Book Description

In Nova Scotia, the focus of study about Scottish settlers, including the Grants, has been on the eastern counties of the province, and on Cape Breton Island. In the United States, when Grants are mentioned, a significant concern seems to be to find a genealogical or DNA link to Ulysses Grant. No one has seriously examined and written about the Grant families of southwestern Nova Scotia. That leaves a space for me to act in, and to develop a narrative history of a family founded in the soil, strengthened by the forest, and challenged by the sea environments that comprise the fundamental essence of Nova Scotia. And so, my passion has been to tell the story of my family and their relatives in southwestern Nova Scotia and to follow the paths of many of them to New England (especially to Massachusetts). This study will fulfill an implicit task left to me by my Aunt Ruth Dexter. That is the essence of why I have spent so much of my retirement on this task. But there is more to come as I follow suggestive clues left by my ancestors, or seek to overcome “brick walls” that stump every genealogist from time to time. When I began this project, my aim was simply: “To collate and present a family history of the line descending from John Grant and Mary Sabean to myself.” If I had stayed within that framework this book would have been much shorter and less interesting. As it turns out, there are many fascinating aspects to our story. Not only will you read about the hard-working and courageous children of John and Mary, but you will follow them and their offspring as they find love and marriage, sometimes with close or distant cousins. • You will ride or sail with them as they migrate within Nova Scotia and outward to New England. • You will wonder at their expressions of faith and sense their hidden, internal conflict as they make religious choices based on factors we can only imagine (spirituality, simplicity, availability, or energetic missionaries), reflected in obituaries, burial sites, or their answers to census questions. • You will share their sorrow at the deaths of loved ones through accident, disease, suicide, loss at sea or in the service of their country in war, particularly in World War I. • You will learn of their varied occupations, trades and professions, from farming, fishing and forestry to shoemaking, carpentry and sailing, nursing and teaching. • You will join them as they strive to become master mariners, volunteer in their churches, train young women with the YWCA in China, or succor the sick and wounded with the Red Cross in Siberia – follow them south to Boston and the Caribbean, east to Europe and across the Pacific to Asia. Only then you will come to understand why, at its core, my passion has been to be the voice of my direct ancestors and extended family within a defined framework of time and place, to record their activities where sources allow, in essence, to be the story they could not write.