Description

There was a certain busyness at the
quaysides of 18th and 19th century
Prince Edward Island, a frequency of
coming and going which speaks to us
very directly from the pages of colonial
newspapers.
The Royal Gazette threw its editorial
arms wide to welcome new settlers
and commented benevolently upon
both large and small infusions. In
August 1791, the Gazette reported:
On Tuesday morning last arrived
here on a shallop from Nova Scotia,
several gentlemen, who we are informed,
intend to become settlers in
this Island in a short time.
And a month later, reporting the
landing in Charlottetown of some 500
people from Uist, the same newspaper
exulted:
It is with singular pleasure we announce
the arrival of those honest
and worthy Caledonian emigrants.
This pattern held for a hundred
years as ship after ship disgorged its
cargo of pioneers — the eager and the
disillusioned, the adventurous, and the
desperately poor. But it is with singular
disappointment that the family historian
discovers that the names of
neither the gentlemen aboard the
1791 shallop nor of the many families
who arrived shortly thereafter have
been preserved. Indeed, very much
rarer than a day in June is a bona fide
ship's passenger list actually providing
the names of immigrants to Prince
Edward Island. The Heritage Foundation
and our own Public Archives
know of no such list for the early
French settlers and have on file only
nine lists for the later British arrivals.
Passenger lists were, unfortunately,
of two types: the more common
aggregate list merely noted the
number of people taking passage on
the ship, while the more
genealogically-valuable nominal list recorded
the names of passengers and
often other information. Our fruitless
attempts to find early nominal lists
seems to confirm the Public Archives
of Canada's contention that most lists
before 1865 gave only the aggregate
statistic.