Acadian genealogists and citizenship by Ancestry.com

I believe I have some sort of entitlement-by-ancestry to Irish citizenship (and the European Union rights that would come with it).And Britain is so eager to claim me as British that I'm not even allowed to visit that country unless I make myself a British subject first.  But I have not sought either of those statuses, believing my Canadian passport should suffice.  

I'm not a fan of the trend to encourage people to collect multiple passports and citizenships -- including Canada's new openness to granting citizenship to foreigners with some distant Canadian ancestor adorning their family tree. If they will give you a second or third passport, eventually they will get in line to tax you, or conscript you, or something.

But Acadian genealogists and historians are claiming that if Canada is prepared to give citizenship to people with distant Canadian roots, they should apply their rules evenly -- and not throw out the Canadian documentation that foreign citizens with Acadian roots have been using to support their claim to Canadian citizenship.

Canada declares it will only accept Canadian documentation to prove Canadian ancestry.  Which seems fair.  But according to historian Maurice Basque and other Acadian historians and genealogists, Canada must accept Acadian parish registers that went south with Acadian deportees in 1755 as legitimate Canadian evidence, even if they have been held in Louisiana or French archives ever since.  

One of those whose citizenship certificate was suspended in June is an Acadian whose family settled in Louisiana, and has lived there since.

She received citizenship this year after the passing of the new federal law. 
But IRCC determined she may not be entitled to Canadian citizenship after all because she included in her application family records held in France and the U.S.

She had traced an ancestor born in 1730 in Acadia, sending IRCC their baptism certificate from Baton Rouge’s Archives and Records Center in Louisiana, which was an extract from the record of St. Charles Aux Mines Catholic Church in Acadia.

Surely it would make sense for Canada to say that a Canadian connection that was interrupted almost 300 years ago should not entitle someone with no other connection to Canada to acquire Canadian citizenship. But if the country has already made the commitment to unlimited ancestry, surely it has to be consistent about it.

Meanwhile, business for genealogical consultants (and document forgers, maybe) must be booming.  

History of Bessie Borden

I recently caught the episode of Witness to Yesterday (Canada's busiest history-book podcast, I'd say) in which Donald Wright converses with Carmen Miller about Miller's book The Black Box: Lady Bessie Borden's Family 1863-1956, newly published by University of Toronto Press.

I might have left "Lady" out of the title. Any Canadian with Sir or Lady before their name seems distinctly passé in our times.  We don't have Australia's colourful phrase about a bunyip aristocracy. But we know that whole thing didn't work here either, despite the efforts of families like the Bordens.  The wrongest aphorism ever coined about Canadian history is Carl Berger's "[Canadian] Imperialism was a form of nationalism."  No, the belief that titled Canadians really could share in running Britain's empire for them always was a form of colonialism.

So I  would not rush instinctively to a book about the knights and ladies of the Borden family of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Nova Scotia and Ottawa (and London, England).  

But the podcast episode kept me listening throughout -- it's a lively interchange. Maybe we should read The Black Box. 

Carmen Miller had already published a book about Sir Frederick Borden, but he could not get much of a grasp of the personality behind the politician until a Borden descendent gave him a black box full of the personal papers of Fred's wife Bessie -- papers Miller says the archives he visited had never found worth acquiring. His conversation with Donald Wright nicely captures the surprises of archival research and the pleasures of family history. From the UTP blurb for the book:

In a remarkable tale of tragedy, war, family conflict, and imperial diplomacy, The Black Box presents a collective biography of four generations of women in an elite Nova Scotia family during the late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. These intelligent, educated, artistic women.... 

Listen and see if you have the same reaction -- and check out a hundred other CanHist conversations there.

History of place and Prince Edward Island

The Canadian Historical Association has published on its website the keynote address recently given at its annual general meeting in Charlottetown by Edward MacDonald, museologist, UPEI history professor, and public historian, on the subject of place in history.  It's a lively, thoughtful and pleasantly modest -- how often are historians modest? -- essay. MacDonald calls it "Reckoning With Place."

