower Ship Harbour was covered by the Musquodoboit Harbour pastoral charge for the Presbyterians, but these registers are not available at the PANS.
The situation for the third and fourth decades is better. A list of Ship Harbour families was prepared in 1820 by the schoolmaster (Terrence M. Punch, "Inhabitants of Ship Harbour, Halifax Co., 1820," The Nova Scotia Genealogist, Vol. IX, no. 2, p. 75 (Summer 1991). This list, with the two census years of 1827 and 1838 provide solid base lines for families present at Ship Harbour during the first part of the nineteenth century. SPG ministers made irregular visits and recorded their activities in both letters and vital statistics. These also were the decades for which pupil lists exist in the school records for Ship Harbour, providing in some instances the only record of a child's existence.
The permanent posting in 1840 to St. Stephen's Anglican Church at Ship Harbour of Rev. Robert Jamison marked the beginning of the better-documented era for those Ship Harbour families who were Anglican. While Rev. Jamison's marriage and burial records for the early years of his pastorate have not survived, reporting in civil and religious periodicals (the Church Times, in particular) makes up for some of this lack, and the dominant Anglican religious preference of the population at Ship Harbour means that many Ship Harbour families were covered. The original Ship Harbour parish registers are available on microfilm for consultation only at the PANS, but the Ells Collection contains transcripts of these microfilmed records and are more accessible, via the FHL, for the researcher distant from Halifax. These transcripts include baptisms from May 1841 to January 1952, marriages from 1897 to 1945 and burials from 31 Dec. 1893 to 6 July 1953. There were times after Rev. Jamison's death when there was no minister at Ship Harbour, and some Ship Harbour entries are also found in the records of St. James, Jeddore. For the historian, there is information available on St. Stephen's, Ship Harbour in the Diocesan Times of April 1956, in Philip J. Hartling's biographical essay on Rev. Robert Jamison (Philip J. Hartling, "The Reverend Robert Jamison: "An humble ambassador of my Divine Master," Nova Scotia Historical Review, Vol 4, No. 2, pp. 52-67) and in a pamphlet by Rev. Philip Jefferson available at the PANS.
For the non-Anglican denominations, the most fruitful sources for Ship Harbour vital records after mid-century are the Roman Catholic registers of St. Peter's, Sheet Harbour (which include the records of the chapel at Ship Harbour), and which are available for baptisms from 31 May 1857 to 1906 and for marriages from 6 July 1857 to 17 May 1910. St. Anselm's, West Chezzetcook, in some years of the 1850s covered Ship Harbour, and St. Peter's, Dartmouth and St. Peter's/St. Mary's, Halifax all contain scattered entries for the Ship Harbour area, especially for the Irish families living at Lower Ship Harbour and East Ship Harbour. Registers of vital records of the Nonconformist denominations present at Ship Harbour (almost exclusively Presbyterian), were kept by the Presbyterian ministers who served the area on circuit from Sheet Harbour, Preston, Porters Lake, Middle Musquodoboit and Musquodoboit Harbour, but none of these records is available for periods much before 1870. The lack of early rural Presbyterian records makes the publication of Presbyterian-oriented secondary source material that much more useful, such as the four volumes of indices to The Presbyterian Witness for 1848-1887. The baptismal and marriage registers of the principal churches at Halifax and Dartmouth provide the most information for the Nonconformists and Anglicans alike. It appeared to be an Eastern Shore tradition, even long after ministers of various denominations were present along the Eastern Shore and Eastern Shore villages no longer included in the boundaries of Halifax parishes, for couples about to be married to go into Halifax for the ceremony.
There was civil registration of births at Ship Harbour from 1864 to 1877, and these records have been preserved in one form or another. At the PANS and available via the FHL system on microfilm are the surviving original returns files by Rev. Robert Jamison, who also functioned as the civil registrar, as well as contemporary transcripts of these entered in large ledgers. A card index of the birth registrations exists at the PANS. A list of surnames in this card index has been published (Terrence M. Punch, In Which County? Nova Scotia Surnames from Birth Registers; 1864 to 1877, Halifax, GANS, 1985) which offers the researcher a convenient means to ascertain if more detailed information from the civil birth records is likely to be found.
