8 In a useful and far-ranging survey of the American experience, François Weil suggests that genealogy in the US passed through four stages: from an 18thcentury obsession with pedigree through to a post-Revolutionary republican quest of heroic pioneers to the superiority-seeking scientific racism from the 1860s to the 1950s, culminating in far more democratic patterns after the 1960s. Many mid-19th century and fin-de-siècle elite Americans remained obsessed with “aristocracy, lineage, and hereditary status,” a blue-blood sensibility Weil associates particularly with major Atlantic port cities, the Hudson Valley, and the South. And he also underlines the extent to which a more emphatically racialized practice of genealogy after the 1860s, culminating in a new “science” of eugenic genealogy, allowed some Americans hitherto reluctant to publicize their distinguished bloodlines to broadcast such supposed claims to social superiority, a change exemplified by the 1908 publication of Burke’s Prominent Families of the United States.12 Such genealogies contributed powerfully to a version of American nationalism that was “more vocal, exclusive, and genealogically minded than ever,” as the nation came to be imagined as one great extended family. Indications of this shift to a more racialized genealogical culture included the rise of patriotic-hereditary organizations, such as the Society of Sons of Revolutionary Sires, the Sons of the Revolution, and the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), the latter of which proudly stood for the “purity of our Caucasian blood.” Throughout this period of racialized genealogy, one found a “conflation of race, heredity, and nationalism.”13

9 Yet, as Weil concedes, these stages unfolded unevenly across the country. Many in the Atlantic coastal cities maintained a preoccupation with noble lineage and hereditary exclusiveness well into the 20th century and even beyond; there one found an enduring preoccupation with lineage and status. As Gail R. Redmann explains, 19th-century Americans “used genealogies to distinguish themselves from the new wave of immigrants, many of whom were from eastern and southern Europe.”14 And one place where this was of particular significance was New England, where from the 1890s to the 1940s one found the flowering of a full-fledged cult of the Mayflower and a sustained effort to develop the Huguenots as the founders of America (sometimes with an emphasis on their supposed connection to European nobility).

10 Jean O’Brien notes that southern New England “produced an enormous body of literature in the nineteenth century. It dominated this culture of print, obsessed over its self-fashioned providential history, and defined itself as the cradle of the nation and seat of cultural power.”15 John Farmer’s Genealogical Register of the First Settlers of New England (1829) sought to democratize this genealogical genre by opening it up to the ordinary citizen.16 For François Weil, this 352-page tome, registering “the names of the large portion of the First Settlers, of the most prominent, as well as the more humble,” transformed “the practice of genealogy in the United States.” It meant not only that ordinary citizens found a measure of genealogical attention but that they started demanding different and more critical standards of evidence: “tradition” and “family lore” no longer sufficed.17 In New England colonial culture, “thousands of family Bible pages . . . torn from their original books, now reside in New England libraries and provide indispensable information for the identification of their former owners’ families,” writes John Schutz. They often gave rise, at the death of an individual, to “memoirs” designed “to give posterity something additional by which to remember him,” oftentimes as a stalwart defender of the republic. Supporters of the historical, antiquarian, and genealogical societies attracted “influential and congenial members” from the ranks of “clergymen or former clergymen, lawyers, medical doctors, politicians, professors, teachers, and business people – men of education, prominence, and (sometimes) wealth.” In the case of the New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS), its founding fathers “were amateur, well-meaning men who saw in the deeds of families the threads of patriotism that made the nation strong and prosperous,” writes Schutz. “They believed in family history most of all because it revealed important facts about the nation.” As he says of the NEHGS, which was formed in part in response to criticisms of past genealogists, and which began issuing its own journal in the 1840s,

The British genealogist Sir Bernard Burke thought that Massachusetts in 1863 was “more genealogical than Yorkshire.” 19 Although he finds stirrings of a fascination with the past and a concern for the preservation of its relics in the mid-Atlantic states, Weil finds that “antiquarians were mostly New Englanders.” Often, he observes, genealogists presented themselves as “brave, erudite, but lonesome knights,” selflessly pursuing acts of research for altruistic ends over years and years – and it pays to note they were almost all heroic male “knights.” 20

11 This New England passion for genealogy – in its second, third, and fourth meanings – thus went well beyond a personal interest in one’s immediate family to a far more ambitious interpretation of history in general. Often drawing upon traditions of Puritan piety, genealogy provided religious exaltation as well as a sense of social and cultural belonging. It told the descendants of White settlers not only that they had founded New England, rescuing it from original inhabitants who could be erased from the record, but that God had favoured their doing so. The stories of the powerful men who made this Godly enterprise possible were not just the only ones that mattered but the only ones that existed. As Lorenzo Veracini explains, settler colonialism is premised on “the domination of a majority that has become indigenous (settlers are made by conquest and by immigration).” It entails not accessing the labour-power but rather acquiring the land and natural resources of the peoples who were on the land before the arrival of the settlers, and it generally entails the erasure of such prior inhabitants from public memory and history.21 Genealogy and settler colonialism went together: exalting settlers has often meant erasing those upon whose lands they “settled.”

12 In the 1920s, the cult of the Mayflower suggested the potency of combining genealogy with patriotism. To authenticate one’s descent from one of the 102 passengers who arrived in 1620 at what is now Plymouth, Mass., meant obtaining a coveted stock of cultural capital.22 The certification of Mayflower status was under the jurisdiction of the General Society of Mayflower Descendants (established 1897).23 One corporate investor based in Boston developed “a biographical listing of all known descendants of Mayflower passengers into some 20,600 pages of documents.” The 1920s were especially the Mayflower years, in which “New England’s contributions to the United States were celebrated with plaques, memberships, and named bequests.”24 Debates over the signers of the Mayflower compact would consume precious human energies for a century or more, driven by a drive for social distinction but frustrated at many turns by contradictions and aporia in the genealogical record.25

13 And, inevitably, other Americans, unable to claim direct descent from the Plymouth pioneers, developed rival claims to ancestral primacy. Descendants of Huguenots were especially concerned to establish their credentials and affirm their place in American history: “‘More noble blood never settled American soil than that which circulated through the vein of the Huguenots,’ one genealogist boasted in the early 20th century.”26 Such rival claims, in opposing the specifics of the Puritan claim to national essence, nonetheless perpetuated the New England template of explaining American history in terms of the cultural, political, and (increasingly) biological excellence of a select group of founding fathers. Some of them, as in the case of the De Forests, the supposed founders of New York City, came with the added bonus of supposed links to European nobility.27 Genealogical columns appeared in local historical journals and even newspapers. The Handbook of American Genealogy (1862) had reached its fourth augmented edition by 1900. Blank family registers proliferated along with other research tools.28 “We are becoming the most genealogical nation on the face of the earth,” claimed the New York Times in 1879.29

14 It was this New England template that exercised a disproportionate influence over Nova Scotia from the 1890s to the 1920s. In this respect, if not in all others, Nova Scotia – the preoccupation of many a New England 18th-century preacher, statesman, soldier and, from the 1760s to the 1780s, settler30 – was “New England’s Outpost,” in the resonant phrase of historian J.B. Brebner (1895-1957), who with Harvey exemplified the Depression-era drive for modern, archivally based work. Reciprocally, Boston exerted a strong influence down to the 1950s, both as an economic centre (as a source of capital and a destination for out-migrating working-class Nova Scotians) and as a cultural metropolis.

