| Background: |
In 1785, the British Parliament passed an act appointing Colonel Thomas Dundas and Mr. Jeremy Pemberton as commissioners to receive claims, and to hear evidence to support the claims, for losses suffered by Loyalists in the American Revolution. The two commissioners came to Canada and heard evidence in Halifax, Shelburne, Saint John, Quebec City, Montreal, and Niagara. Unfortunately, ten volumes have long been missing from what appears to be the original volumes of evidence which are held as MSS 18,662 in the Library of Congress, Washington, DC. However, before the loss, the evidence was transcribed into Evidence Books which are now part of Audit Office 12 in the British Public Record Office in London. In 1900, Mr. Canniff Haight made a second transcription of the original evidence books in the Library of Congress. This transcript was lost, but not before it appeared in print as the Second Report of the Bureau of Archives of the Province of Ontario in 1904. In 1984, the Archives of Ontario published a microfiche edition of the Second Report, often referred to as The 1904 Report, but because the ten volumes of original evidence were missing at the time the transcription was made, these volumes are not included in the Second Report. In 1985, the Archives of Ontario published a volume entitled, Loyalist Settlements; New Evidence of Canadian Loyalist Claims, by Dr. Bruce Antliff, who reconstructed the missing ten volumes from the transcripts of evidence in the Public Record Office in London. In addition to transcribing and publishing the ten volumes which are missing from 1904 Report, Dr. Antliff included a section in Loyalist Settlements with the heading, Omissions from the Second Report of the Bureau of Archives of the Province of Ontario. This chapter is located after the reconstructed ten volumes in the book, and contains evidence which Canniff Haight did not transcribe if the claim were crossed out, or if the claim were rejected before all the evidence had been presented to the commissioners. In a word, Loyalist Settlements contains all extant evidence which is not in the Second Report. |
