Made in Canada
Race, Nation, Status, and Identity in the Founding of Canada
Forthcoming
Who was actually here at the founding — by name and by number, in the register’s own words? Volume One works the East Coast: Ontario first, then Montreal, then Nova Scotia, 1780–1850, reading the founding documents cell by cell instead of retelling the story built on top of them.
Lies: my teacher taught me. — from the Introduction
Digital editions will be DRM-free, sold here directly.
What this book actually does
Every claim traces to a document the project went and read — a census page, a muster leaf, a land petition, a registry, a transcript of someone’s own testimony. Twenty-two of those pages are reproduced in the book, photographed from the record itself.
The same rule as the rest of Canoa’s list holds on every page: document or discard. A colour or status word in a register fills the status column, never the origin column — and where the ground is unworked, the book says so plainly rather than padding it.
Inside
Part I — Ontario
- The Nations Before Any Ship Arrived
- The Loyalists Land
- The Founding Count
- Petition and Rejection
- The Township Returns
- The Bureau’s Own Files
- Oro: A Settlement Examined
- Grey, Niagara, Hamilton: Place by Place
- Status Is Not Origin
- The Census, Read Cell by Cell
- In Their Own Words
- Emancipation Day and the Churches
- What Was Searched, What Was Found
Part II — Montreal / Part III — Nova Scotia
- Montreal
- Nova Scotia: Musters, Manumission, Advertisement
- Conclusion
- Acknowledgments and a Note on Method
About the author
Cary Thunderstone is a genealogist and independent researcher, and the author of When Did I Become African? and Bacchanal.
His research runs on the same rules his genealogy does: oldest source wins, a blank field stays blank, and no origin gets attached to a person the record never gave one to.