The Provincial Archives of New Brunswick anounced yesterday it has digitized and added to its website the Dictionary of Miramichi Biographies and produced an improved search engine for the online vital statistics.
The Dictionary of Miramichi Biographies is a searchable database, with some of the research was done by Willis D. Hamilton on Miramichi history, biography, and historical genealogy. According to the Provincial Archives of New Brunswick, the book is a “veritable history of this distinctive and important part of New Brunswick, providing insights into the origins of the people, their institutions, occupations, religious practices, cultural values, and much more.”
In addition to a full text search, you can browse the Dictionary by name, occupation, organization, or page by page.
This database presently consists of the 2013 update of his Dictionary of Miramichi Biography (1997) which contains 1,109 biographical sketches.
The Dictionary profiles men and women from many walks of life who were born before 1900 and spent at least part of their lives on the Miramichi. They include business people, politicians, military men, sports figures, clergymen, doctors, lawyers, teachers and hundreds of others whose lives were notable or interesting.
The author, Willis D. Hamilton, is a native of the Miramichi, where he was born in 1936, and where his parents and all of his grandparents and great-grandparents were also born. He is an educator by profession and was the director for many years of the University of New Brunswick’s Mi’kmaq-Maliseet Institute.
The vital statistics search function now offers new search options – use of wild cards (*?), searching on two surnames linked to a birth or marriage, and direct links to the federated database or vital stats database from a search result.