15 Yet if one were determined to follow the New England genealogical model and develop a master narrative of Nova Scotia’s heroic and pious White Anglo founders, some daunting complications were bound to follow. If the founding fathers of the NEHGS fuelled their years-long efforts in dusty archives with the thought that by doing so they were celebrating the true founders of the Republic, what could inspire their fellow antiquarians in the Nova Scotia Historical Society (NSHS, established 1878)? Some of the families in question, having arrived as Planters or Loyalists, could be figured more easily as founders of their home communities in New England than of those in Nova Scotia; moreover, many of their descendants had returned to New England, all of which made it difficult to claim them as the men who made Canada great. If it seemed obvious to many genealogical chroniclers of American history that the American Revolution was organized by their freedom-loving ancestors following the same script that had caused them to pursue liberty a century earlier, both the “Planters” who had come to Nova Scotia in the 1760s and 1770s and the “Loyalists” who had arrived in the 1780s had somehow, despite their ancestry, failed to master this script.31 From the Nova Scotia perspective, the putative Loyalist founders were even more problematic since they arrived as the third major group of Europeans and enjoyed a not wholly undeserved reputation as privileged and ultimately unsuccessful elitists. Across Canada there was (and there still is) a determined cadre of history enthusiasts for whom the Loyalists are the foundational Canadians, who developed associations that paralleled the Daughters of the American Revolution, and took up the quest of genealogical credentials as a serious business; but, despite their best efforts, the Loyalist Myth has never become Nova Scotia’s Myth.32

16 What might seem obvious to New Englanders – that their Puritan forebears were the Great Men who founded the country – was thus not obvious in Nova Scotia, especially since so many of these worthies had, after their Nova Scotia sojourn, pursued fame and fortune elsewhere – often in the United States. After Confederation in 1867, the nation-state to which many “Nova Scotia” Planters and Loyalists contributed was not the one in which Nova Scotia was located. A common fin-de-siècle pattern was to assert that the contribution of the noble ancestor in question lay in his having built a transnational community of the people of British race. Genealogists – at least those of categories (2), (3), and (4) – focused on White colonizers, who were thought to have “settled” or “planted” Nova Scotia. The most flamboyant of those championing founding whiteness were those who thought the Norse had settled near Yarmouth and left behind a “runic stone,” reportedly first discovered c. 1812 but famous only after it was championed by an emissary of the Numismatic and Antiquarian Society of Philadelphia in 1880.33 There ensued many imaginative flights of genealogical fantasy about Nova Scotia’s founding White people, all of them extreme versions of a far-more-pervasive pattern of “Firsting and Lasting,” in which Indigenous peoples were either forgotten as “pioneers” or imagined to have vanished altogether.34

17 According to liberal settler-colonizer ideology, European settlers, “discovering” an unsettled wilderness, brought with them civilizing qualities – property, social order, religion, individualism, and political freedom – which gave them not only the right but also the duty to develop communities embodying them. In the emerging official history of Nova Scotia, of these settlers the British were primae inter pares, whose superiority in civilization and arms gave them the right to prevail over other European claimants. Thus the true founders of Nova Scotia were not those who came first – the Indigenous peoples or, among Europeans, the French – but the British, who, whichever side they chose in the 1770s and 1780s, were united by their purportedly Manifest Destiny to build free societies in North America. Both sides of the conflict that split the empire and divided many New Englanders in Nova Scotia from those in New England could be seen as the White colonizers who settled the continent, an achievement far bigger than their momentary political divisions. In a version of Benedict Anderson’s “Reassurance of Fratricide,” the conflict between Rebels and Loyalists could be presented as a long-ago war between now happily reconciled brothers whose remembrance of their past conflict confirmed their shared values, i.e., that of bringing the civilization and order of the British race to North America.35

18 Judge A.W. Savary (1831-1920), one of the major genealogical Nova Scotian genealogical writers of the 1890s, caught this spirit of anglospheric unity by quoting Virgil’s Aeneid: “Sic genus amborum scindit se sanguine ab uno,” which might be roughly translated as “Thus from one stock, do both our stems divide.” He went on to write reassuringly of the reconciliation of the two fraternal “stocks”:

Striking the pose of the chivalrous knight, embarked upon a soul-testing quest, Savary wrote passionately of the deep sacrifices he had made for the cause of genealogy:

19 Although Savary does discuss some happenings in Nova Scotia, by far the greater part of his genealogical opus dwells upon New England. He published in the New England Historical and Genealogical Review, conducted an extensive correspondence with his Massachusetts relatives, and devoted a considerable portion of his Boston-produced book to the genealogy of the separate Severy line of Plymouth County, which he had first mistakenly assumed must have been made up of his blood relatives. Savary greatly admired the tenacity and forbearance of his ancestors, and (quite unusually) even made space within his pantheon of heroes for a woman.37 For this Nova Scotian, a study focused on his virtuous family was necessarily focused on its New England days.

20 Many “category-2 genealogists” active in Nova Scotia were residents of New England. The “labours of . . . patriotic Nova Scotians in exile,” in the words of D.C. Harvey in 1931, were in evidence from the 1890s to the 1920s.38 Undoubtedly the doyen of these Nova Scotia patriotic genealogists in exile in New England was A.W.H. Eaton (1849-1937). Born in Kentville into the family of a school inspector, a direct descendant of a notable New England settler, and raised in a religious atmosphere in which his father’s Calvinism and his mother’s Anglicanism vied for his loyalty, Eaton spent much of his adult life wrestling with questions of religious faith. From 1886 and for about 20 years he supported himself by “preparing New York boys in English for the leading eastern colleges, Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Columbia,” brought out a manual on “Letter-Writing, its Ethics and Etiquette,” and produced volume after volume of romantic poetry – much of it sanctifying the landscapes of Nova Scotia.

21 It was as a genealogist and local historian that Eaton won his greatest renown in the province, in works that ranged from pieces praising his own family to such articles as “Chapters in the History of Halifax, Nova Scotia” and “Rhode Island Settlers in Hants County, Nova Scotia” in Americana magazine from 1913 to 1919.39 In his own and many other minds, Eaton’s most important work was published in Salem, Mass., in 1910: A History of Kings County Nova Scotia, Heart of the Acadian Land, Giving a Sketch of the French and their Expulsion, and a History of the New England Planters who Came in their Stead.40 This was a book of 898 pages, and roughly 38 per cent of them were comprised of pages devoted strictly to genealogies, with a further 9 per cent dedicated to family biographies. Eaton spent three hard years on it, doing all his writing in the NEHGS library in Boston. He confessed that, had he sought to compose “complete family histories, several lifetimes would have been demanded and many volumes required to be filled,” but he hoped that “the families themselves” would carry on this work: if they received “an impulse for more thorough genealogical research on their own part, the author’s purpose in making them shall have been fully served.” Eaton generated many of his insights from published sources, but he also solicited information through notices in the press, histories, and memories from “the families.” He also relied on cemetery records and oral traditions; in one case, he reported on direct impressions of the Expulsion of 1755 as they had been passed on through the generations. He also relied heavily upon the prior researches of Dr. William Pitt Brechin, a Boston physician who was also well known as an “indefatigable genealogist of Cornwallis families” and compiler of invaluable scrapbooks, a genealogical achievement hailed in the “fifty-fourth volume of the New England Historical and Genealogical Register.” Brechin’s work was all the more indispensable because the Horton vital records had evidently disappeared, legislation regarding vital statistics were never enforced, and “of the families of the New England planters in Kings County after three generations, except in probate records or deeds, we are unable to find any public records at all.” Eaton noted the wide range of people across the province who had helped him make up for this dramatic evidentiary gap.41

22 Although the book never lays out a clear thesis, its implicit message was that New England and Kings County were virtually as one. The “settled history” of Nova Scotia began with Cornwallis and, in the case of Kings County, entailed the arrival of Planters, a few of whom were from Massachusetts and Rhode Island. But most came from “those beautiful old towns” of “four Connecticut counties, New London and Windham, Middlesex and Tolland,” which were made up of “worthy gentlemen and prominent persons in the several towns where they belonged.” “If any one will take the trouble,” Eaton wrote, “to examine the admirable histories of New London and Norwich, . . . or the now rapidly increasing later town and family histories of eastern Connecticut, he will see how important the families were from whom are descended the people who have inhabited and still largely inhabit the county whose annals this volume is written to preserve.” Of many families settling in Horton and Cornwallis, Eaton remarks that many of them

