Intimate Relations: Family and Community in Planter Nova Scotia, 1759-1800

Martin L. Nicolai is an adjunct assistant professor of history at
Queen’s University.

Academics, museum curators, and genealogists rarely meet within the
confines of a single conference room, let alone within the pages of a
single book. In Intimate Relations, however, we see the boundaries
between their historiographical domains blur as 20 social historians of
various backgrounds present stimulating and sophisticated analyses of
the New England colonists or “Planters” who settled in Nova Scotia
following the deportation of the Acadians.

One of the most striking aspects of Intimate Relations, the outcome of
a 1993 conference at Acadia University and the third volume of a series
on Planter society, is how it reveals the extent to which genealogy,
once a field devoted to hagiographic portraits of glorious ancestors,
has come of age. Computerized genealogical databases containing a myriad
of detail about hundreds of families in Nova Scotian townships have
permitted a cross-fertilization of ideas and methodologies between
academics and today’s sophisticated genealogists, who are often
academics themselves. The result is that we now have an extraordinarily
rich and insightful portrait of family and community life in colonial
Nova Scotia.

Essay topics in this volume range from widow-hood, genealogy, land and
inheritance, clothing, and furniture to women and the economy, domestic
violence, business, and religion. Philip Greven, one of the pioneers of
North American demographic studies, furnishes a thought-provoking
introduction, and one of George Rawlyk’s final contributions to the
historiography of the Baptist movement in Nova Scotia is also included.

What is especially noticeable about this body of scholarship is the
sense that the New England community in Nova Scotia is finally
perceived, without apology or even comment, as a historic community with
a unique and valid culture rather than as a strangely deformed junior
sibling of the 13 colonies to the south. Intimate Relations provides
academics and lay readers alike with a fascinating and refreshing look
at a complex and dynamic community that exemplified both the diversity
and continuity of life in English-speaking North America during the
early modern period.