Our Settling Of Acadia

Acadia or, as the French called it, Acadie was the original name of the region now known as Nova Scotia. The first French settlement took place there in 1604, however the British claimed the region by right of the discoveries of John Cabot. The British obtained permanent possession by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 which concluded Queen Anne’s War (War of the Spanish Succession). However in 1755, because of renewed war with France and doubts about the loyalty of the French settlers who were known as Acadians, the British colonial authorities removed most Acadians from their lands and dispersed them amongst the other colonies in America. The authorities then encouraged settlers to take over the Acadian lands through a system of generous land grants that were advertised throughout the other colonies. During the 1760s settlers from the colonies to the south flocked to Nova Scotia in the thousands, and in so doing established the first English speaking part of the future Canada.

When the American Revolution broke out in 1776 Nova Scotia elected to remain a British colony. Had they remained in the southern colonies the settlers in Nova Scotia would undoubtedly have become American.

Many ancestors moved from New England to Nova Scotia Colony in the 1760s. Family names included Holmes, Kinnie, Kimball, Knowlton, Lockhart, Mitchener, Nickerson, and Trefry.

An ancestor who moved from the USA to Nova Scotia after the US Revolutionary War circa 1780 was Captain Edward Barker, a British officer who had fought against the American revolutionaries. Other than Barker there appears to have been no United Empire Loyalists amongst our ancestors in Nova Scotia.

The Fultons, an ancestor family which moved to Nova Scotia much later (1820), came directly from Ireland, although Fulton relatives (not ancestors) did arrive earlier, at least two of them before 1770. Indeed one of them, “Judge” James Fulton 1739-1826, was about 1765 engaged by the government to plan grants and survey the land in Colchester County. He was subsequently awarded a large grant of land for himself.