Such direct connections between New England and Nova Scotia allowed Eaton to derive, from probate records and a long description of a New London wedding, conclusions about social life in Kings County itself. When probing the New Light religious revival that roused the county in the 1770s and 1780s, to give a further example, he made direct reference to the Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society for 1888.42

23 A second implied thesis was that these New Englanders, by virtue of their moral and hereditary excellence, had an almost biological right to the properties they claimed. As one American historian, fully quoted in Eaton’s text, exclaimed:

Thus, although they farmed lands once possessed by the Mi’kmaq, tilled by Acadians, and conquered by the British, Eaton’s New Englanders were nonetheless the founding White settlers, constituting the primary “stock” of Kings County and, indeed, Nova Scotia. By contrast, Eaton’s Mi’kmaq are pathetic, simple-minded remnants of a vanished time, more to be pitied than blamed.43 The New Englanders were the settlers and colonizers whose acquisition of property in the Annapolis Valley allowed for “that spirit of independence and sense of liberty” characteristic of New Englanders throughout the continent.44 Unlike many American genealogists, then, who could easily imagine that the White men about whom they wrote had founded the United States, Eaton’s conflation of “race, heredity and nationalism” was inherently transnational in its scope. His heroic pioneers were founding a settler-colonial order in all of North America, not just in Canada or Nova Scotia.

24 For Eaton was not just writing a local history of Kings County but a hymn of praise to the New England planters, whose descendants “in not a few cases have carved out for themselves brilliant careers,” a pattern that “will not seem strange when one remembers the fine qualities of the stock from which most of them sprang.” This was ultimately a conservative vision of a county justly led by a distinguished group of families, who

The county’s towns fell under the leadership of “a group of intelligent, well-bred men and women, of more or less education as the case might be, but of refined instincts and cultivated tastes,” whose family names consume many lines of the History.45 The truly attentive reader will also spot that 18th-century Kings County harboured slaves, dispossessed Acadians, and very poor people, some of them subjected to the indignity of being auctioned off as unpaid labourers to the highest bidder at auctions – but such small islands of social realism are set amidst a sea of ancestral romanticism.

25 It was entirely appropriate that Wolfville, which once bore “the disagreeable name ‘Mud Creek’,” now honoured the name of the estimable DeWolfs among whom one found “Judge Elisha DeWolf, the leading man of the village, an important land-owner, who built the house now known as Kent Lodge, and who had the honour of entertaining in his hospitable cottage, H.R.H. the Duke of Kent, when he was journeying from Halifax to Annapolis.” It was naturally the case that such excellent families had flourished throughout both Canada and the United States: “As might be expected from the character of the people, a very large number of the sons of Kings County men have gone beyond the grammar schools and other secondary schools of the county, to institutions of higher learning at home and abroad.” It was hardly surprising that so many had proceeded to Harvard and other institutions of higher learning, including A.W.H. Eaton himself. Thus was reverent filiopietism combined with self-congratulatory “autopietism.”46

26 Eaton saw himself as engaged in a work of cultural salvage that only he could undertake: “If I had not done Kings County,” he told D.C. Harvey,

If, however, one were a member of his extended family, such as his entrepreneurial cousin Cyrus Eaton of Cleveland, or his other, more philosophical cousin, Benjamin Rand, the Harvard scholar and librarian, the very genealogist hailed so warmly in Kings County, one was likely to be just as impressed by his “notable history of the Eaton Family of Nova Scotia,” in the words of one heartfelt eulogy to him.48 To this genealogical historian, the history of Nova Scotia was, in a sense, that of the Eatons writ large.

27 The theme of the New Englanders’ moral and biological excellence could be applied well beyond Kings County. Eaton, in the “Halifax Chapters,” remarked that the city owed much of its character to “people of excellent standing among the New England commercial gentry to which they belonged,” and went on to list 22 such noteworthy families. There followed a long list of Nova Scotians, many of them Haligonians, who had received British knighthoods and other honours – an implicit homage to the common heritage and interests of the British race. And when it came to the New England settlers of Kings and Hants counties, i.e., Eaton’s own forebears, he wrote: “It is impossible to speak in too high praise, and one needs only a slight acquaintance with Rhode Island history to know the unusual prominence and worth of the families from that colony that came to Falmouth and Newport.” This statement was followed with another long list of the names of the most eminent families. Given how many men with sterling pedigrees had left 18th-century New England, Eaton, a longtime Boston resident, even allowed himself to wonder if the Revolution might not have lowered the city’s cultural tone and caused the loss of “some of her very finest ideals.”49

28 Although technically an expatriate, Eaton never ceased to identify himself as a Nova Scotian. He advised one admirer that his History of Kings County was his work of “most permanent value,” in large part because it documented “that remarkable migration of New England Families in 1760 to Nova Scotia that took thousands of men and women of the very best New England families to Nova Scotia.” Then, in classic filiopietistic style, he rhymed off the great names of this New England tradition:

As he reached his twilight years, Eaton fretted that he had left much of the work of celebrating these and other founding settlers undone. He was especially worried about an extensive collection he had made of genealogical facts in Colchester County, for its loss would constitute a colossal setback for the province:

Notwithstanding this pessimistic sense of an era of genealogical county histories coming to a close, Eaton still held out some hope that the great work of writing Nova Scotia’s history, county by county and leading family by leading family, might continue. Eventually a “thorough, readable history” would emerge.50

29 Eaton’s “saving Nova Scotia’s history” by applying to it the genealogical techniques he had polished in Massachusetts suggested both the similarities and the differences between New England and Nova Scotia. In New England, genealogy was pursued by a formidable elite ensconced within powerful institutions. When they turned their attention to Nova Scotia, it was to find ancestors imagined to be pious, hard-working settlers helping build up the English-speaking settlements that made North America – often by coming back to the United States and rising into the top ranks of entrepreneurs, professors, and lawyers. In Nova Scotia there was some local interest in genealogy, as evident in old “genealogy books” kept in towns like Yarmouth51; the drive to safeguard local township records, which were directly useful for listing property holders and the traditional brands farmers placed on their cattle from the depredations of outsiders (some of them archivists)52; columns devoted to recording the deeds of well-known families in the Yarmouth Herald and Halifax Chronicle; a few devoted collectors of genealogical information pertinent to particular communities, such as T. Brenton Smith in Queens County53 and Harry Piers of the Nova Scotia Museum, a correspondent of and subscriber to Burke’s Landed Gentry in London54; a minority of the papers read to the Nova Scotia Historical Society55; and doubtless innumerable grandmothers and grandfathers keen to impress upon the young the moral lessons acquired from venerable ancestors.

30 Moreover, there were some more ambitious homegrown attempts at general genealogically flavoured historical interpretations in the 1920s. In 1923, Pictou County resounded to speeches and ceremonies hailing the virtuous ancestors who had sailed a century before on the Hector – just like the Mayflower, the ship could be imagined to be the vessel that started it all.56 That Scots were the primae inter pares of the “White Races” officially promoted by the province in 1936 was one consequence of this pervasive promotion of tartan-themed attractions.57 In 1924 the entire province advertised an “Old Home Summer” celebration – a blatant steal from a similar Massachusetts promotion – that enticed American “family and friends” back to re-experience their native province.

31 Yet all such genealogical enterprises, duly noted, hardly held a candle to the genealogists of all five categories found in more-developed New England, where one found a large leisured class with ample time and resources to create a booming mnemonic sector of the “most genealogical nation on the face of the earth.” When they turned their eyes northward, in search of Planter or Loyalist forebears, they were not hoping to encounter difference but kinship – often kin who might count towards establishing their own cultural credentials as founding settlers of New England.

