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From Rural Roman Catholic to Urbane Freemason and Transcendentalist? Louis A. Surette in Nineteenth-Century Nova Scotia and Massachusetts
In a previous post, “ Ecclesiastical Kinship at Pointe-de-l’Église ,” I discussed the ‘presbyterial household’ of the Abbé Jean-Mandé Sigogne. Among the children who lived (for a time) as part of this ecclesiastical kin-unit were three Surette brothers from Argyle Township, near Yarmouth. These boys were sons of Athanase Surette and Louise d’Entremont, Acadian parishioners at Sainte-Anne-du-Ruisseau.[1] Louise and Athanase produced a prodigious family, having twelve children
Colby Gaudet
Oct 19, 202520 min read
Primary Source: Letters between an Acadian Mother and Son, 1849–1852
The following is a series of letters between Cécile Melanson (née Murat) of Pointe-de-l’Église, Nova Scotia, and her son, Stephen (or Étienne) Melanson of Boston, Massachusetts. As I’ve written for the Acadiensis blog , Cécile Murat was not Acadian by birth. Born in 1780, she was a child of French parents living in Boston and was later adopted by an Acadian couple in rural Clare. In 1800, Cécile married an Acadian, Jean-Baptiste Melanson (brother of Samuel Melanson in my prev
Colby Gaudet
Oct 15, 20258 min read
Olaudah Equiano's Nova Scotian Interlude, 1758
Olaudah Equiano was an eighteenth-century writer and abolitionist. When he was thirteen and enslaved to a British naval officer, he visited Nova Scotia. He stopped in Halifax and participated in the seige of Louisbourg. In his memoir, he recounted details of those events.
Colby Gaudet
Primary Source: Sarah Bancroft, Antinomian Prophetess of the Annapolis Valley, 1791
In the early 1790s, in the lower Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia, there lived a woman known locally as “The Prophetess.” Her name was Sarah Bancroft, and she was an antinomian preacher in the radical New Light tradition of Protestant evangelism. As a prophet, Bancroft preached publicly about the urgency of recognizing and confessing one’s sins in the hopes of experiencing a spiritual conversion (or New Birth) through God’s grace. The New Light message of spiritual rebirth had
Colby Gaudet
Sisters of Charity Burials, Mount Olivet Cemetery, Halifax
In my recent research pursuit of Sister Mary Bernard (1852–1937), who I discussed in my last post, I discovered that she was buried at the Mount Olivet Cemetery, here in Halifax.
Colby Gaudet
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