Blogs

Wilmot, Nova Scotia & Black Loyalists

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.

New Brunswick’s Loyalist Experiment: Examining the Lives of William Burtis, Robert Campbell, and Thomas Mullins

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.”

Research Finds in the Graveyard, Part 1

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.

“It is unpardonable in an overseer to be a hard punisher”: Planter Paternalism and Violence on William Vassall’s Loyalist-Era Green River Plantation, Jamaica

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.

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