32 A graphic sense of the gap between New England and Nova Scotia can be discerned in the correspondence of A.F. MacDonald, who served in the Halifax Dominion Archives office in the late 1920s. Knowledge that such an office existed excited many a genealogist in the United States, who imagined it would offer services equivalent to those provided by similar American institutions. They were swiftly disabused of any such hopes when they arrived in Halifax. To make up for the disappointment of some of them, MacDonald exerted himself heroically to fit ancestors to customers. He received a vague request from a man from Pennsylvania desirous of details about an 18th-century Loyalist marriage in Annapolis Royal. MacDonald answered with a three-page missive dense with arcane data mined from W.A. Calnek’s History of Annapolis County and Judge Savary’s Supplement to the History of Annapolis. He also roused Laura Hardy of Granville Ferry to search the local probate records, which task she combined with inquiries into the clergyman who might have performed the ceremony.58 She seemed genuinely shocked when she received five dollars from the American ancestor-hunter:

Honour, gratitude, reciprocal obligation, historical knowledge for its own sake: we are in the presence of a communitarian ethos quite different from far more hierarchical and commercial genealogical world of the larger American centres. It was one in which, repeatedly, the Archives and its network of supporters provided goods and services virtually gratis to a growing population of American ancestor-hunters.

33 Thus, when researchers wrote to MacDonald of the Halifax Branch of the Dominion Archives in Ottawa or to his successor Harvey at the Public Archives of Nova Scotia in Halifax, which took over much of the field in 1931 and assumed custody of most of the Dominion Branch’s holdings, they often discovered an unwelcome corollary of the difference between the two genealogical cultures. Compared with Massachusetts, Nova Scotia was barely getting started in the field of genealogy. It not only lacked the equivalents of the well-funded elite genealogical societies but also the records requisite for most genealogical searches. Although PANS, founded in 1857, was officially the custodian of rare state papers of Nova Scotia, it was not an institution designed to meet the needs of ancestor-hunting members of the general public. Because vital statistics were not kept in Nova Scotia before 1865, and births, marriages, and deaths were not officially registered until 1908, much depended on the existence of church records, only some of which were readily available and, in almost all cases, not yet available at PANS.60 “We have a great many genealogical inquiries,” Harvey as archivist announced shortly after the new building’s opening, “but not having complete vital statistics anywhere in Nova Scotia it is rather a thankless job trying to do anything with them, particularly as many of the ancestors desired were just ordinary folk who were doing the world’s work, and who at most may appear in a census return or a grant for land.”61 Many passengers’ lists, another promising genealogical resource, had been destroyed, and only a few had been retained in the Archives.62 Tracing those with Scottish names remained an almost impossible challenge down to the late 1930s, and it was a difficult one after that since even the systematic organization of land grants data (completed by Margaret Ells and J.S. Martell by 1938) would not be of much help if the Scottish settler in question had been a squatter without land title, a landless labourer, or one of thousands of the Cape Breton MacDonalds.63 Some American correspondents simply could not believe that Nova Scotia had no officially registered vital statistics until the 1860s and offered researchers no centralized repository of local data: “Is this true?” asked one incredulously, responding to this discouraging news. “Haven’t you Town Rec.? –County Rec.–? Has no one had photo sheet copies made of such & given, put somewhere?”64

34 This was the situation into which D.C. Harvey stepped in 1931 when he became the provincial archivist. Harvey visualized the Archives as a progressive “historical laboratory,” whence would come a steady stream of research tools, documents, and narratives as part of a grand design of liberal enlightenment. In his vision, the Archives, by following a coherent research program focused on the emergence and consolidation of liberal democracy in 19th-century Nova Scotia, was engaged in the pedagogical exercise of rousing citizens to a sense of their responsibilities as inheritors of this tradition. His overarching ambition was the creation of a citizenry well-informed about the emergence of its liberties and appreciative of the British Empire that had purportedly made them possible. Genealogy might be assimilated into this liberal progressive agenda; it should never dominate it.

35 Harvey’s objections to genealogy can be boiled down to four key arguments: it was anti-egalitarian, it might raise questions about the authority of the Archives as a state institution, it conceivably posed a threat to the security of documents, and it meant hours upon hours of hard work on the part of hard-pressed archivists with many other, more scientifically valuable things to do.

36 On the egalitarianism question, Harvey was a conservative liberal and not a socialist; but he nonetheless had little time for rank and ostentation. Those he admired most were, first, the White settlers, and second, the entrepreneurs, successful administrators, and visionary politicians who helped them create a flourishing society. He looked askance at functionless privilege. He responded with high moral dudgeon to people who sought jobs at the Archives on the basis of patronage. Some of this thinly secularized Presbyterianism comes through in his response to the entreaties of H. Percy Blanchard of Ellershouse (1862-1939). Blanchard told Harvey in 1931 that he was “an old lawyer, retired, and feel that I am still alive.” Here was one local genealogist — an aspiring category (4) – who hoped to prosper in the new age ushered in by PANS. Once a writer of what is now considered science fiction,65 Blanchard also claimed credit for organizing the Baddeck Public Library on the Dewey Model. He advocated what he called the “Arlington System” of genealogy, which assigned a number to every child, even to those failing to produce progeny. Here was a method that not only saved “pages of space” but also ensured “accuracy.”66

37 In 1931, Blanchard, although possessed of a considerable estate, now found his income “rather limited, so I must economize.”67 For years he had toiled in the fields of Blanchard ancestry, “till now I have a very satisfactory record of all the Blanchards of Nova Scotia.” Then he had been hired by the businessman and politician Hon. F.B. McCurdy to work on the McCurdys. Not only had he produced enough for the intended volume, but material sufficient to fill a supplement to it. He traced the family back to 15th-century Chief Gilkrist Mackurerdy and established that

Thankfully, then, they were not Picts or Highlanders but, rather, racially superior Scots, whose very name was linked to the second daughter of King Zedekiah, named Scota, who had escaped from Ancient Judea.68 If this seemed a suitably august and religious pedigree for Frederick Blanchard McCurdy, MP, Conservative cabinet minister and renowned figure of the Montreal Stock Exchange, it might also be taken as evidence of a point made by contemporary analysts: family genealogies often tended to be comprised of “truth and falsehoods, the exact and the incorrect, strokes of genius and errors of interpretation,” with “historical exactitude” signifying but little.69

38 Nonetheless, for all his fantastical genealogical speculations, which were of a piece with contemporaneous and far-fetched attempts to prove Nova Scotia’s supposedly primordial Norse heritage, about which Harvey was a pronounced sceptic, Blanchard was too well-connected for the Archivist simply to dismiss him. He had enlisted the support of Hon. E.N. Rhodes, the former premier and the political godfather of the revitalized PANS itself, who was said to be of the opinion that “as large a collection of genealogies should be had as possible, and as soon as possible.” Blanchard wanted to proceed promptly, at the institution’s expense, to the preparation of a pamphlet about the renowned Nova Scotia Archibalds. His genealogical enterprise would spur “particular families” throughout the province to “follow their own later pedigrees and have them printed in leaf form.” More ambitiously, he laid out for Harvey a complicated scheme for the collection of the genealogies – including details even as to how the charts should be typed out and bound – which once assembled would constitute a provincial “genealogical tree book.” He also recommended that the Archives itself publish 500 copies of his system, “ready to hand for any ambitious Genealogists,” and publicize this methodology through a publicly funded newspaper campaign.70

39 This genealogist presented his scheme as a step towards a truly modern genealogy, yet its fusty odour of elitism was palpable. President A.S. Mackenzie of Dalhousie University, who was also vice-chairman of the Archives’ Board of Trustees, commended Blanchard’s enthusiasm, but then went on to distinguish what he took to be PANS’s new progressive vision from Blanchard’s pedigree-obsessed design:

For his part, Harvey politely thanked Blanchard for enabling him “pretty clearly to see your idea of what the Provincial Archives of Nova Scotia should be” while firmly declining to follow his lead.72 Harvey also refused to provide free storage at PANS for some 900 copies of the Ancestral McCurdys. He suggested that they might instead be placed “in the hands of every living McCurdy known” and also distributed to the province’s libraries: “I fear that if they were stored in the Archives they would displace something for which we are supposed to be specifically responsible and that there would not be any perceptible sale to justify a public institution assuming responsibility for them.”73 He was unimpressed, one imagines, with the Tale of Zedekiah.

