Canada, Nova Scotia, Antigonish Catholic Diocese, 1823-1905

What is in This Collection?

This collection contains church records for the years 1823-1905; dates vary for each parish. In this set of parish registers, the births or baptisms, marriages, and deaths or burials are usually entered in separate volumes. A few volumes have intermixed entries; some are indexed. Early registers are written in paragraph format, while later registers are pre-printed with the information filled in by hand in each column. On August 23, 1886, the see was moved from Arichat to the town of Antigonish and the diocese became the Diocese of Antigonish. The diocese covers seven counties in northeastern Nova Scotia: Richmond, Inverness, Victoria, Cape Breton, Antigonish, Pictou and Guysborough. Catholic records are traditionally kept on the parish level so the registers are usually found at the church where the event occurred. Based on statistics from the 1901 Canadian census, around 28% of the population of Nova Scotia was Catholic and 58% of the Catholics in Nova Scotia lived in the Diocese of Antigonish. About 68% of the pre-1906 parishes in the diocese are included in this record set.

Additional records and/or images may be added to this collection in the future.

Reading These Records

Some of these records are in Latin or French. For help with reading the records, see the following resources:

• Latin Genealogical Word List
• French Word List
• French Records Extraction - An Instructional Guide

To Browse This Collection

What Can These Records Tell Me?

The following information may be found in these records:

Collection Content

Sample Images

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  1895 Baptism Record

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  1895 Marriage Part 1

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  1895 Marriage Part 2

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  1904 Burial Part 1

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  1904 Burial Part 2