Race in St John’s Anglican Church in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia - Eva Wissting

What can a church’s list of baptisms tell us about the society of a Nova Scotian town two hundred years ago? It might seem like an impossible task to draw much information about the people and their lives from a long list of names and dates when there is no cohesive narrative on the pages. However, text can work in astonishing ways, even in scantiness––and not just through the words placed on the pages, but also through what has been left out. The list of baptisms from St John’s Anglican Church in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, from the emergence of the church in the mid-1700s up until 1869, may have been created with a different intention, but today we can read in them signs of inequality and discrimination. A combination of notes included in the list with names and other details that are omitted show us that even though people of different races were included in the congregation, those deviating from the white European norm were underprivileged, and their identities were suppressed. While a great majority of the names on the list of baptisms in St John’s church signal European descent, there are a few instances that tell us that there were people with other backgrounds in this congregation. Family names like Heckman and Wentzel, Moreau and La Grace, Richards and Bailey (1-2) suggest that these families stemmed from Germany, France and England. A few names, however, are accompanied by the note “Mi’kmaq” and the letter “(I).” On this list of approximately 6,000 names, there are eight baptized children on the list that, along with their parents, are identifed as Mi’kmaq––all between April and December of 1764 (14). Interestingly, they are all identifed with names that sound European, such as Margaret, Marianne, Peter and Paul––and even more interesting is that within this limited group of people (24 individuals), several names appear multiple times. For example, there are three each of Margarets, Mariannes and Peters and as many as fve Pauls. This odd limited name variation, in combination with the lack of any traditional Mi’kmaq names, may suggest that these names either were used specifcally when interacting with Europeans, or that it might even be the church that chose to use these names––possibly because that seemed more practical to the settlers, or more Christian––rather than that these names were an identifying choice of the people themselves. Apart from the eight baptisms of Mi’kmaq people in 1764, there is no other information in the list that shows any presence of Indigenous Peoples

in St John’s congregation. The list itself does not tell us if this means that there were no other Indigenous congregation members. It could also be the case––as the European names of the Mi’kmaq individuals suggest––that they were there but their Indigenous heritage was suppressed. Regardless, the presence of the Indigenous members in the congregation about whom we do know through these eight baptisms, suggests that they were not included as members on equal terms with the congregation members of European descent, who could participate in the church while preserving their culture and heritage and without being labelled according to race. Instead, Indigenous members of the church had to (at least regarding their names) conform to a European norm. Another signifer of race in the list is the letter “N”. Between the years 1759 and 1846, there are 18 instances of “(N),” once accompanied with the term “Negro” (9) and once with “Mulatto” (21). One time it is also accompanied with “slave of Peter RUDOLF” (16) and another time with “serv to WILKINS” (28). Furthermore, the use of a letter in parenthesis is only used for “(I)” and “(N),” never for any other letters. “(N)” therefore apparently signifes a Black person, even in the instances when the “(N)” is not accompanied with any further explanatory notes. Noteworthy is that a larger proportion of these children are noted as “illegitimate” than in the list in general. The term “illegitimate” occurs many times throughout the list, 97 times, but as many as eight of the 15 Black baptized children on the list (three of the 18 Black people on the list were adults when they were baptized) are either noted as “illegitimate” or have no note on either one or both of their parents. The one example that stands out the most is the frst baptism of a Black person on the list, on May 27th, 1759, where there is no name noted whatsoever––no father or mother, no name of the child and not even a note on an owner or master, but simply “Negro boy Lunenburg” (9). None of the non-racialized children on the list lacks information in a similar way. Furthermore, three of the “illegitimate” children on the list are children of a woman named Silvia (20, 23, 25), but never accompanied by a name of a father. In March 1824, however, there is a Silvia who is baptized at age 70 noted as “servant J Creighton” (41). If this is in fact the same Silvia all through and she really was 70 years old in 1824, then she was 36 when her third child was born and 18 when she had the frst child that was baptized at St John’s. A John Creighton appears on the list as father of three children with wife Lucy Clapp between 1774 and 1781 (21-22) and either the same or another John Creighton had three children with wife Catherine between 1800 and 1813 (29, 34, 36). It appears that Black people were not only discriminated against by being racially labelled in the list of baptisms, but that the circumstances their children were born into was quite different than for the European congregation members. Looking closely at the details of the list of baptisms from St John’s church in Lunenburg makes it easy to start imagining the lives behind the names, but since there is only limited information available, we can only be sure of part

of the whole picture. The fact that people of colour and Indigenous peoples were baptized could be interpreted as acceptance into the congregation. However, the fact that so many of them are described as “illegitimate” and listed without the names of either or both parents (or any name at all), or––in the case of the Mi’kmaq––the strange pattern of repeated European names, show that they were treated differently than the rest of the members of the church. Maybe most telling of all is the fact that race was only relevant to note when it differed from the white European norm of the congregation.

Works Cited

“Lunenburg St John’s Anglican Baptisms 1749-1869 (Chronological),” Lunenburg County Church Records, transcribed by Robert Kim Stevens, http://sites.rootsweb.com/~canns/lunenburg/church.html, accessed 6 November 2019.