Genealogy

If not through keepsake posters or commemorative plaques, how do you find out when great aunt Ruby died?

Most people interested in genealogy become stuck at some point, unable to find out when a family member has died. In some cultures, including the Cajun, funeral posters were put up in a prominent place within a community to announce a death and, by implication, invite concerned parties to the wake or burial. Among German Protestants, funeral sermons were sometimes printed as souvenirs of a funeral. These Leichenpredigten were rare, but informative. Another way of marking a death was the funeral hatchment, a shield hung in a church where an armiger - person with a coat of arms - was buried. These are rare in Canada, yet Saint Paul's Church in Halifax possesses eight of them. Just as Protestants may have had a funeral sermon, many Roman Catholics who died were commemorated by funeral cards, useful as bookmarks in missals, asking the recipient to pray for the repose of the beloved's soul.  If your family was not German nor Catholic nor armigers - and you've determined that relatives can't help you - it's time to turn elsewhere to find a family member's date of death. Many newspapers keep files of obituaries for the past 20 to 40 years… but the period before about 1960 can stretch back like a desert. What to do? Perhaps you know where the relative was buried and there is a headstone. Maybe Aunt Ruby belonged to a church you can identify, and the church or the cemetery connected with it has burial records.

Or consider this idea. For the past 120 years, funerals involved professional funeral directors, or undertakers as we once knew them, who maintained burial registers. Apart from names and dates of death, you might also find the cause of death, place of burial, names of next of kin and place of residence. Records from some funeral homes have been deposited in provincial archives, through it's more likely that they're on hand, either in their original books or in microform, at various local and regional museums, genealogical and historical societies.

If the person lived in a city or good-sized town, there will be sets of directories in the community library or a heritage-related body. If you can find that Ruby is listed in the 1942 city directory, "Slippers, Ruby, wid. (widow of) John," and she is not listed in 1943, it's possible that this omission from the directory followed a more permanent disappearance. Check the directories for two or three years on either side of 1942 and 1943 to ensure that she was there until 1942 and gone after 1943. Note that directories missed people - or misspelled names - through carelessness or because there was no response at a specific address. But at least you can narrow down the likely period of death in which to focus a search through, say, the obituaries of newspapers.

You can sometimes learn a death date most readily by examining an index to probate records for the county or district where a family member lived - assuming the deceased owned property. Since 1900, death dates were usually entered in indexes to estates probated. If not, and you find that there was a will, find the date of the will and the date of the earliest probate document and you'll know that the death date falls within the period. For example, Ruby Slippers made her will on September 18, 1942, and a document in the estate file is dated August 8, 1943, so you have 11 months of obits to search through. If you know the province, but not the specific probate jurisdiction, there will be notices in the province's Royal Gazette, inviting people with claims against the estate to put in their accounts. From these notices you can see which county/district applies.

A few final ideas to keep in mind. Did the person belong to a society that might have noted members' deaths in minutes, newsletters or bulletins? There were Masonic Lodges, Royal Canadian Legions, Charitable Irish and North British societies, etc. University publications also sometimes note deaths of alumni. Leave no stone unturned. One man discovered that his grandfather was dead by a certain December because his estate made a donation to the Goodfellows fund, which appeared in a daily newspaper. Be prepared - with an open eye, ear and mind. Genealogical clues turn up in the darndest places.

People have always moved around, spreading their culture to the far corners of Atlantic Canada.

Genealogists quickly learn that people do not remain in one jurisdiction. Most learn to cast their nets wider than one church, one community, or one record, since not all members of an extended family stay in one place, denomination, or line of work.

There was movement across this region from the earliest years of human settlement. The Mi'kmaq migrated. The French began in New Brunswick in 1604, but within a year set up house in Nova Scotia. In the century before the Expulsions, the growth of pastoral Acadie spread people of French ancestry or birth across the expanse of the Tantramar, which forms part of both Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.

The "Foreign Protestants" of the 1750s did not remain in Lunenburg, or even Nova Scotia. A Beck (Peck) and DeLesDernier turn up early in Chignecto; the LaRoque's census of 1752 reveals a few others (Henry dit Maillardé and Abraham Louis) at Port La Joye, while Jonahs and Jaillets moved to southeastern New Brunswick before 1780. Likewise, the Yorkshire settlers of the 1770s straddled the border of the two future provinces.

In the 1760s, Prince Edward Island had been shared out by lot among 67 proprietors. Many Scots and Irish discovered that they could not obtain freehold title to their land. In general, tenants have less incentive than owners to improve a property. A man who proposed to farm had first to make the fields. Should the tenant farmer's rent fall behind, he could find himself turned off the land he had cleared, together with his family and livestock. This encouraged removal to the mainland, where land could be bought or granted.

The New England Planters of 1759-1774 distributed themselves over the western mainland of Nova Scotia and in the Saint John River valley of New Brunswick. The Loyalists of the 1780s founded new communities all over the Maritime region, in places as diverse as Guysborough and St. Andrews, Digby and Bedeque, Sussex and Shelburne. They migrated internally within the Maritimes in search of better opportunities. Black Loyalists reached Charlottetown and Saint John, Preston and Manchester.

The Highland Scots and the Irish immigrants of the early 19th century preferred to settle among their own people, so the same Gaelic traits arrived in all three provinces.

With local exceptions, the people who settled in the Maritimes were drawn from the same basic human stocks. Mulgrave could have been described as an Irish community at one time, and Pictou as Scots. Likewise, Kinkora was Irish, and Mount Vernon was Scottish, but each pair is located in a different province. Meteghan, Tignish, and Caraquet are Acadian communities, but found in three provinces. In varying proportions, the same kinds of people came to each part of the area.

Any historian or genealogist needs consciously to remember that many families have members or branches in more than one of the Maritimes.

An illustration of how people got around is the Bradshaw family. Abraham was born in Medford, Massachusetts, and died in Chester, NS. His son, Joseph, lived at Kempt, NS. Another son, William, died at St. Martins, N.B., and a third, Isaac, lived at Bedeque, PEI. It would be an indifferent family historian who confined his work on that family to one province.

Chester people were drawn to the Bay of Fundy in the age of shipbuilding. The Bradshaws were not unique. Saint John and Halifax were once regional mercantile rivals. Halifax was the mercantile hub for the Atlantic seaboard, from Barrington to Sydney, and through the Gut of Canso into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Chatham, NB, was closer to Halifax by sea than was Saint John, so Halifax enjoyed its traffic. Saint John held sway throughout the Fundy rim, including the Nova Scotia coast all the way around from Yarmouth through to Amherst.

This rivalry decided where each province built its first long railway. The line from Halifax to Windsor was intended to cut into Saint John's hegemony on the Bay of Fundy, while New Brunswick's Shediac line was meant to wrestle the business of the Gulf coast away from Halifax. Each time a business interest established links with an outport, personnel moved to new places. Crewmen made homes ashore in another province, perhaps marrying local women.

All of this does not even begin to talk about the Newfoundland folk who settled near Ingonish for the fisheries, or in industrial Cape Breton for the mines and steel works, nor the Scots from Cape Breton and Prince Edward Island who moved to the Codroy Valley, or the Acadians at Port-au-Port.

Blessed if we aren't all the same bunch in many ways.