New Brunswick Land and Property Records: Difference between revisions

{{Infobox NIFGS|June 2012|{{Research New Brunswick Ancestors Course}}|Althea Douglas, MA, CG(C)}}  

Petition or Memorial: A written statement by an individual (or group) giving the reasons why they should receive a grant of land.  

Interval land—is river lowland, both island and riverbank, that floods in the spring with the run-off or freshet as snow melts in the watershed and uplands. Like the annual flooding of the Nile, this enriches the land annually and interval land produces good hay and is great pasture. The St. John River valley has a lot of such land. Not to be confused with dyked marshland.  

The Provincial Archives of New Brunswick (PANB) online research includes RS108, an “Index to Land Petitions: Original Series 1783-1918.” This includes a full explanation of the land granting process and an “Historical Background” which is well worth studying with some care. However, the basic steps were:  

Petitions and information on the grants can be followed up at the PANB.  

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, control of the territory which is now called New Brunswick passed back and forth between the French and English. On February 10, 1763 the ''Treaty of Paris'' ended the Seven Years War and the area became a possession of Great Britain. Under the administration at Halifax, the territory north of the Bay of Fundy was known as the Counties of Sunbury and Cumberland. Significant efforts were made to establish settlements (townships) on the St. John and Petitcodiac Rivers and in the Chignecto Isthmus.  

An index is on films F-1744 and F-1755. On reels F-1734 to F-1764 are copies of the old Nova Scotia Grant Books.  

In the newly founded colony of New Brunswick, the land granting process was essentially the same as in other British possessions. Brenda Dougall Merriman’s, Genealogy In Ontario: Searching the Records has detailed descriptions of British colonial records which, though generated in Ontario, may be relevant regardless of what British North American colony you are researching.  

The searchable index to the petitions in '''RS108 '''(1783-1918) totals about 67,300 entries. Do be sure to read the various rules used in compiling the index at the end of the introduction, since many more names than that of the actual petitioner are included. Unfortunately, in the 1850s the province began to issue standardized forms for petitions and because the information required was minimal, they are less helpful to the researcher.  

The PANB and Library and Archives Canada both have collections of the large-scale atlases, county wall maps (also large scale), and county survey plans that were produced during the latter half of the 19th century. These published surveys cover towns, villages and dispersed settlements; they show locations of buildings, identify residents, and list names and occupations of individuals who subscribed to the works. H.E. Halfpenny’s 1878 Atlas was published in facsimile as ''Historical Atlas of York County, New Brunwick and St. John, New Brunwick (City and County)'', by Mika Publishing in 1973. The maps contain detailed information but only for the two counties and the two major urban centres, Fredericton and Saint John which is where the subscribers lived of course.  

The New Brunswick Executive Council records, 1784-1867 were once in the care of the National Archives (NA) when it was the Public Archives of Canada (PAC); here they were microfilmed. When the PANB was established these records were returned to the province and reorganized. Microfilms, under the old arrangement MG9 A1, are still available at Library and Archives Canada, and Finding Aid #121 includes nominal indexes to many of the files of petitions, applications, intestate estates, and patent applications.  

It is advisable to work with the newer PANB series and its indexes at the PANB, but you might encounter the PAC/NA references in earlier research.  

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