Background Essentials

Your research will flow more smoothly if you acquaint yourself with New Brunswick geography and history. The province today consists of 15 counties divided into parishes.This administrative structure evolved over the course of two centuries, so you will find many instances where an area was once part of a larger jurisdiction. It is important to have some understanding of this evolution, because many of the records you will use are indexed by name of individual coupled with the location where the event occurred.

New Brunswick, one of the original provinces of Canada, has a long history spanning several centuries of exploration, inward and outward migration, development and growth. Archaeological evidence shows the presence of the Native Peoples -- the Micmac and the Maliseet -- for 11,000 years. As with most of North America, explorers began to visit the shores of Atlantic Canada in the late 1500s, and a party of French wintered on a tiny island off the southeast coast of New Brunswick in 1604. To the area which today makes up most of the Maritime Provinces, they gave the name Acadia.

Within a few years private interests in France attempted to establish trading posts, and the Jesuits arrived to begin Christianizing the Natives. There followed more than a century and a half of conflict as both France and Britain sought to take control of the territory and its resources. The years of dispute came to a close in 1763, when nearly all French possessions in North America were ceded to Great Britain, including most of Acadia, or what the British called Nova Scotia.

The area rapidly began to attract colonists and entrepreneurs both in groups and individually. Scores of settlers came from the British Isles or migrated northward from the American colonies. When the Revolutionary War ended in 1783, England offered the area as a refuge for the United Empire Loyalists, those who wanted to maintain allegiance to the British monarchy. More than 14,000 such persons were brought to this area and, to govern this greatly increased population, New Brunswick was made a province separate from Nova Scotia.

Throughout the nineteenth century, many thousands of immigrants arrived in search of new opportunity, homes, property and greater freedom. The earliest came mostly from the British Isles, but later arrivals included natives of Scandinavia, Belgium, Germany, France and all parts of the Old and New Worlds.

For more than two centuries, the province has continued to welcome newcomers, while at the same time outward migration has taken New Brunswick sons and daughters to all parts of Canada and the United States, and points distant as Australia and New Zealand. Every year thousands of their relatives and descendants travel to New Brunswick to discover first-hand the home of their forefathers.