But the question I asked Andrew Nurse remains valid: what wisdom do I have to offer? Only the kind you can buy at any corner store. So, I’ve decided it is safest for me simply to remind you today of things that you already know. Then we can both feel smart! 

Modest as it may be, however, the essay offers testimony to how much good history has been done in and on Prince Edward Island in the last fifty years or so, with lessons worth noting by anyone who writes about places not their own. Detail matters. 

History of the Grimke family -- and the new book about them

Allan Levine draws my attention to a story in the New York Times about an emerging scandal in historical scholarship and publishing.

The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in An American Family by Tufts University historian Kerry K. Greenridge starts with the Grimke sisters, Sarah and Angelina, daughters of a slave-owning plantation family in South Carolina who became famous for their abolitionist activity in the Northern states well before the Civil War.  But she also introduces the black Grimkes, who include three black sons of Sarah's and Angelina's plantation-owner brother; the three sons' mother, the enslaved woman Nancy Weston; and other black members of the extended Grimke family down to the twentieth century.

Published in 2024, The Grimkes became a much praised and widely read new study of slavery and freedom. Until lots of scholars of slavery began questioning the source notes for the book -- many of which they said could not be found in the cited archives -- and for uncredited borrowings from other historians.  Book and author are in trouble, the author is fighting back, and her university and publishers are distancing themselves from her. 

Full story in the New York Times: if I have done this right, non-subscribers to the Times should be able to access this gift link. 

A political scientist and a historian step up

I have mixed feelings about Substack and how it commodified and monetized the old blogosphere.  But my inbox today had three Canadian Substacks I was glad to see.

The historian turned security analyst Wesley Wark has a powerful piece on something Mark Carney might achieve, or at least try to achieve, at the NATO conference in Ankara: pull Orange Hitler back toward the side of Ukraine. ("Ballistic Terror wesleywark@substack.com)  

Wark had another powerful post yesterday, about the barbaric Russian destruction of the Mariupol Theatre and all the unhoused people sheltering in it

And a little closer to home, Emmett Macfarlane fulminates against the stupid and self-defeating decision of the prime minister to make the Canadian Senate once more a patronage house.  

Carney’s record so far is revealing. He has abandoned climate policy, he is cutting important institutions and programs, from mental health and disease prevention to international aid to Library and Archives Canada, and he plays partisan institutional games with the best of them. The 2025 election was framed around Justin Trudeau’s unpopularity. Once Trudeau resigned, voters surged to Carney, not only because of the Trump threat but because they didn’t want Pierre Poilievre. It’s becoming increasingly clear, that in avoiding Poilievre, Canadian voters did not get a Economist Party PM. What they got was basically Oxford-educated Stephen Harper.

Our CEO prime minister, a millionaire who has spent his career among billionaires, thinks anything he does not know already is not worth knowing, and in the process demonstrates his blinkered ignorance of the needs and requirements of parliamentary government.  Take a stick to him, Macfarlane. 

Macfarlane notes he has some insider status here -- he advised the Trudeau government on the non-partisan Senate ideas. For the details see his book on the Senate, Constitutional Pariah.  Probably the only good book ever written about the Senate.

I have some, well, adjacent if not inside claims here.  It has been suggested that my 1867 and Three Weeks in Quebec City established the idea (later taken up by the Supreme Court of Canada, that the only thing the confederation makers required of the senate was that it be weak.  See this article for a summary.

Historians in the news, mostly elsewhere

Globally, historians are having rather a moment, while maybe the political guys are somewhat in disarray.

Heather Cox Richardson and Timothy Snyder are among the wisest commentators on everything that is wrong with the United States of America these days.  Anne Applebaum is tops on developments in Europe  -- Snyder matters there too.  Phillips O'Brien has terrific insights into Ukraine's growing strength against Putin. 

