Colby Gaudet, a post-doctoral fellow at Dalhousie University, is studying how some families navigated the legal and religious practices associated with grief and death. What he found is a community adapting to a society that saw them as outsiders, while also asserting their religion and culture.
Wills were an uncommon occurrence among 19th century Acadians
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The Digby County Will Book shows documents that Acadians left behind. (Nova Scotia Archives)
When Hilarion Thériault felt his time was coming at 71 years old, he decided to leave a will — an uncommon occurrence for Acadians in the 19th century.
That’s because many Acadians did not have much property to pass down. After the Acadian deportation, many lost their land and homes. Additionally, Roman Catholics in the province were not allowed to own property until the 1780s. While many occupied the land they lived and worked on, they struggled for decades to get land titles.
But Thériault was, as his will puts it, “unwilling to die unprepared.”
Colby Gaudet, a post-doctoral fellow at Dalhousie University, studied Thériault’s and 23 other wills from the small Acadian community of Clare, N.S., to better understand how some families navigated the legal and religious practices associated with grief and death.
This story was brought to Nouzie by RSS. The original post can be found on https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/acadian-wills-researcher-clare-9.7309046?cmp=rss