40 The rather different challenge presented by Pubnico-based H. Leander d’Entremont (1862-1944) raised a second problem with genealogy: it might decentre the archives itself as an official repository of certified historical facts and fount of settler wisdom. Having returned to Nova Scotia after a long sojourn in New England, d’Entremont was a frequent contributor to the Halifax Chronicle on matters historical and genealogical – especially those concerning his re-adopted Acadian community, which in his eyes had been very much shaped by a distant Golden Age of French colonialism. D’Entremont claimed direct descent from Charles de Saint-Etienne de la Tour, the Governor of Acadia from 1631 to 1642 and 1653 to 1657. He was sufficiently well-connected that he was entrusted by the Archbishop of Halifax with a precious register of births, marriages, and deaths.74 He was also, in 1931, in touch with archivist A.F. MacDonald of the Halifax Dominion archives about obtaining a copy of a land grant from Oliver Cromwell to the la Tours, along with a map:

In return, d’Entremont promised to send the Archives a copy of his soon-to-bepublished The Baronnie de Pombcoup and the Acadians.75 MacDonald loaned him the documents, apparently free of charge.76

41 D’Entremont vaunted his “d’Entremont Collection,” an archive containing as it did 10,000 pages of material “which, if typewritten, would make [up] probably more than 3,000 pages.” Here was an “encyclopedia of Acadian history,” containing “quite a number of documents and letters that have never been published in this country.”77 He was also proud of his Musée de la Tour, wherein (on Blakeley’s 1938 description) one could encounter not only prized genealogical records but also the family coat of arms (dating, perhaps, all the way back to 1020), a wall case full of old French documents, a sword fashioned from the appendage of a sword-fish, and a violin made by one of his ancestors.78

42 In 1928, writing under the letterhead of “Chateau d’Entremont,” a title that may rather have overstated the aristocratic ambience of his humble Pubnico dwelling, d’Entremont wrote to archivist A.F. MacDonald for militia records, which, he maintained, would reveal that the local Acadians “were always loyal to England.”79 Access to archival records in distant Halifax was essential, and he felt that, given the importance of his work and perhaps (by implication) his connection with nobility, they should be loaned out to him. He had heard tantalizing rumours about a “trunk load” of Acadia-related documents in Halifax. If these rumours were accurate, the situation called out for the services of “a competent person with knowledge of both English and French, and who could arrange them in their proper order.” D’Entremont undoubtedly believed himself to be that very person. As had been the case with Blanchard, d’Entremont was an old man seeking employment in Depression-era Canada. He hoped to transform his genealogical passion into a source of income. D’Entremont suggested that the Archives pay him $500 to type out and index the 93 volumes in his collection, whereupon he would give them the originals – a bargain for a collection that had cost him (and here he struck the genealogists’ characteristic note of altruistic self-sacrifice) “about $3,000 in time and money.”80

43 D’Entremont entered into an extensive correspondence with Harvey in 1932. As he told Harvey, even d’Entremont’s local MLA had expressed interest in “the historical work I have undertaken to develop in this section of our Province.” D’Entremont himself had also been active in providing genealogical services to Maritime-born correspondents in distant California.81 Yet now he felt the urgent need to consult the “missing link” in Acadian genealogy, the first Register of Port Royal from 1702 to 1727, which recorded “the births, Marriages and deaths of the Comeau family.” In essence, he wanted PANS to follow MacDonald’s example and send him the register, or else to arrange to have someone with good French copy out all the names.82

44 Harvey confirmed that the archives did indeed have the register and agreed to allow d’Entremont or his delegate to make transcripts, but (evidently unlike his predecessor MacDonald in the Dominion branch) he declined to go any further than that on the grounds of safeguarding the documents’ security.83 He likely also had little appreciation for d’Entremont’s championing of an alternative imperial narrative. From d’Entremont’s perspective, Harvey seemed a haughty Anglo Halifax bureaucrat denying a hard-working Acadian genealogist access to invaluable resources. It seemed a case of willful disregard of a minority that confirmed suspicions of linguistic and ethnic bias d’Entremont had raised with Harvey’s predecessor: “I have never heard of an Acadian being employed in the Archives, at Halifax, . . . and, as the Acadians consist of more than a tenth of the population of the Province, I have often wondered why none were ever in the department.” More pointedly, he went on to ask: “Are there no Acadians, in Nova Scotia, with enough intellectual ability to hold a position with the Nova Scotia Department of the Archives? I wonder.”84 Such an Acadian might challenge the inaccuracies and aporia in existing genealogies.85

45 This was one of the few times in this period in which a subaltern directly confronted the Anglo grip on genealogy in Nova Scotia. Since one of the primary motivations for forming the archives in the first place had been to defend the province against imputations of cruelty to Acadians, d’Entremont was touching an exposed nerve.86 It is little wonder that Harvey came to see him as an oppositional figure who, despite his earnest attempt to prove Acadian loyalty to the Crown, might nonetheless seem to be questioning the institution’s very raison d’être and its claim to stand for the heritage of all Nova Scotians.87 The two of them would fight it out through the 1930s, in a battle in which d’Entremont explicitly challenged Harvey’s competence as a local historian as well as his impartiality as an interpreter of the province’s history. If some of the debate seemingly revolved around a precise, indeed minute, issue – the exact location of Fort La Tour – in it d’Entremont also directly challenged Harvey’s authority as a supposedly aloof and blinkered Halifax bureaucrat indifferent to the hard-won fruits of honest researchers such as himself.88

46 Far more congenial was Henry C. Ritchie, the local historian of Saratoga County, New York, who spent many of his winters copying and indexing the vital records of townships in the vicinity. During the summer, however, he returned to his native Pictou County, where he devoted himself to transcribing cemetery headstones.89 In 1956, Ritchie estimated his expenses of traveling to Nova Scotia, living away from home, and “in the field” had amounted to no less than $500 over four weeks. He did not include in this estimate the unpaid labour of his wife “not only in actual copying, but in the much longer job here at home of transcribing.”90 Such was Ritchie’s martyr-like scrupulosity that he submitted to the Archives a list of his own mistakes in the more than a dozen books, each of them about 200 pages in length (with 20 names per page), resulting from his “crop of Pictou County Cemeteries.” The equally empiricist Harvey could only express his “continued admiration for your enthusiasm.”91

47 When Ritchie’s records were presented to PANS in September 1957, after his death, the greater cultural stakes involved in his zealous graveyard adventures became clearer. His “great achievement” was lauded as one that should “awaken in all a proper sense of devotion and deference to the ancestors who had kept Canada British.” His eulogist evoked the conquerors of the Plains of Abraham and the moving sight of Chester Cathedral in England, wherein was displayed “an old, thin, faded flag under which they marched to victory nearly two hundred years ago.” In Pictou, such noble ancestors had created a Presbyterian society in which every child over the age of five was

In short, the early Pictou pioneers were very much like the founders of the Christian church in their piety, resourceful, kindness, mutual helpfulness, and egalitarianism – not to mention their exemplary passion for genealogy True Pictonians realized that, in the matters that counted, the American Ritchie had served the noble project of documenting White settlers as they colonized North America, one with which Britons, Americans, and Nova Scotians should all identify. Race, heredity, religion, Anglospheric nationalism, and noble individualism were all potently combined in this transnational vision.

