Tracing your roots can follow the Cabot Trail

The new website www.novascotiaroots.com is a combination trip planner and genealogical research tool that allows roots travelers before they set out to collect specific facts about their families along with practical travel information such as accommodations, attractions, and dining. The core of the site is a database containing 50,000 surnames going back 200 years or more, a million birth, death, and marriage records, and information on 27,000 locations.

Scottish names are particularly common here, and researching some of them in depth could take you all over the province. The website helps narrow the search.

Look for MacDonald, for instance, and more than a dozen places where that family lived in the 18th century — and where descendants live today — are highlighted on a map of the province. Orange circles mark the places, the larger the circle the greater the concentration of people with that name.

The place with the most MacDonalds is Cape Breton Island at the eastern end of the province and connected by a causeway. A famous beauty spot, Cape Breton is home to the Cabot Trail, one of the world’s great scenic driving routes. Settled by Scottish Highlanders, it is also known for its vital Scottish culture, which in summer includes Highland games, folk dancing, and bagpipe competitions.

Inside each of the map’s orange circles is a blue pin-shaped marker. A click on the pin brings up the name of the archive best able to help with family research, along with contact information and directions. For Cape Breton, this is Cape Breton University in Sydney.

Anyone searching the website for a common English surname such as Brown or an Irish one like Murphy will probably be referred to the large orange circle representing Halifax, the provincial capital and biggest city. Here the place to research your family is Nova Scotia Archives and Management, the provincial archives, with records from the entire province.