Loyalist Trails UELAC Newsletter, 2016 Archive

In this issue:
- Conference 2016
- Unpacking the Name in a Loyalist Diary: Barbarie Descendants, by Stephen Davidson
- Age of Revolutions: Placing the American Revolution in Global Perspective
- JAR: Untangling British Army Ranks
- Your Loyalist History in the Loyalist Gazette
- Where in the World?
- Region and Branch Bits
- From the Twittersphere and Beyond
- Last Post: Frederick Wilmot Hubbard

Conference 2016: Loyalists, Lighthouses & Lobsters

The 2016 UELAC Conference in Summerside PEI will be hosted by the Branches of the Atlantic Region: Abegweit, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia on July 7-10.

By the time this newsletter is distributed, the conference will be pretty much over. Enjoy these notes about it.

Editor's note: Once again it has been a wonderful conference - thanks to the organizers for a great event.

• James McKenzie and Alison Sands are both descendants of United Empire Loyalists and have travelled from New Brunswick and New York, respectively, for the United Empire Loyalist Association of Canada conference taking place in Summerside from July 7 to 10.
• "The Loyalists are Coming" cartoon
• Welcome to Summerside
• Revisiting part of P.E.I.'s history in Summerside. Reenactment group sets up camp for a military unit that lived and died more than 200 years ago
• The 84th Regiment reenactors with Premier of PeI Wade MacLauchlan and United Empire Loyalists' Assoc. at UELAC opening night of conference in Summerside
• A new exhibit on the United Empire Loyalist settlement of Prince Edward Island in 1784 will open this week in the Bedeque Area Historical Museum.

For information about the conference, read here.

Unpacking the Name in a Loyalist Diary: Barbarie Descendants

© Stephen Davidson, UE

In November of 1780, John Barbarie was just a name in the diary of a loyalist soldier. Taking that single “puzzle piece” of loyalist history as our starting point, we’ve been trying to complete the picture of this man's life. Having discovered the stories of his wartime service, his enslaved African, and his loyalist in-laws, it is now time to learn about the legacy of John Barbarie.

By 1784, the veteran of the New Jersey Volunteers was making a life for himself and his new bride along the shores of the Kennebecasis River in New Brunswick. Within three years of their marriage, Mary Barbarie had the first of their nine children, a daughter named Mary Ann/Jane.

Four years later John Lambert Barbarie was born. He would marry Mary Anne Arnold and become the father of Julia ( Mrs Edwin), George, Douglas, Charlotte, and Horatio. John Barbarie III died in Norton, New Brunswick in 1868.

Oliver Barbarie was born in 1794. Named for his father's brother, he went on to marry Susan(nah) Leonard and had at least four children: Gertrude, John, Courtland, and Oliver Jr. The latter died in 1863. William Johnson French was born around 1796, followed by his sister Gertrude Marie. She married John Hallett; together they had a daughter named Gertrude Marie Barbarie Hallet.

John and Mary Ann Barbarie's last child was Andrew. He and his wife settled in Restigouche, New Brunswick where they had at lease one son (J.C. Barbarie) and one daughter.

Andrew Barbarie was Restigouche's member of the colonial assembly for 20 years prior to Confederation and was the Clerk of the Crown. He died in Dalhouse, New Brunswick in 1868.

His son, J.C. Barbarie, became a lawyer, was the clerk of the peace, the registrar of probates, a militia captain, and the clerk of the municipality of Restigouche. In 1878, he was elected a member of the provincial assembly (New Brunswick was now part of the Dominion of Canada), a post he held until he was appointed to the legislative council in 1885. J.C. Barbarie married Elizabeth Phillips in 1866.

However, progeny were not the only legacy of John Barbarie, the loyalist officer. He became a colonel of the local militia and a magistrate of Kings County. He was the witness to at least one other loyalist's will. Strangely enough, for a man involved in legal affairs, Barbarie died without a will. His wife and son John Jr. administered his estate. His only appeal for compensation to the Royal Commission on the Losses and Services of American Loyalists was unsuccessful. However, John did receive a $60 pension as a retired officer, so perhaps he was content with this and his loyalist land grant.