48 During the 1950s, Ritchie wanted the Archives to store his research notes and, after much hesitation, the institution agreed to do so; archivists for years afterwards lived with the consequences of some of Ritchie’s inaccuracies, which provoked a lot of to-and-fro with visiting researchers. In this case as in so many others, the institution argued that the place for all such vulnerable records was the fireproof Archives, where they should permanently reside, and not ancient churches, crumbling town halls, or mouldy basements. Harvey was leery of local acquisitiveness when it came to records, some of which were being purchased by outsiders. He was acutely aware that, for many people, the past was little more than a quarry of exploitable properties to be marketed to the travelling public.

49 With little choice but to facilitate such exploitation when it was demanded by the government, he did so with maximum rigour; Harvey, for instance, made life a living hell for Will R. Bird, whose folksy if factually challenged renditions of history for the delectation of tourists came in for the full Harvey treatment. In this instance at least, Harvey as the province’s de facto official historian was placed in a supervisory role when it came to presenting history to the public. As for the documents themselves, Harvey hoped to keep them secure and worried fretfully when they seemed not to be. He was reluctant to loan out documents to the likes of d’Entremont and he was leery of amateur genealogists in general, some of whom were coming to acquire a reputation for light fingers.93 In the Nova Scotia case, such security concerns had been aroused by the questionable collecting habits of archivist W.C. Milner, widely thought to have made off with many documents from trusting locals, and they were later accentuated by the post-career activities of a federal archivist who in the 1950s marketed many collectibles to a second-hand book and documents dealer in Ontario. If genealogists often felt they were under the watchful eye of anxious custodial archivists, they had good reason: they were not fully trusted with the treasures they craved.

50 In addition to their occasional social pretentiousness, implicit challenge to the institution’s mnemonic authority, and reputation as security threats, the fourth, and probably decisive, mark against the genealogists was that they took up time better dedicated to other things. The more developed institutions in Massachusetts had sophisticated indexing systems, allowing researchers relatively easy access to data. It was true that by the late 1930s PANS had acquired more sources that could be brought to bear on genealogical inquiries. James S. Martell, Harvey’s gifted protégé, gradually developed a catalogue of all the land papers, which when completed in 1938 contained some “35,000 names of people granted land by the Crown from 1775 to 1845.” On the basis of that list, Marion Gilroy compiled a list of Loyalists and Land Settlement in Nova Scotia.94 Yet using this database was time-consuming and hardly foolproof. Even if the ancestral prey showed up in such sources, the wider significance of their doing so might remain unclear.95

51 In a small institution, digging through such papers, and the many other tasks generated by genealogical inquiries, could not be delegated to a specialized sub-staff: to a surprising extent, many of them fell onto the desk of Harvey himself (assisted after 1945 by Phyllis Blakeley, who undertook them with only slightly more enthusiasm than her boss). When Lovat Dickson of MacMillan and Company of London announced his quest for his ancestors in Truro – “I realise this is not a simple task,” he added, with considerable understatement, considering he had only a couple of names to work with – an aggressive research campaign was launched on his behalf in Halifax even though, as Harvey stated plainly, “we are not equipped for genealogical work.” Harvey sent him three detailed pages of notes, based on PANS land grants, published reports from the United States and Ontario, and Eaton’s and Thomas Miller’s genealogical work on Kings and Colchester counties. He also made arrangements to receive the esteemed Briton in Nova Scotia in December. In recompense for what must have been many dozens of hours of labour, Harvey suggested a payment of £1 might be in order.96 Possibly Harvey put himself out for a fellow Rhodes Scholar, and possibly he was as always keen to win influential friends for his cash-strapped institution; but the episode also suggests how much even the genealogically-averse Harvey might find himself swimming in genealogical waters as the century progressed.

52 Similarly arduous was his work in response to a genealogical inquiry from Frederick W. Patten of Melrose, Mass. Harvey was able to locate a Mark Patton on a list of settlers between the river Musquash and Aulac and in a 1770 census return of Cumberland Township. James Martell, also set to chase after Pattons, found none in an “all day search, going through all the files of land grants,” but did come up with a draft grant in 1819 to a William Patten who had settled between River Philip and Pugwash. After all of this research work, undertaken for free by PANS and its staff, Harvey did feel that Mr. Patten should pay for any further extensive copying: “We really have no staff here for genealogical researches and I do not feel that we should do this extensively free of charge.”97 When Harvey complained he had been besieged “by correspondents from Boston to San Francisco (including all states of the Union and not omitting Salt Lake City) for information as to grandfathers who came to some part of U.S.,” it was the cri de coeur of a man who felt personally overwhelmed by proponents of a form of history he did not really support.98

53 Yet his reservations about genealogy went deeper than his complaints about the countless hours of labour he and his staff members were condemned to devote to it. His deep-seated reservations about genealogy as a form of historical knowledge can be traced back to the 1920s, when he outlined in point form what appears to be a developmental chart for the “Evolution of the Canadian Historian.” The first steps were local: family genealogy, “local men & history,” and “national patriotism.” The next steps were more ambitious: “orientation” with “motives and policies,” as a result of which the peculiarities of Canada’s experience of the “Expansion of Europe & America” would become plain. Thus “the Canadian finds he has a contribution to make to the world view point from his own experience reacting upon his knowledge of the world.” Inspired by the “new histories” of the 1920s, Harvey thought he had found a way of combining Canadian history with the histories of humankind; in the margin, he wrote: “There is an idea here if I can work it out.”99 In this vision, genealogy was not rejected, but it was considered only a first step in a much more expansive and rigorous process of historical discovery.

54 Much of Harvey’s ambition to write a new kind of local history – one that connected the local, the national, and the international – survived his return to Nova Scotia in 1931. In his almost reverential correspondence with Eaton, in which he told the esteemed American that he had hesitated before writing to him because “a private hesitates to approach a general,” Harvey quietly dissented from Eaton’s vision of how a synthetic history of Nova Scotia might eventuate. Rather than arriving as the culmination of a county-bycounty process of genealogically inclined local histories – i.e., Eaton’s Kings County writ large – such a synthetic history would emerge through a dialectic of the particular and the general. In the foreseeable future “general histories and local histories will be a mild check on one another making possible an ultimate, accurate and fairly complete general history.” County histories, he complained, “tend too much to the genealogy and the general histories have hitherto featured with ‘damnable iteration’ certain limited movements and have neglected social and economic, agricultural and educational phases of history.”100 When Harvey in his annual report of 1940 outlined the three major goals of the archives, they were “the collection and preservation of public and private documents,” the “use of this collection as a bureau of information and an historical laboratory for students,” and “ultimately the publication of a comprehensive history of N.S. in several volumes.” Genealogy was not even mentioned.101

55 Harvey’s moral and intellectual resistance to genealogy, although deeply felt and sometimes eloquently communicated, was frequently expressed in muted, rather passive-aggressive ways. In his capacity as a member of the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada, he had no compunction about asking genealogical historians for advice.102 Moreover, Harvey was a public servant, and his Archives answered, directly or indirectly, to politicians. It would have been injudicious, and out of character, for Harvey to refuse genealogical requests from such eminences. Former Prime Minister Robert L. Borden had sounded an alarm about the missing township books of the New England settlers (his uncle, the town clerk of Horton, had once possessed minutes from the “earliest days.”) The Archives launched a search for them.103 Prime Minister R.B. Bennett, likewise descended from New Englanders, had prevailed upon Harvey to help investigate the perhaps politically valuable although misleading notion that he could also boast of Loyalist ancestors.104 Premier Angus L. Macdonald’s office was the source of a number of genealogical inquiries.105 Others arrived from a host of town governments, the NSHS, local newspaper editors, and so on. None could be simply cast aside.