Update, July 7:  Should add to the list Jill Lepore, who's so often good on American history, 

Canada not so much right now.  Look at the piffle our political analysts get away with:  they are regurgitating off the cuff ideas C.E.S. Franks first came up with in the 1960s as if they were scripture.

History of Winning

A pleasant thought to start the day with. While every one of the other thirty teams still contending for the World Cup is facing a tough ninety minutes in the next few days to see if they can qualify for the round of sixteen -- CANADA IS ALREADY THERE.  

'Course when the fifteen qualifying matches are done, fifteen teams will have joined Canada in the bracket. But they ain't there yet. And when they are, fifteen others will be going home. Not us. Not yet. 

Photo: Eustaquio scores oen. Globe and Mail

Read of the day: Wesley Wark on leaving NORAD

Historian and security analyst Wesley Wark has an (admittedly) provocative article up at The Walrus online today, setting out why Canada should be planning for the end of NORAD and for a new NATO-based security alliance for the North American and European north.  (Wark's childhood experiences, we discover, include some years spent at a NORAD base in Montana.)

Image: Stanley Kubrick, "Dr Strangelove."

Carlo Ginzberg (1939-2026) and Orde Morton (1940-2026) RIP, historians

To my surprise, the Toronto Star published an article recently on the passing of the Italian historian Carlo Ginzberg.  It's from a wire service, not a Star original, but still, I would not have thought his importance was enough to catch the's Star attention.  

The article says his: 

pioneering work transformed the study of the past by recovering the voices of marginalized people. ...

Ginzburg was a pioneer of microhistory, which focuses on small, specific units of analysis — such as an individual, a community, or a singular event — to reveal broader themes and issues within history.

That's about right, though surely it was not an entirely new idea. Sometime in the 1980s I made a radio documentary for CBC Ideas that we called "Four New Historians" -- and each of the four historians I profiled had recently written a book that might have been called microhistory.  

I went to New Haven, Connecticut, to interview Ginzberg, then a visiting scholar at Yale University (CBC budgets in the 1980s!), about his recently translated book The Cheese and the Worms. It explored the world of a sixteenth-century miller in a north Italian village who argued that life emerged from the universe as easily a worms arose in cheese -- and was eventually executed for heresy for the vigour with which he defended his atheistic views.  

The other three were Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, author of Montaillou, Natalie Zemon Davis, author of The Return of Martin Guerre, and Jonathan Spence, author of The Death of Woman Wang.   

Not coincidentally, I had recently written about obscure marginalized people who had lived in 18th century New France, and while I had written it before I encountered any of these books, they had given me a sense that I was not completely alone in the world in what I was writing about.   

I remember Ginzberg as quiet, thoughtful, fluent in English, perhaps less talkative than he might have been in his own language, but generous with his time and attention. Reading the article, I recalled him fondly. 

***

F. Orde Morton was the son of W.L. Morton, the historian of Canada, Manitoba, confederation, and much else. Like his father he was a Rhodes Scholar, but his first career was with Canada's department of External Affairs. I note his passing because he made some history as well as writing about it. His recent death notice says: 

In 1969 Orde was informed that he would be dismissed from External Affairs on the ground that his being gay made him a security risk. In 1970 he returned to Oxford at St. Antony’s College on a Canada Council doctoral fellowship, and in 1974 completed a doctorate with a thesis on Brazilian history at the time of Independence.

He taught and wrote Latin American history for a time, before turning to a business career. 

Leadership woes #1,000,000

After the by-election victory yesterday of Andy Burnham, a longtime power in the British Labour party, here is what another party powerbroker said about how the future of current Labour leader and prime minister should be determined

Harriet Harman, the party’s former deputy leader, who was appointed by Starmer as his adviser on women and girls just a few weeks ago, said she wanted Starmer, Burnham and any other potential leadership contenders to agree to put their parliamentary support to the test but without involving the wider Labour membership.