John's brother Oliver Barbarie also found sanctuary in New Brunswick in 1783. Oliver had been a lieutenant in the Loyal American Regiment as well as an ensign in the New Jersey Volunteers. Like his brother, Oliver was granted land in Saint John, but later moved to Sussex Vale in Kings County (about halfway between Saint John and Moncton). When the two brothers learned that John Smyth, a fellow loyalist officer was going to file a claim for compensation in Great Britain, they asked him to present a petition on their behalf. The records for the Royal Commission on the Losses and Services of American Loyalists show that Smyth gave testimony on behalf of a loyalist baker named Thomas Skynner on February 8, 1785. However, there is no record that he ever testified for the Barbarie brothers. Smyth died in London on January 12, 1786 and was buried in Mary LeBone churchyard.

Learning of Smyth's death, Oliver Barbarie went to London to seek compensation for himself. After being told that he was too late to submit a claim, Oliver remained in England where he joined the British army. He re-established contact with Cortlandt Skinner, his regiment's commander during his stay in London. The two had known each other before the revolution when Oliver studied law under Skinner's tutelage. Oliver Barbarie eventually married Skinner's daughter Euphemia.

The couple had two sons, John Nugent Barberie (1802- 1860) and Cortlandt Skinner Barberie (1804-1841). Cortlandt joined the British Army, serving in India where he lost a leg and was returned home. This loyalist's son never married; he died due to complications of his war wounds. John (1828-1899), a son of John Nugent Barbarie, was a gentleman farmer in England until he left for Virginia in 1872. He eventually settled in West Virginia where land was being given away. This John Barberie had 14 children.

Oliver Barbarie, the loyalist solider, died in London on May 2, 1824; his wife Euphemia died in 1830 in Holyhead, UK at the home of her brother. Oliver's brother, Captain John Barbarie, died on July 19, 1818 at 67 years of age in Sussex Vale, New Brunswick – nine years after moving to the loyalist settlement. This community was also home to Barbarie's mother-in-law and to his daughter Mary Cougle. Barbarie's widow, Mary Ann, died in their home in 1832 at 67 years of age.

Six years after Mary Ann Barbarie died, another loyalist passed away near Fredericton, New Brunswick. His name was Anthony Allaire. He was the lieutenant who in 1780 noted John Barbarie's name in his diary. Having spent two days together at South Carolina's Fort Ninety-Six, did these two cousins ever meet after settling in New Brunswick? The records are silent.

However, given their family ties and the fact that they both intially settled in the Fredericton area, they no doubt had opportunities to visit and recount all of the adventures that they had had since meeting one another at South Carolina's Fort Ninety-Six.

All that we know for certain about these men is that Lt. Anthony Allaire kept a diary and that one of its entries contained the name of John Barbarie. That one entry was sufficient to be a starting point for a historical quest – one that has revealed the amazing saga of one loyalist and his world.

To secure permission to reprint this article, email Stephen Davidson.

Age of Revolutions: Placing the American Revolution in Global Perspective

By Steven Pincus, 20 June 2016

Sometime in 1766 or 1767, Ezra Stiles, the popular minister of Newport, Rhode Island, and the future president of Yale College, catalogued the "struggles for liberty and revolution AD 1765 and 1766" around the world. For Stiles, as for many contemporaries, the agitations against the Stamp Act in North America, the West Indies, and Britain were part of a global phenomenon. Stiles noted that in "Europe" weavers took to the streets in Britain, Madrileños rioted against the policies of Leopoldo de Gregorio Marquis of Esquilache, and Corsicans took up arms to establish, albeit briefly, a form of republican government. In "America," new imperial policies met fierce resistance in French Saint Domingue, New Spain, New Granada, and Peru. Stiles knew that the riots and celebrations that he witnessed first hand in Newport and Connecticut were a local instantiation of a trans-imperial phenomenon.

Stiles knew whereof he spoke. On both sides of the Atlantic a political economic crisis shook the great European empires to the core in the 1760s. The French, Spanish and British Empires emerged from the Seven Years War overwhelmed by ballooning sovereign debts. To avoid defaulting the leading ministers in all three states pursued austerity measures and sought new ways to raise revenues. In all three empires, these policies provoked massive popular resistance.

Read more.

