 This site given the Ancestral Home Award for 2000 Visit the Acadian and French Canadian Ancestral Home site for many excellent genealogical resources. |
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Joseph
FERREIRA |
Lovina
GUEVREMONT |
Joseph
PIVIN |
Marie
JEFFREY |
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Lovina
FERREIRA |
David PIVIN |
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The Pursuit of Our Heritage
I began doing genealogical research on my family a few years ago. Because there was so much information to browse on the internet, I became interested in doing on-line research. During this time I have also visited the Family History Center (FHC) Library of the Mormon Church in Mesa, Arizona. This valuable collection of resources is open to the public and offers any individual access to books, microfilm and CD-based indexes. Most of what I have obtained, however, has been from internet sources.
Our family heritage, while in recent years is from New England, has lines which go back through French Canada and Portugal. On my side, my father's family lived for many generations in Quebec, Canada, while my mother's family came from Nova Scotia, Canada. My wife's father was born in the Azores, which are part of Portugal and her mother's family came from Quebec. We have traced the Canadian lines back into France to well before the colonial days. Most of this done with the help of friends and cousins on the Internet and various CD-ROM files.
| When the tree icon appears to the right, click it to see our tree. A complete GEDCOM file is linked below. Obtain this DFTCOM2 applet and display your own tree. |
I have found much information about my mother's line doing research on the village of D'Escousse on Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Other cousins, like Ed Galvin and Jeanne Joyce-Stone have focused on this community for their researches and have extensive family history information on their pages. My contribution to the effort is a detailed map (261K jpeg) of the area surrounding D'Escousse known as Isle Madame, located off the southern coast of Cape Breton. My map was derived from fisheries charts which were published on the net by the Canadian government.
If you have interest in Isle Madame families, there is a list server established by Ed Galvin which provides an excellent forum for meeting and exchanging information. To subscribe, visit Ed's D'Escousse page and follow the instructions there, or visit the listserver web site where there are many links to other resources.
In August of 2000, many Isle Madame cousins gathered from far and wide for a genealogy summit meeting. Photos and speeches from the gathering may be found or linked at my Isle Madame Listserver Picture Archive. There are links there to John Poirier's collection of summit meeting speeches. Check back often to see new submissions from those who live there today or whose ancestors passed that way.
My internet cousins, Vic and Olive Dawson have provided an audio tape of an interview of my great aunt Marie Angeline (Minnie) Mombourquette conducted by Vic in about 1980 in D'Escousse. I have transcribed this tape so that it could be shared with a wider audience on the internet. She describes life in the area of Isle Madame in the late 1800s and at various times since then, with many stories about people and places and what life was like in this fishing and farming area of Nova Scotia. Click here or on postcard to review this interesting oral history.
Nova Scotia genealogical research has been organized in a site called Nova Scotia GenWeb with links to researcher's sites and many other resources for all the counties. It is part of the Canada GenWeb project which seeks volunteers to add to the wealth of knowledge about each county. My interest lies in the Cape Breton counties and many of my cousins have their pages linked there. And finally, be sure to visit George Rose's great collection of resources on his Nova Scotia French Acadian and Scottish genealogy site.
Currently I am researching the following names:
I use Reunion for the Macintosh (which is also supported on Windows) to store all my data. Programs like this can create an output format which allows the exchange of files among people with different programs and computers. It will keep track of all your data and notes, even family photos if you have them scanned.
For a full version of my most recent GEDCOM click below: (updated 12/30/02)
The list of WWW resources on genealogy is very large. A few starting points to get you going on your search:
This genealogical data is for the personal use of individuals in the internet worldwide community. Commercial use is strictly forbidden without written permission from the author. Copyright 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003 David P. Pivin.
This page last updated 1/1/03