Harman told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “What should happen is that the three contenders – which is obviously Keir Starmer, who’s the prime minister, Andy Burnham, who’s the challenger, and Wes Streeting, who’s also a challenger – should be got in a room by the deputy leader of the Labour party, Lucy Powell, and the chair of the parliamentary Labour party, Jess Morden, to agree a process whereby Labour MPs choose who they want.”  (Italics added)

I'm not a huge admirer of Britain or its politics. Britain been a godawful mess for a long time. Besides, it has banned me from entry. (I'm a Canadian citizen and passport-holder, but I was born in Britain, and so Britain does not recognize my Canadian passport as valid.)  

But the way Harman proposes to review and perhaps change the party leadership is, in the end, the only way that is compatible with functioning parliamentary democracy, and British politicians seem to be recognizing that. When MPs are accountable to the electorate, and the parliamentary leader is accountable to the MPs in caucus, a constant accountability chain is maintained -- which is the whole point of parliamentary representation. 

If you are in Canada, this post will almost certainly be the only place you will see this viewpoint expressed.  Pity. 

(Canadian MPs on their leaders:  "But if we say anything, he yells at us!")

Monarchy notes

I'm a bit irritated by a New York Times story, "One City Might Have Cracked the Housing Crisis," about a BC First Nation that is spearheading a large residential housing development in Vancouver's Kitsilano neighbourhood.  The theme seems to be that the one good thing about indigenous title is that it enables developers to thumb their nose at city-planning regulations.

I did laugh, however, where the reporter notes that NIMBY Vancouverites 

sent protest letters to Queen Elizabeth II. (In Canada, complaints about federal land are still addressed to the British sovereign.)

It is funny, I guess, that the New York Times promotes this medieval idea of how Canadian government works. But Canadian monarchists (and constitutional nerds, too often) often make much of the claim that there really is a Canadian monarchy and a king of Canada. Here's another proof that no one in the world takes them seriously. We shouldn't either. 

The Globe and the Tk’emlúps "anomalies"

I was slow in giving a close read to the long story by Patrick White and Willow Fiddler about the Tk’emlúps Residential School and residential school denialism that the Globe and Mail published on May 22.  I think I was mostly put off by the Globe’s editorial on the matter, which seemed like straight-up encouragement to denialism.

But in the end it is a good piece of journalism. 

White and Fiddler make clear enough that apart from a few ill-chosen words, the Tk’emlúps leaders mostly spoke carefully in June 2021 about how the ground-penetrating radar showed anomalies that were suggestive of graves. The article also states clearly that there is no doubt about substantial numbers of children dying at residential schools (and their remains being undocumented). It cites Canadian government documentation back to the 1920s confirming the death rates. It notes cases like the Dunbow school in Alberta where flooding in 1996 exposed (and carried away) many skeletal remains.

That is, the story makes it plain there is very good reason to assume that the “anomalies” at the Kamloops site are exactly what everyone in 2021 assumed they were.  Journalists who understood that the anomalies could be taken as gravesites were not failing us when they drew plausible conclusions.

The article might have been more clear about a point of view I remember hearing in 2022:  that the Tk’emlúps people, while making it clear that they had no doubt what the anomalies meant, had no great need or inclination to dig up what they assumed to be the remains of their small friends and relatives for scientists to stick on a shelf in some research lab for a century or so, in the name of research. (It does at least cite one person calling such demands "morbid and unnecessary.")

The story makes it clear enough that Tk’emlúps provides no serious basis for denying or minimizing the crimes and tragedies of the residential school system, despite the denialists “bones or nothing happened” approach to reconciliation. As is said in the article:

“I think a lot of denialism’s roots go back to the fact that lots of these folks don’t want to acknowledge or face the fact that atrocities happened to children,” said Manny Jules, chief of Tk’emlúps through much of the 1980s and nineties.

The Globe’s editorial and self-criticism has given new fodder for denialists everywhere in their campaign to stop progress towards reconciliation. There is no reconciliation without truth, as the editorial says. But the fundamental truth remains: residential school kids died and were buried in unmarked graves at residential schools across the country.