In addition to civil birth registration, civil marriage and death records were kept also at Ship Harbour from 1864 on, with the death records ceasing in 1877. Having Rev. Robert Jamison as the civil registrar caused some of the Roman Catholic families to refuse to register their children with Rev. Jamison, confusing his function of civil registration with Anglican baptism. (There was also some confusion about this in Rev. Jamison's mind as well; he complained about this refusal to the Halifax authorities, but also noted in his own parish register that he would not record his religious baptisms for the period of civil birth registration, believing it to be redundant.) The Roman Catholics took their children instead to Rev. Martin Maas, until 1870 the Roman Catholic priest at Ship Harbour. Many entries for baptisms performed at Ship Harbour now found in the registers of St. Peter's, Sheet Harbour do not duplicate Rev. Jamison's civil records for the Ship Harbour district.
The structure of the birth date entry in the genealogies offers a good indication of its source. A date which is only a year and is preceded with circa is a date calculated backward from an age given in the census or at death. A definite birth date with only the year comes from a tombstone where birth year rather than age at death was given. A full birth date comes from a baptismal register that provided birth date as well as baptism date, except from between 1864 and 1877, when it comes from the civil birth registrations. Birth dates before 1840 include the name of the church at which baptism took place, but afterwards this is included only if it is not the local Eastern Shore parish. Other formats indicate private sources, such as family Bibles, whose reliability is open to question but which sound plausible.
Marriage records are available from three general sources: the civil records of marriage bonds and licenses from the early days of the province and then of marriages performed from 1864; individual parish registers of marriages maintained by the respective clergy; and newspapers, especially denominational newspapers which published their ministers' returns. All three were used, but the information available from each of these sources differs, and the form of presenting each of these is different so the reader can ascertain from the structure of the data presented in the text what was the source. For marriages where a date and church are identified, the source was a marriage register from that church. For marriages where a date and geographic locality are given, the source was the civil records. When the minister's name is added, but no church and sometimes no place identified, the source was a newspaper announcement. Civil marriage records have been microfilmed and are available through the FHL system.
Deaths were recorded civilly along the Eastern Shore from 1864 to 1877. The 1871 census also included a separate schedule listing deaths for the previous 12 months, which does not always duplicate the civil records for the same period. The other major source for death are tombstone inscriptions and newspaper announcements/obituaries.
The two major sources of cemetery tombstone transcriptions are the PANS, which has a series transcribed in the early 1870s, and the transcripts of the MHHS, which were made in the early 1980s. Neither is available on microfilm.
Transcripts of the tombstones in all the major and most of the minor cemeteries along the Eastern Shore have been made and are useful to consult. There are a number of these at the PANS transcribed by Terrence M. Punch during the early 1970s. The reliability of Mr. Punch's transcripts is high, but many nineteenth century burials had no headstones to transcribe. Another set of transcripts of cemeteries located between Petpeswick and Spry Bay, not necessarily duplicating or overlapping Terrence Punch's transcripts, was prepared independently by members of the Marine Harbour Historical Society (MHHS) and published 1981-82 as a part of three volumes entitled Around the Harbours, Vols. 1 and 2, and Along the Shore. These latter transcripts should be used with caution as they contain typographical (if not transcription) errors, and are best considered as leads for further research.
The particular transcripts pertinent
to the Ship Harbour area are: St. Stephen's, Ship Harbour (Anglican) (MG5,
Vol. 15)
St. James, Lower Ship Harbour (Presbyterian)
(RG1, Vol.6, #24)
St. Denis, East Ship Harbour (R. Catholic) (RG1,
Vol. 6, #23)
Old Cemetery, Ship Harbour (community) (MHHS)
Marks Cemetery, Ship Harbour (private) (MHHS)
Shelnut Cemetery, Ship Harbour (private) (MHHS)
During the second half of the nineteenth century increasing attention was paid to the Eastern Shore, including Ship Harbour, by the Halifax press. The Golden Age had less direct impact on Ship Harbour than it did on some of the other Eastern Shore communities where gold was being mined, but the attention being paid to the region is also reflected in the increase of secondary source material for Ship Harbour as well.
