Atlantic Loyalist Connections

A burial entry for Jeffery Jenkins, Black Loyalist, in the Anglican Parish Church records of Wilmot, Nova Scotia provides a remarkable insight into the history of the area. Other information about the Black Loyalists in the area is found in the baptisms as well as in land and census records.

" At Trinity Church Jeffery Jenkins, coloured, originally a slave, liberated since he came to Nova Scotia with the Loyalists of 1783. He was one hundred years of age. "

In a 1975 edition of Acadiensis, scholar Murray Barkley described the “Loyalist experiment” in the provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia as a gradual process of ‘mythmaking,’ an “attempt to establish an exclusive Elysium in the North […] based on a hierarchical social structure […] large land-holdings, and a corporate, self-sufficient community of loyal, well-disposed subjects.”

We are pleased to announce that two new chapters have now been added to the New Brunswick Loyalist Journeys story map project. You will now find twenty additional biographies of loyalists from Kings County and St. John County, New Brunswick. Please visit the project site for the complete biographies of the loyalists featured in this post and others: https://loyalist.lib.unb.ca/story-maps .

The Old Burial Ground in Fredericton, New Brunswick were originally established in the years after fleets of Loyalist families arrived in the province in 1783. Loyalists erected numerous settlements across the provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, establishing the cities of Fredericton, Saint John, Digby, and Shelburne. Originally intended as a public square by surveyors, the grounds instead saw their first internment in 1787 with the burial of British Officer Anthony Foster, marking the founding of one of the city’s oldest cemetery.

What can you find out about loyalists from grave markers? Continuing from our last post Research Finds in the Graveyard, Part 1 we will take a closer look at loyalist settlement era grave markers.

Many history enthusiasts and genealogists are drawn to cemeteries and graveyards, often to the dismay of their companions and families. Grave markers can prove to be great sources of information when doing historical biographies, family history, demographic history, and cultural history of settlers in eastern North America during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

What can you learn from grave markers?

"Chinese", "Atheist", "The history of Anglican clergy in the West Indian colonies in the 18th century"?!? I think it must be very difficult for you to connect these things together now, and you may think it is ridiculous. But please, believe me, this is not a spoof.

Slave-based sugar cultivation on the island of Jamaica was nothing if not brutal. In the late eighteenth century, it was also rapidly industrializing. By professionalizing management practices, embracing technological change, and increasing rates of reproduction among enslaved populations, planters could momentarily distinguish themselves in a crowded scene of ever-competing estates.

We continue this week with our exploration of important loyalist terms. (See Part 1 here).

muster roll

Do you know your loyalist ABCs? This post will familiarize you with some important terms for loyalist history and research!

American Loyalist Claims Commission

In pandemic days, more and more research has been pushed to online, accessible sources. With this shift in mind, we have created a list of some of the best online resources to use in loyalist research. If you know of other resources, please drop us a line to pass them along.

Happy researching!

We are living in strange times. The COVID-19 pandemic has caused us to re-consider our values and has sent many in search of ‘the good life.’ We are looking for ways to live better, to live healthier, and to live longer. This is hardly a new preoccupation for human contemplation and experimentation. Cures, medicines, devices, and lifestyle changes have existed throughout history in hopes of prolonging our lives, maintaining our youthful vim and vigor, and thwarting death.

Exactly when Gillam Butler acquired his estate on Campobello Island is uncertain, but there are clues that suggest he was never a destitute loyalist refugee, but rather an opportunistic New Englander who saw the border and a major financial opportunity. Following Sheriff Wyer’s first notice of auction of Butler’s Campobello property in the Royal Gazette, David Owen published his concerns in the Saint John Gazette as to the legality of Wyer’s position to auction off Butler’s seized estates on Campobello.

To fully grasp the kind of place that Gillam Butler lived, it is useful to imagine New Brunswick’s southwesterly edge, including the Fundy Isles, as a kind of loyalist borderland. The fishing outports of mainland Charlotte County, Grand Manan, Deer and Campobello islands have long been sites to congregate in Indigenous trading networks, transatlantic commerce, and European imperial warfare.

In April of 1786, writing to Lord Sydney, the British Home Secretary, New Brunswick’s Lieutenant Governor Thomas Carleton complained about “a certain Mr. Gillam Butler, an Inhabitant of Campo Bello [sic] Island.” The Governor, a staunch imperialist who surrounded himself with likeminded loyalist refugees, informed Sydney that Butler was caught by officials at the Saint John Customs House swearing a false oath in an attempt to gain a register (a list of commercial goods on a British vessel) to sell his cargo of American-produced whale oil.

During the seventy years after the Loyalists arrived, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia remained a prosperous, albeit cold and unforgiving.

It is terribly easy for scholars to ‘miss the forest for the trees.’ About a month ago, I emerged from my den of research to give a biographical presentation about Christopher Sauer III. At the end of my talk, I was caught off guard by an obvious, down-to-earth question. “Why,” my sensible classmate asked me, “was a German so loyal to the British cause in the American Revolution?”

Often, we can only guess at what children of the past experienced in their young lives as it was not usual for them create documents of their own. This was poignantly true for the children of the African Diaspora during the eighteenth century. A record as basic as a name, however, can offer a way into an historical culture. The Book of Negroes holds the names of many children leaving New York City at the end of the American Revolution, although an equal number of children's names were not put to paper at this time.

There has been a surge of interest in historical handwriting in the past month as people volunteer their time to help institutions with crowd-sourced transcription projects such as Transcribe from the Nova Scotia Archives and the volunteer initiative from the