My Ancestors' History

Another by Jane Kenyon:

In the Nursing Home

She is like a horse grazing
a hill pasture that someone makes
smaller by coming every night
to pull the fences in and in.

She has stopped running wide loops,
stopped even the tight circles.
She drops her head to feed; grass
is dust, and the creekbed's dry.

Master, come with your light
halter. Come and bring her in.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Today I will continue my discussion of the History of my ancestors in Nova Scotia.

To understand how a bunch of Germans ended up in Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia one must know a bit of the history of inter-marriage bordering on incest that is the state of the royal houses of Europe. In 1714 George, elector of Hanover--Germany as we know it today did not exist as a unified country for another century--became King of Great Britain on the strength of his mother having been granddaughter of King James the First of England. In 1727 his son became George the Second but he also retained his interests in Hanover where he was born. Now cross the pond and we find the East Coast of what would eventually become Canada. The indigenous population of the Maritimes were the Mi’kmaqs and they and the French settlers who resided there had become allies. Acadia, as the French called the area was fast becoming a threat to the English colonies on the Eastern seaboard of what would eventually be the USA.

It was the building of the great Fortress of Louisbourg at the tip of Cape Breton to guard the approaches to the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and ultimately Quebec City that finally forced the English to act. It was decided that to solidify their claim on the area and act as a counter-force to Louisburg a settlement would be established at Chebucto, as it was called by the Mi'kmaq and they named it Halifax. On the hill overlooking the harbour a fortress was built to guard its approaches and although after over 250 years it has yet to fire a shot in anger, it is still called the Citadel. It retains at least one working cannon which fires the traditional Noon Day Gun. There is some irony in the choice of colonists to settle this port. A British Colonel named Edward Cornwallis was charged with establishing this military base by the Earl of Halifax who cooked up the scheme and it was decided that there could be no more loyal subjects of an English King who spoke little English than his peasant-farmer German subjects. Having settled Halifax in 1749 it was decided to establish a further colony down the coast at the former Mi'kmaq and French fishing port that became Lunenburg--named for Brunswick-Lunenburg, George's family name. Thus it was that in 1753 a group of peasant German farmers who had migrated to Hanover from their war-torn homeland in the Palatinate of Germany became my ancestors in Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia.

In an act of chauvinistic paternalism Cornwallis and his officials decided that, in the official records, their names should be Anglicized and hence Mülhmen became Mailman
Schneider, Snyder
Whynache, Whynot
Schwartz, Black
and so on. As I have quipped in the past, I'm just thankful I'm not an Outhouse from Yarmouth County. Someone with a twisted sense of humour also added a few French Protestant, Huguenots,and hence my Paternal Grandmother was a Vienotte, though it too became Vienot or Veno. I'll let you be the judge of whether the English did these people, who had left an area that traded back and forth between France and Germany and were in the direct path of both armies, any favours by plunking them down in the middle of an area claimed by the French as Acadia and molested by local Indians loyal to their French Allies. However suspect the motives, the settlers managed to flourish and as their numbers grew spread out across the County to make Lunenburg County the most heavily settled county in Nova Scotia. History records that with the help of the New England Colonies the English laid seige to Louisburg twice, the French having won it back through diplomacy and treaty, and the second time in 1758 it was razed to the ground. In 1755, not satisfied that they had done enough to secure their interests in Acadia, in what history records as the Expulsion of the Acadians, British troops deported 7000 French Colonists along the Bay of Fundy and Minus Basin coastlines to the British colonies from Massachusetts to Georgia and many migrated to the former French territories in Louisiana to become the Cajuns of New Orleans.