56 On those occasions when he did resist what sometimes seemed to be a genealogical tsunami, Harvey’s approach tended to conform to James Scott’s notion of “weapons of the weak.”106 He might place sotto voce asides in correspondence with people he trusted or assume a tone of haughty aloofness with corresondents he did not know (an approach one aggrieved genealogist nicely characterized as “disinterested, slightly rude”).107 Yet sometimes Harvey went beyond that. In October 1947, he was reprimanded by no less a figure than J.C. Webster (1863-1950), a founding father of PANS and the wealthy benefactor of museums at Fort Beauséjour and Saint John, for the “tart reply” he had given an ancestor-hunter researching Loyalist genealogy. “I know how you dislike genealogical investigation,” Webster wrote. “So do I.” Yet Harvey had annoyed an important person, with potentially damaging results for “the cause of history.” In reply, Harvey thought he had been condemned on the basis of second-hand information. It was preposterous to insinuate he would withhold information from a researcher because of an alleged hostility to Loyalists. Yet he did concede that his “very extensive correspondence” with the researcher over the intricacies of Loyalist genealogy and military history had been exasperating:

As for his supposed coolness towards Loyalists, Harvey said he was merely being a good critical historian. He had only tried to place them “in proper perspective . . . and to do this I have found it necessary to criticize a little of the blind ancestor worship that has been associated with the Loyalists.”108 There was more to Harvey’s resistance, it is clear, than just an overworked archivist’s anger at being overburdened by genealogical inquiries. The attempt to erect Loyalists into “founding families” – a northern parallel to the reverent ancestor-worship of the more passionate New Englanders – was to be resisted because it was not only fatuously elitist but also factually inaccurate. An historical laboratory109 was being asked to fudge its results. As Harvey saw things, he had been forced into a pointless, time-consuming correspondence to help someone construct an essentially dishonest and unbalanced interpretation of regional history.

57 Such playing with the past had no place in his historical laboratory. In many ways it constituted an affront to Harvey’s sense of himself as an historian. If that was the morality of genealogy, Harvey wanted nothing to do with it. “They do not want it to become a center of genealogical research,” charged one angry genealogist.110 For all his pragmatically necessary compromises and inconsistencies, understandable enough for a man occupying his position and possessed of his moderate political sensibilities, Harvey was nonetheless essentially guilty as charged.

58 After 1945, a new generation of archivists emerged who were far friendlier to genealogy. They believed that the Archives should not only passively accommodate genealogy but also actively encourage it. The easiest way to explain the postwar shift in the institution’s stance regarding genealogy might be simply to attribute it to the ascent of C.B. Fergusson (1911-1978), who formally succeeded Harvey as provincial Archivist in 1956. Fergusson, replying to the complaint that the Archives was cool to genealogy, pointed to a number of recent innovations that suggested the situation had changed. Foremost among them was the creation of a Genealogical Committee of the NSHS in late 1952, a move that Harvey viewed with a distinct lack of enthusiasm.111 Whereas Harvey had envisaged a general Nova Scotia history embracing the social, economic, political, and cultural all at once, Fergusson was much more attuned to the accumulation of local biographies as evidenced in his project of assembling a biographical dictionary of all the MLAs of Nova Scotia.112

59 One indication of Fergusson’s enthusiasm for genealogical research emerges from his correspondence with S.F. Tucker, who was concerned about commemorating the memory of Rev. George Gillmore (1720-1811). He asked for Fergusson’s help in consulting Gillmore’s diary, held at Pine Hill Divinity College. Fergusson was able to consult the diary, which PANS held in microfilm, transcribed a good portion of it himself (albeit with some subsequently acknowledged errors), and conferred at length about the aporia and inaccuracies it contained. Tucker felt any words of gratitude would fall short of the priceless service Fergusson had rendered him.113 Even a genealogist fierce in her critique of Harvey warmed up to his successor, whom she came to see as a rare example of a “pleasant gentleman”; he was indeed her “ONE BRIGHT LIGHT from NOVA SCOTIA’s Official and Historical and Church Spots.”114 It was plain to her that a new day was dawning in Nova Scotia.

60 Whereas Harvey in the 1930s had explicitly discouraged a genealogical orientation for the institution and broadcast far and wide its unsuitability for in-depth genealogical inquiries, Fergusson by 1965 could be found announcing that PANS was the center for genealogical work in the province. Virtually all replies to inquiries on genealogical questions emanated from the Archives, he wrote, because it brought together information from so many scattered sources.115 Under his guidance, the Archives strove to offer authentic details in response to even the most obscure requests. Oftentimes Fergusson did such work himself, seemingly with enthusiasm.116 He even seems to have passed on unsolicited genealogical tit-bits to eminent people.117 Perhaps the acme of the new regime was the issuance in 1967 of the pamphlet Tracing Your Ancestors in Nova Scotia, Nova Scotia’s own contribution to a swelling tide of genealogical manuals.118 Harvey had died the year before – which was, perhaps, a blessing. This was not his vision of the true vocation of his beloved institution.

61 The burden of addressing the queries of genealogists fell mainly onto the shoulders of assistant archivist Phyllis Blakeley, who soon wearied of the importunities of Americans ignorant of the most basic procedures of historical research. Blakeley liked to tell of one such inquirer, one Barclay S. Hayes of Arlington, Mass.:

“They always expect a miracle,” Blakeley grumbled, “How should I know?”119 Will R. Bird, the impresario of much of the province’s fledging field of historical tourism, steered one visitor to the Archives with the terse instruction to “look after the ancestors of this lady or tell her they are not listed.” His impatience was perhaps not wholly unwarranted: the visitor wanted birth, death, marriage, and other family information about a minimum of three people (and perhaps many more once the extended family was taken into account), only some of whom were known to have been in Nova Scotia.120

62 Other ancestor-hunters arrived with colourful family stories they hoped might be confirmed in Nova Scotia. For Mrs. D.S. Baker, writing from New Hampshire, the object of her quest was to establish that her newly born granddaughter, Wendy Valentine, was the seventh generation to bear the name Valentine.121 Stuart D. Hyle wanted local confirmation of family tales of a piratical background: “After all, it isn’t every day that one finds out his ancestors were pirates and cut-throats.”122 What general insight into history would be generated if that turned out to be the case – or didn’t? Or is any such questioning out-of-place in a new consumer-driven dispensation, in which history is primarily a source of entertainment?

63 After the 1940s it became painfully evident that one was often no longer dealing with polished literary genealogists of the Eaton sort but rather rank amateurs, many of them from the United States. PANS often resembled a “contact zone,” a social space (as Mary Louise Pratt explains) where two cultures meet and sometimes clash in a context in which one is endowed with a sense of cultural superiority and the other a resentful sense of being patronized or even exploited.123 The attitude of metropolitan superiority assumed by some Americans could rub Nova Scotians the wrong way: “She is what we call a ‘white-washed Yankee’,” exclaimed Blakeley in 1949 of one particularly difficult American. This visitor was described as “a Nova Scotian who has absorbed all the ignorant ideas current in America and is condescending to everyone who isn’t a citizen of the United States, and generally acts as no true American ever would.”124

64 Some Americans arrived with an almost belligerent need to settle their minds as to their ethnic origins. Walter G. Burke of Waltham, Mass., born 1892, and evidently not a man of the social elite, was keen in 1956 to settle for once and for all whether he was of French or Irish descent: “Any where I went I have always been taken for irish descent. I must have proof before I change it.” He seemed to be saying that, if worst came to worst, he would have to own up to being of French descent, but only if presented with irrefutable evidence. The Archives returned what was likely to him a discouraging response: his roots undoubtedly lay in francophone Minudie. But Burke seized on the phrase “there is some doubt about it” to respond with his own version of the truth, in which he imagined his supposedly Irish forebears crossing the Atlantic, settling for a time in Newfoundland, and then wresting “a living from the soil.” The archivist obligingly came up with two land-seeking Irish carpenters who might fit the bill, albeit with the significant proviso that he had been “unable to connect these individuals with your ancestry.”125