There are two major published sources for contemporary newspaper reporting on marriages and deaths. There is a nine-volume series compiled variously by Terrence M. Punch and/or Jean Holder, Nova Scotia Vital Statistics from Newspapers, which provides genealogically pertinent extracts from Halifax non-religious newspapers from 1769 to 1854. J. and Shirley McCormick published in 1992 a four-volume series of extracts from a major Halifax religious periodical, The Presbyterian Witness, Vital Statistics, 1848-1887. The PANS also has on index cards extracts from the Baptist weekly, the Christian Messenger. In the Annabel Ells collection at the PANS one can also find a series of newspaper extracts, for the Eastern Shore in general but concentrating on Ship Harbour, carried through to 1901. All need to be consulted.
Census and quasi-census data is key to unravelling Eastern Shore family structures. The 1790-93 capitation tax lists, if they ever were created for the nascent Eastern Shore villages, have not survived, nor have the detailed heads-of-family population schedules for the 1818 census that was taken along the Eastern Shore -- only the totals remain available.
The detailed population census schedules from 1827 through 1891 for Ship Harbour have survived, and are widely available from a variety of sources. The 1827 census, including that of Ship Harbour (District 46), has been published by the PANS (Census of Nova Scotia - 1827; Census of District of Pictou - 1818, Halifax, PANS, 1979). Caution should be taken in using the 1827 census for the Eastern Shore. The population schedules prepared by the field enumerators were not retained, and the "original" manuscript version on microfilm was all done in one hand. It is easy to read but obviously a contemporary transcription of the original returns. The originals must have been difficult to decipher at points, and some of the surname garbles in the transcript are difficult to connect with the surnames for which one might be searching.
The 1838 schedules are the original enumerator lists, and contain sometimes imaginative spellings of surnames and unusual mathematics, but usually are easy to decipher and use. The 1851 census is not legible in the microfilm version for Ship Harbour (much of the few surviving portions of this census is no longer legible) but for those not able to consult the originals at the PANS, an index of this census, including the Eastern Shore districts, is available (Ronald Verne Jackson, Nova Scotia 1851, Accelerated Indexing Systems International, 1986). The population census schedules for 1861, 1871, 1881 and 1891 are all available on microfilm for consultation at the PANS, on public interlibrary loan from the NAC, or for purchase from the PANS (1851-61) or the NAC (1871-81-91), as well available on a rental basis from the FHL system. The 1901 and subsequent census was not available at the time research was being carried out, and was not consulted. Transcripts of the 1827, 1838, 1851 and 1861 census schedules for Ship Harbour are found in the Ells collection. A surname index for the 1871 census of Eastern Shore districts, including Ship Harbour, was created by Philip L. Hartling and published in the Genealogical Newsletter of the Royal Nova Scotia Historical Society, Vol. II, no. 26, pp.151-158 and no. 29, pp. 252-255. For the economic historian, the very detailed economic census schedules taken for Ship Harbour in 1871 are found with the population schedules on the NAC census microfilm.
A major generic source on the family and economic history of Ship Harbour is the collection of Annabel (Siteman) Ells (PANS (MG1, Vol. 1020). For many years while working at the PANS Mrs. Ells, born at Ship Harbour, researched and transcribed documents relating to Ship Harbour and its families, and this corpus forms an easily accessible and very useful starting point for any study of her natal village. For those not in Halifax, the FHL system also makes major parts of this collection available through its microfilm loan program. The papers are accessioned in little logical order, and many duplicates exist in various degrees of legibility, but it is a source that cannot be ignored by genealogist or local historian interested in Ship Harbour. The newspaper extracts to 1901 for the Ship Harbour area found in the Ells Collection focus on genealogical data, but contain newspaper reporting of interest to the religious and economic historian as well. One has the sense that Mrs. Ells had planned a doctoral dissertation on Ship Harbour, but her writings do not show much use of the material she painstakingly collected and transcribed by hand and manual typewriter back in the days before Xerox) would have eased her task. The love in her labor is evident. No serious researcher of any aspect of Ship Harbour history can ignore this collection, which contains some unique items.
Wills, when they were written by Eastern Shore residents, are recorded and available at the PANS, with an index, among others for Halifax County. From the genealogical perspective, wills have not been a very useful genealogical source for Ship Harbour, but do provide some data for its economic history. The earliest Ship Harbour residents wrote out wills, but there were few wills for the mid-century period. Estate inventories do give a good indication of the kind and level of economic activity carried out by a particular family and their level of success.
Land transaction records provide a few clues to places of origin and dates of departure. For Ship Harbour, however, they are not the rich source they can be for other areas. Petitions