In honour of the International Year for People of African Descent, Nova Scotia Archives has made over 500 documents of African Nova Scotia immigration available online.  The government records are digitized and fully searchable and contain the names of many individual Black Refugees.

According to the website, the documents were assembled by the first Records Commissioner, T.B. Akins around the theme of “Refugee Negroes.”

‘The earliest documents concern the 1792 emigration to Sierra Leone of about 1200 free black people, who had come to Nova Scotia as part of the Loyalist migration at the close of the American Revolutionary War in 1783. Other early documents relate to the arrival of the Jamaican Maroons in 1796 and to Government costs pertaining to their emigration to Sierra Leone in 1800.’

Visit the extraordinary resource for yourself at gov.ns.ca/nsarm/virtual/diaspora/

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