The late Leonard H. Smith, Jr., and his wife Norma H. Smith were great students of New England and Nova Scotia ancestry. Together they compiled numerous works on these two subjects; however, probably their greatest genealogical contribution is their two-volume work, Nova Scotia Immigrants to 1867. The Smiths’ interest was spawned by Mr. Smith’s parents’ birthplace, Digby County, Nova Scotia. The couple eventually immigrated to Massachusetts, where their son Leonard was born. As the authors note in the Introduction to Volume I of their book, “No one who has worked with United States censuses of New England can have failed to notice the frequency with which the words “Nova Scotia” appear in the columns headed, ”Birthplace of Father” and Birthplace of Mother.” It is clear that thousands of persons enumerated trace their ancestry through that province.”
Researchers whose forebears came–or might have come–to New England via Nova Scotia before 1867 face no small problem, as that year marks the beginning of official recordkeeping. “With the exception of [some] passenger lists and town records, however, the usual sources only rarely offer information as to the former home of an immigrant. The scarcity of those records in early Nova Scotia magnifies the problem.”
If you are hunting for your New England and/or Nova Scotian origins prior to 1867, you would do well to read the Introduction to Nova Scotia Immigrants to 1867, and examine a sample page of immigrants found therein; which is why we have reproduced those pages below.