65 Other Americans arrived fired with a sense of the absolute urgency of their familial researches, which they expected Nova Scotians in general to share. The 1957 visit of Mrs. Stewart H. (Lady-May) Giffin of New York City presents us with an illustration of some of the conflicts that might then arise in a genealogical contact zone. This category (3) genealogist charged that upper crust Haligonians were content with slipshod research and outright falsehoods. Here was a courageous researcher who, in her own mind, had defied them with her genealogical truths – “the facts, and not the Bunk!” – and, in consequence, received rude mail from ignorant Nova Scotians: “I get such charming letters, like: ‘No ignorant stranger is going to tell me my ancestry, my ancestor came with Cornwallis, English, etc. and New Englanders came here 1760 . . .’.”126 Assuming the stance of a tough-minded empiricist confronting know-nothings contented with “Traditions” or “Wishful Thinking,” she proclaimed it was foolish to “retain Fairy tales, once one’s learned the facts.”127 Upon learning, evidently from an American newspaper,128 that the Archives had acquired the collection of a prodigious genealogical researcher in Queens County, T.B. Smith, Mrs. Giffin feared for its safety in an institution run by incompetents. So headstrong were members of the Halifax elite, not to mention the leaders of the Giffin Family Association with whom she was also locked in battle, that they might even be tempted to tamper with the primary source itself.129

66 Despite such misgivings, Giffin issued a long list of tasks for the Archivist, along with an enclosed form for him to complete and “return at once.”130 When the archivist dutifully responded, she fired off an even angrier missive that advised him that he had only given her a rehash of Smith’s (and her own) findings. “I realize, you are not delighted at even hearing from me,” she wrote him in November 1956 (that was perhaps an understatement). She went on to mock, with a deadly accuracy, the officious tone of the institution’s correspondence: “While letters are acknowledged – that is almost all: ‘We’ve noted what you said, or noted what you sent to us’.” Rising to a crescendo, she demanded her genealogical inquiries be answered, satisfactorily and promptly: “May I this once, beg of you, to bear with me – & answer the previous 8 questions . . . .”131

67 As Mrs. Giffin’s tone suggested, some genealogists arrived convinced that their research missions were of momentous importance. Mrs. S.W. Dickie of North Haven, Connecticut, writing well in advance of her visit in August 1956, set the Archives to work on her behalf. Like many genealogists, she emphasized that much depended on her speedily finding answers to her queries. “Please don’t question my motives in this,” she cried. She confessed she was on “a treadmill of curiosity and the more I learn the more I realize I must know.” The entire story of the North Carolina Regiment that had arrived in Nova Scotia and settled near Country Harbour needed to be written: “There is a book – there are many books – to be written of this fabulous but neglected phase of history. I would love to do it but feel that I am not capable.”132 Yet after such expressions of urgency, she did not visit the Archives when first she reached Halifax. “My children have no patience with my obsession with the Loyalists,” she lamely explained. She took her family to Country Harbour, before it became too dark. Returning to Halifax, she once again stood the Archivist up. Nonetheless, unfazed, she then presented him with a list of demands:

68 Slowly, a province not hitherto much attuned to genealogical ways was brought into contact with outsiders whose perceptions of the past were shaped by them. As early as the late 1950s in Nova Scotia, genealogy became a sufficiently remunerative trade that one might venture to make it a full-time profession (as it had been in the northeastern US since before the 1880s).134 Such emerging category (5) professionals had new resources upon which to draw – the Mormons, striving to fulfil their mission to baptise by proxy the departed as well as the living, started their program of the mass diffusion of genealogical resources on microfilm.135 By the 1970s and 1980s, the Archives had much more to offer genealogists: thousands of “biography” cards (many of them the work of Blakeley) based on newspaper and other evidence offering insights into particular individuals as well as case upon case of microfilmed church records and past genealogical researches. Ultimately, in the new building of the 1980s, there was an entire room of microfilm readers destined primarily for their use.

69 The demographic characteristics of the genealogically inclined public changed as well. The percentage of Canadian “visits” to the institution rose markedly, while that of the Americans and New Englanders dropped just as precipitously.136 Blakeley, reminiscing in the 1980s, wrote that the 1960s put her in mind of Walt Disney’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1940) in that, like the poor broom-wielding apprentice, she felt overcome by a “rising tide of general researchers, M.A.’s and professors, school tours, genealogists and tourists, community historians, journalists and T.V. writers,” all in large measure activated by the celebration of Canada’s Centennial in 1967.137 The era of the “patriotic Nova Scotian” resident in New England was drawing to a close while that of the “patriotic Canadian” investigating his or her “roots” in Nova Scotia was in full bloom. The popularity of the television show with that name in 1976 made genealogy seem an important enterprise in establishing one’s identity; Harvey would not have found it reassuring to learn how frail was much of the factual foundation of Roots.138

70 In retrospect the rise of mass genealogy in the 1960s and 1970s can be represented Whiggishly as a democratic breakthrough. and in a sense one can see the logic of the argument. If a decided aroma of patrician elitism hangs over the literary musings of Eaton and the fantasies of Blanchard, today’s “genealogist” – category (1) may be just about anyone who can purchase an account with ancestry.com. Today’s category (5) professional genealogy community, meanwhile, has fully professionalized, with an elaborate apparatus of methods, journals, and even arcane theoretical debates. So it is that, in some interpretations, we have travelled from an “exclusive, class- and race-based cultural activity and means for self-assertion” into a sun-lit land in which genealogy has become “a democratic and multicultural pursuit.”139

71 But might not Harvey’s critique of genealogy caution us against too rapturous embrace of this new, improved, and decidedly corporate version of the old form of inquiry that so roused his suspicions? Harvey might rightly find the new regime of market-driven genealogy to be an implicitly irrationalist one because it replaces any concern for processes of social and political evolution with an individualist accumulation of untheorized personal details. If for $21.99 per month one evidently can purchase history as a personal commodity, what need is there to inquire into the structures and processes generating the disaggregated data arriving in one’s in-box? What will one learn about the evolution of the social order and the structures of government by learning, on the basis of supposedly scientific evidence, that one is 35 per cent Scottish, 45 per cent Ukrainian, and 20 per cent “Something Else”? The epoch of the category (5) genealogist is upon us, and it now offers its customers not only heartening stories but pie-charts and algorithms – all seemingly offering support to atavistic and biologically determinist readings of human history.

72 What Harvey sought – an integrated, coherent, and factually accountable version of the past through which his fellow citizens might acquire a better understanding of their mutual obligations as well as their rights – seems more distant than ever. And this applies even more to his objection to the time and labour constituted by genealogical inquiries, especially since this is an era when so many other important realms of provincial experience want for historians. As he readily conceded, genealogical inquiries might play a useful subordinate role in rigorous historical inquiry. If, on the other hand, they were imagined to be decisive influences on the core methodology and overarching interpretation of that inquiry or shaped the critical insights that that inquiry might inspire, they would constitute something like a moral threat to the historian’s scientific enterprise. If few would counsel the 21st century re-adoption of his optimistic liberal narrative, which made so little room for Indigenous peoples, racialized minorities, and the working class, more might ponder whether purchasing imagined histories of noteworthy individuals offers much of an improvement on it. Perhaps it is merely a perpetuation of the settler-colonial imperatives that have structured the genealogical enterprise in North America from its beginnings?