Growing up in Trinity, Trinity Bay, Nfld
., I heard and remembered a few scraps and facts about the family
history, but did not do anything to record or organize them until a few
years ago, when my own children, who were living in varius parts of Canada,
urged me to put what I knew down on paper.
Once I got started. I quickly realized it was about twenty years too late
in starting, as all of the people I would have liked to talk to had passed
away.
I learned that the Provincial Archives in St John's had a great deal of information, including copies of the Registers of Birth's and Marriage's for a number of the Church Parish's in Newfoundland and have visited the archives about fifty times, during the last four summers, researching ,recording information. Some of the records, dating back to the early 1800's are in excellent handwriting and well preserved, while others are faded, scrawled and difficult to read .
From the little I knew and from the church records I was able to trace the ancestory of my children back to their greatgreatgrandparents, and many of their decendents. This information containing almost 600 names is recorded in the PAF (Latter Day Saints) Ancestory Program. I dont think it is possible to display this information on the internet but the files can be transferred to users of the PAF and other programs using a GEDCOM format.
In the meantime, while researching the church records I copied the details of births and marriages of any Sullivan, Hoskins, Kelly, Doyle, Gibbons, Nolan etc etc that I ran across. ( All of these names are not necessarily relatives.) My first cousin, Angela Collins (nee Hoskins) of Carbonear also shares an interest in Genealogy and we have shared and augmented each others information. From our combined efforts I now have a data base of almost 1,000 births and close to 200 marriages, dating from the early 1800's to the early 1900's. Although I have some names of baptism sponsors, and marriage witnesses, they are not included in my data base which is recorded in single line entries in Word Perfect. I decided on this approach because of the excellent sorting capabilities which would have been lost if I had used more than one line to record information.
It should be noted that all of the individuals in
my PAF files are not necessarily in my 1,000 name WordPerfect data base.
Obviously also, all of the names in the data base, who are not known relatives
are not listed in the PAF files.
The information for the data base is organized and sorted
by the family names:
Sullivan, Doyle,
Hoskins, Kelly, Gibbons,
Nolan, Lee, Daley, Leane,
Murphy, and Curtis
are from the Roman Catholic Parish Records, of
Kings Cove Trinity, St Marys, St. Brendans and
Trepassey .The names of Smith
and Symth are from both Catholic records and Vital Statistics (Greenspond
area) at the provincial archives.Other names which were of interest
do crop up from time to time and if you wish to browse through the entire
data base of almost 1,000 names which is sorted by year, click
here
As well, information from heradstones at cemetries in Kings Cove, St Vincnets and Openhall is included .
Click here to read George Connolly's Will. George was my GGgrandmother's second husband.
Any additional information or corrections regarding births or marriiages would be appreciated.