JAR: Untangling British Army Ranks

By Don N. Hagist, May 19, 2016

After a few years of editing articles for this journal, it's become apparent that the ranks of British officers sometimes confuse people. By "sometimes" I mean "often." And not without reason. Although titles like colonel and captain are familiar to us all, the roles associated with these ranks, and the fact that an individual could have more than one rank, lead many a writer astray. So here's a primer that should help sort things out.

The British army that served in American during the Revolution was composed primarily of infantry regiments. The full, or established, strength of infantry regiments varied during the course of the war, and actual strength was almost invariably different from the established strength, but a good rule of thumb is to think of a regiment as consisting of about 500 soldiers. There were exceptions, but this is a good overall guideline. Regiments were typically divided into ten companies of equal size. In most regiments, each company had three officers, and the regiment also had five staff officers; this sounds simple enough, but there were a number of nuances. Read more.

Your Loyalist History in the Loyalist Gazette

Do you have some quality research on your loyalist ancestor, or perhaps another Loyalist, or maybe some research into the Loyalist era you would like to share, have published?

The deadline for submissions to the Fall 2016 issue of The Loyalist Gazette is 01 August 2016.

Reports from Branches as well as feature articles about our Loyalist ancestors or the War of 1812 are always welcome.

Please send me articles as e-mail attachments, in MS Word, and send photos, also as e-mail attachments, in jpeg format, with at least 300 dpi resolution for each image, i.e. at least one megabyte in size.

Just do it!

...Bob McBride, UE, UELAC Publications Chairperson and Editor of the Loyalist Gazette

Where in the World?

Where is ?

To participate, submit a photo of yourself in UELAC promotional gear at a place of some note and tell us where it is (if you are a member of a branch, please indicate that as well). Send your submission to the editor at loyalist.trails@uelac.org.

Region and Branch Bits

From the UELAC branches, news and events of interest to others.

• Check out the St. Lawrence Branch Facebook page.

From the Twittersphere and Beyond

• What a Toilet Shows About Life During the American Revolution. The finds from an 18th-century Philadelphia privy have researchers flush with excitement.
• Oldest 13-stars-and-stripes American flag that's available for public view. Photo. Some details.

Last Post: Frederick Wilmot Hubbard

The family of Frederick Wilmot Hubbard announces his peaceful passing which occurred on Sunday, May 22, 2016 at the Veterans Health Unit in Fredericton at the age of 99. Born on May 15, 1917 in Burton, NB, he was the son of the late Louisa Jack and R.D. Wilmot Hubbard.

Fred came from a long line of loyalists and politicians who had a leading role in the establishment of New Brunswick. He was proud of his UEL ancestry which included a Father of Confederation, Robert Wilmot.

Fred attended Rothesay Collegiate School and graduated from the University of New Brunswick in 1943 with a degree in electrical engineering. He joined the Royal Canadian Navy the same year and served on the anti aircraft ship HMCS Prince Robert that was commissioned in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean.

In 1946 Fred married Lucy Black of Winnipeg and worked in Ontario and Quebec before returning to New Brunswick in 1963. Fred worked on the design and construction of the Belledune Smelter and later on the construction of the Mactaquac Power Plant. He finished his career as Director of Buildings for the Province. After retirement he did consulting work which included a project that saw the construction of an affordable apartment building for seniors at Parish Church on Westmorland St.

Fred enjoyed winters in Florida. He also enjoyed a good game of golf and he and Lucy played well into their nineties. Fred was a member of many organizations including the United Empire Loyalists and served on the vestry of Christ Church Parish Church.

Fred is survived by son Allen (Ronna) Hubbard and daughter Elizabeth (Colin) Cantlie as well as grandchildren, nieces and nephews.

He was predeceased by his wife of 67 years Lucy (Black) Hubbard in 2014 and his sister Marion Logie the same year. His brother Lt. Alleyne Hubbard was killed in action in 1944 and is buried in Nijmegen, Holland where in later years Fred paid homage. He was also predeceased by William and Jean Black, Christopher Black and William and Robert Logie.

Funeral arrangements are entrusted to McAdam's Funeral Home. The Royal Canadian Legion, Branch # 4, will held a tribute service on Monday, June 27, followed by a celebration of Fred's life at Christ Church Cathedral, Fredericton, NB. Interment will in St. Paul's Cemetery in Burton.

May no sailor go unloved
May no sailor walk alone
May no sailor be forgotten
Until they all come Home

...Andrew Gunter, UE