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According to Thomas Dickson's family bible, John and Jenny Dickson's second daughter Nancy was born 04 March 1829. Thomas's son William left some notes saying that Nancy married a Robert Stewart and had two children. Then, says Will, they "lost all track of the family." I searched in vain for traces of a Nancy Stewart of the right age in Cumberland County records, or even a Robert Stewart of the same generation. What I found, unexpectedly, were the following death records: [1]
Died 17 May 1873, Nancy Dickson, a married woman age 45, born River Philip, resided Goose River, father John Dickson, mother Jane
Died 17 May 1873, an unnamed infant male Dickson, born Goose River, resided Goose River, father Daniel, mother Nancy
There's also a birth record for the child:
Born 11 May 1873, in Pugwash, a male Dickson, father Daniel, mother Nancy Dickson, married Feb 1851
Infant mortality was much more frequent in those days than it is today but no less a tragedy. Whether the mother and child succumbed to a common disease, the child because the mother died, or both of them at childbirth, we shall probably never know. (In the last case we would read "11 May" as an error for "17 May".)
From censuses and marriage records of other children, these are quite clearly Daniel Dickinson of Goose River (now Linden) and his wife. Daniel Dickinson (b.1827, d. after the 1901 census) is a fairly well-known figure, the son of Samuel Dickinson of Wallace and grandson of loyalist Daniel Dickinson, who arrived in Nova Scotia about 1783 [2].
The public documentation seems fairly clear -- or at least as clear as it ever seems over a century later -- but it creates something of a mystery: If Daniel Dickinson's wife was Thomas Dickson's sister, how then did Thomas's family lose track of her? Goose River is not especially far from Claremont. What's more, there are several other points of contact between the families, albeit all after the death of Nancy. In 1884, Daniel and Nancy's son Mickie Dickinson married Lucinda Sutherland, younger sister of Thomas's wife Hortense Sutherland. Then in 1889, Daniel married Susanna Carter neé Seaman, grandmother of Nellie Carter who married Will Dickson.
I'm inclined to suppose that Will Dickson may have been writing about his great-aunt and not his aunt Nancy. Both died over a decade before he was born. Whether there was some sort of family falling-out that contributed to the estrangement, we shall probably never know.
Nancy and Daniel Dickinson's children were [4]:
After Nancy's death in 1873, Daniel married Susan Dykens in 1874 and had one daughter:
Daniel was again widowed, and married the widow Susanna Carter of Mansfield on 7 May 1889.
[1] Cumberland County vital statistics from
Cumberland County GenWeb.
Despite the italics, these are abstracts and not literal transcriptions.
[2] C.H. Sutherland, The
Sutherlands & Westchester, Nova Scotia (Agincourt,
Ontario: Generation Press, 1986) p.81.
[3] Nancy describes her birthplace
as Ireland in the 1871 census, but since her parents migrated
to River Philip when she was a small child this seems an obvious
and trivial error.
[4] Statistics on the children compiled from
birth, marriage, death and census records from
Cumberland County GenWeb. There is considerable disagreement between
the various sources over the exact birth years of many of these children.
For instance the 1901 census has Mickie, Jane and Mary born on three
different days between November 1857 and May 1858. Rather unlikely!
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This page was last updated 2004 May 06.