The Black Loyalist Directory

"Africa's Children is a testament to one's heritage, a belief in one's ancestors, and a record of truth ... no told!" – Dr. Henry V. Bishop, chief curator, Black Cultural Centre, Dartmouth, Nova Scotia Chronicling the history of Black families of the Yarmouth area of Nova Scotia, Africa's Children is a mirror image of the hopes and despairs and the achievements and injustices that mark the early stories of many African-Canadians. This extensively researched history traces the lives of those people, still enslaved at the time, who arrived with the influx of Black Loyalists and landed in Shelburne in 1783, as well as those who had come with their masters as early as 1767. Their migration to a new home did little to improve their overall living conditions, a situation that would persist for many years throughout Yarmouth County. By drawing on a comprehensive range of sources that include census and cemetery records, church and school histories, libraries, museums, oral histories, newspapers, wills The Black Loyalist Directory, and many others, this is a history that has been overlooked for far too long.

The Black Loyalists depicts the unique expressions of the Black Loyalist identity to Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone.

The preface of this report reviews the two-year project entitled Remembering Black Loyalists, Black Communities that researched the earliest group of Blacks to migrate to Nova Scotia. The main section traces the history of those Black Loyalists who were granted 3,000 acres of land at Tracadie, Nova Scotia, in 1787. The first chapter contains biographies of those persons listed in the Book of Negroes, an inventory of all Blacks aboard British vessels who were legally permitted to leave New York. Chapter two contains the limited information (name & whether a man, woman, or child) found in the Loyalist muster roll of Chedabucto Negroes, 1776-1785. The third chapter examines the 1787 Tracadie land grant documents, including the processes taking place before the grant, a list of who was granted land, and where the land was located. Appendices include a list of name variations of Tracadie land grantees, a list of ships departing for Port Mouton, Nova Scotia in 1783, and an origin distribution chart of Black Loyalists of Port Mouton. Includes name index.

“Engaging and steeped in years of research . . . a must read for all who care about the intersection of Canadian, American, British, and African history.” —Lawrence Hill, award-winning author of Someone Knows My Name In an attempt to ruin the American economy during the Revolutionary War, the British government offered freedom to slaves who would desert their rebel masters. Many Black men and women escaped to the British fleet patrolling the East Coast, or to the British armies invading the colonies from Maine to Georgia. After the final surrender of the British to the Americans, New York City was evacuated by the British Army throughout the summer and fall of 1783. Carried away with them were a vast number of White Loyalists and their families, and over 3,000 Black Loyalists: free, indentured, apprenticed, or still enslaved. More than 2,700 Black people came to Nova Scotia with the fleet from New York City. Black Loyalists strives to present hard data about the lives of Nova Scotia Black Loyalists before they escaped slavery in early South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, and after they settled in Nova Scotia—to tell the little-known story of some very brave and enterprising men and women who survived the chaos of the American Revolution, people who found a way to pass through the heart, ironically, of a War for Liberty, to find their own liberty and human dignity. Includes historical images and documents

Some Black Loyalists who arrived in New Brunswick, abandoned freedom and became indentured, for guarantees of stability and security in a new, unknown land.

The Loyalists were colonial Americans who supported the British empire and opposed independence during the long revolutionary war. When the American Revolution ended in a peace treaty that was too feeble to protect them against persecution in the newly independent United States, tens of thousands fl ed to a new life in exile. In 1783 many of them sailed northward from the New York City area to the St. John River valley in the future Canadian province of New Brunswick. This volume makes available for the fi rst time the source materials documenting this vast migration. Most records were discovered at the National Archives of the United Kingdom. In this book you can follow thousands of loyal American refugees at one or more critical points in their journey of exile: on registering their names at New York to take part in the exoduson boarding a ship for the voyage northwardon drawing provisions from the army commissariat at St. John Harbour after arrivalas recipients of town lots in the future city of Saint Johnas participants in the political turmoil that overtook the American Loyalists in exile This rich resource will be treasured by both family historians and those interested in New Brunswicks colourful past.