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Place names offer clues about where early families settled, or where they came from.

When the man called Tusitala—teller of the tales—died in Samoa, it was the end of a career that had taken him by canoe and donkey pack through Europe. When he found that too tame, he took his bride to live in a mining camp in California. Later, he returned home to Scotland from which he soon sallied forth to spend the rest of his life in the South Pacific.

Robert Louis Stevenson was a natural nomad, yet he felt the tug of the familiar.

Stevenson wrote that all Scots shared a common bond: “In spite of the differences in blood and language the Lowlander feels himself the sentimental countryman of the Highlander. When they meet abroad, they fall upon each other’s neck in spirit; even at home there is a kind of clannish intimacy in their talk.”

People seek out what they know and feel comfortable with. When I spent a lengthy period in Japan assessing the teaching of English as a second language, I enjoyed things Japanese. Yet there came that day when my colleagues and I simply had to find a place that sold bread, cheese and apples. We needed the familiar for an hour or two.

Genealogists should be among the first to see how this matters in their pursuit.

Can you imagine Champlain coming ashore and declaring that, henceforth, the settlement would be known as Stuttgart or Nottingham? Would a party of rugged Highlanders from the Hebrides name their settlement Marseilles to remind them of the auld sod? Similarly, one might assume that Emerald, NB, was settled by Irish immigrants.

Turn this notion on its head, and you have a hint as to where the first settlers came from. Dumfries, in New Brunswick, was settled by Scottish Lowlanders, Inverness in Cape Breton by Highlanders. Emyvale, PEI, recalls its namesake in County Monaghan, Ireland. Since this is where those pioneers originated, they applied a name they knew to their new community. Falmouth in Hants County, NS, is named after Falmouth in Barnstable County, Massachusetts—and settled by New England Planters.

Still, there are exceptions, such as Bangor in Prince Edward Island. It is tempting to say that its settlers came from Bangor in Wales or from County Down. However in the late 1870s the local community was abuzz with suggestions about what to call their home. A public meeting was held to settle the matter; those present agreed to find a name in an old English dictionary, and Bangor turned up on the randomly opened page.

Then there are the places called after a pioneer family or settler of note. McKinnons Harbour in Cape Breton was named after early residents named Roderick and Allan McKinnon, and O’Leary, PEI, commemorates Michael O’Leary, an Irish farmer in Lot 6. New Brunswick has Bedell Settlement, Carrolls Crossing, Doyles Brook, Fosterville, Paquetville, and Robichaud. Nova Scotia offers us pioneer names such as Aldersville, Baxters Harbour, Boutiliers Point, Doucetteville, or Hubley; the Island gives us Abells Cove, Beaton Point and MacWilliams Cove.

Newfoundland, perhaps the title-holder of unique community names, teems with coves and islands, brooks and bays that commemorate its early settlers. Think of Benoit’s Cove, Colliers, Parsons Brook, Tucker Head, and, yes, there really was a Joseph Batt, although Joe Batt’s Arm refers to the water, not the man’s limb.

It helps to look at place names to see what clues they offer about where early families were established, or where people came from. It could be that New Lairg, NS, was named by emigrants who brought the name Lairg with them from Sutherland-shire, in the north of Scotland. These hints from geography can help us track the routes our ancestors followed.

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