“Unwilling to Die Unprepared”: Kinship, Religion, and Property in Nineteenth-Century Acadian Wills

Abstract

In the early nineteenth century, French-speaking Acadian householders in the township of Clare in southwestern Nova Scotia asked their Catholic missionary to compose their last wills, contracting the documents in English for an anglophone judiciary. From a study of probate records, the Acadian testaments show how an aging generation of former political exiles and refugees (survivors of the Acadian deportations) transmitted the land and goods they had acquired since reestablishing themselves in Nova Scotia. Representing a distinct ethnic and linguistic group in a predominately Anglo-Protestant British colony, the wills reflect Catholic religious and social elements in a time when—until 1827—anti-Catholic Test Oaths restricted Acadians from dimensions of public life. In declaring a will, Acadian testators made statements about their religious faith as death approached and affirmed kin bonds through property distribution. Clare’s Acadians simultaneously retained Catholic deathways that distinguished them from Protestants and adhered to English inheritance laws brought to eighteenth-century Nova Scotia from New England. The figure of the parish priest held considerable and complex authority in the Acadian community as he executed both religious and civic duties, including his role as justice of the peace.