Quote:
Originally Posted by Architype
I've known a few Canadians who had some American ancestors; anecdotally it seems more likely in Ontario (loyalists) or Western Canada, but the percentage is low enough to only be a minority. Conversely, many Americans had Canadian ancestors. My ancestors came over around the time when George Washington was president.
|
This is really a regional question. In some areas like Southern Alberta there was direct immigration from the United States around 100 years ago. On the West Coast, well into the 19th century, it wasn't clear which areas would be British or American and settlers moved around somewhat randomly at times. I would guess that those early settlers ended up not being very demographically dominant here though.
In Nova Scotia (which back then included NB) there were American settlers before the Revolution, and there was a time when the colony was fairly well established but was a sister colony of others like Massachusetts, so British officers and the like were transferred back and forth between places like Halifax or Annapolis and Boston. There was no concept of "immigrating" between different parts of British North America. One pre-Revolution group of settlers was the New England Planters who arrived around 1760. These were settlers who moved onto land freed up by the deportation of the Acadians. They didn't come for political reasons like the Loyalists. The Loyalists also weren't necessarily born in the American colonies, they were just the group that left them.
An interesting tangent (
source):
The term 'Bluenose,' used as a nickname for Nova Scotians, dates from at least the late eighteenth century.1 The first recorded use of the word was in 1785 by the Reverend Jacob Bailey, a Loyalist clergyman living in Annapolis Royal after the American Revolution. Writing to a friend that year, Bailey complained about the outcome of the recent elections, where the political lines had been clearly drawn throughout Nova Scotia between the newly-arrived Loyalists (Americans will know them as 'Tories') and the New England Planters—long-time residents since at least the 1760s. Bailey noted sourly that "The blue noses, to use a vulgar appellation...exerted themselves to the utmost of their power and cunning." In another letter the next year, Bailey continued his complaints by listing several regrettable aspects of life in Nova Scotia, one of them being "Violent contentions between the Loyalists and the old inhabitants called blue noses."
Back in this time there were also other groups like the British settlers who moved to the Halifax area, foreign protestants (German and Swiss), Ulster and Yorkshire settlers, etc. And in the 19th century there were subsequent waves of immigration mostly from the British Isles and the American immigration tapered off.