History of the County of Annapolis

Cat No.:   CA0387:

The title continues: “Including old Port Royal and Acadia with Memories of its Representatives in the Provincial Parliament and Biographical and Genealogical sketches of its early English Settlers and their Families.”  While it was published in 1897 it was in preparation over a significant period prior to this by its primary author W. A. Calnek. Following his decease in 1892 his friend, A. W. Savary was asked, by Calnek’s son and by a local newspaper publisher, to complete the work. He eventually agreed to undertake the work, but only if he could edit the manuscript materials down to a volume suitable for compilation into a single book - as it appears here.

This book then is a “one-stop-shopping” resource for the County of Annapolis, containing history, biography and genealogy data in addition to 16 illustrations.   The history of the County as a whole is recounted chronologically, starting in 1604 and proceeding in 11 chapters through 1887/8.

There are a further 6 chapters devoted to the more detailed history of individual townships and settlements which provide, not only stories of the location but also the names and activities of some of the settlers and citizens living there. This section is completed with a chapter discussing the churches and religions active in the community.

Altogether the preceding chapters account for about half of the 660 plus pages in the book, the remainder being devoted to the biographies and genealogical records of the inhabitants. Most of this material had been submitted to Calnek for publication on a subscription basis by the inhabitants (which explains the anxiety of the son and the local newspaper publisher to have the material published) which would cause one to hope that it could be regarded as accurate, although it was also checked against, and / or enhanced from, various official and private records of the county. The Biographies are quite detailed and may run to several pages of the quite small print used in the book. Submitted genealogies were generally truncated, according to the completing author (Savary), to only two to three generations by the need to keep the book within manageable proportions.

This is a “must have” resource for anyone researching the history or genealogy of Nova Scotia’s historic Annapolis County or the city of Port Royal. This digital version is fully text searchable and the search speed is greatly improved by our FastFind technology.

No. of CDs is:  1 ;   Format is:  PDF ;   Searchable?:  YES;

FastFind:  Yes;  ISBN No.:   978-1-897405-95-6 ;