Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia has released a new Africville Story Map that uses text, maps, video, audio, and links to external resources to tell the story of Africville.
The website was created for the ENRICH Project by Lama Farhat at the university’s GIS Centre. ENRICH stands for the Environmental Noxiousness, Racial Inequities & Community Health Project, a community-based research and engagement project on environmental racism in Mi’kmaq and African Nova Scotian communities.
Africville was an African Nova Scotian community founded in the 1840s along the Bedford Basin on the Halifax peninsula. Over the next 150 years, 400 individuals and their families settled and built a thriving and tight-knit community.
Despite the community’s continued growth, it was demolished in the 1960s by the city of Halifax.
The roots of Africville can be traced back to explorer Mathieu da Costa, who was the first black settler to arrive in Nova Scotia as part of the expedition that founded Port Royal in 1605.
In the years that followed, black settlers from French and English backgrounds settled in the colonial towns of Louisbourg and Halifax.
Between 1782 and 1785, more than 3,000 Black Loyalists fled the United States to Nova Scotia as refugees after the American War of Independence. They settled across the province in towns such as Halifax, Preston, Birchtown, Annapolis Royal, Clements, Brindleytown, Little Tracadie, Chedabucto and Granville.
They were then followed by the Jamaican Maroons, who escaped from from the Spanish and later British rule of Jamaica.
Next came the 2,000 black refugees of the War of 1812.
Some of these settlers, refugees, and their descendants settled along the Bedford Basin and established their new community — Africville.
For genealogists, what is missing on this website is a database of black settlers and refugees. Apart from the Book of Negroes, I don’t know if such a database has been created.
The website should also include in the ExternalResources tab a link to the Nova Scotia Archives’ African Nova Scotians section where visitors can search the Book of Negroes for names of Black Loyalists.
