Afghanistan observed

Barnett R. Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation and Collapse in the International System. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. xvii + 378 pp. No price given.

Barnett R. Rubin, The Search for Peace in Afghanistan: From Buffer State to Failed State. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. xi + 190 pp. US$25.00 (paper).

David B. Edwards, Heroes of the Age: Moral Fault Lines on the Afghan Frontier. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996. xviii + 306 pp. No price given.

J.L. Lee, The ‘Ancient Supremacy’: Bukhara, Afghanistan and the Battle for Balkh, 1731–1901. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1996. i + 695 pp. No price given.     

Pioneer Life on the Bay of Quinte: an Evaluation of Genealogical Source Data in the Study of Migration

The movement of people, goods, and ideas into new frontiers is one of the most important and prevalent themes in Canadian historiography.¹ For all that emphasis, however, the literature on the historical demography of the Canadian frontier does little to address the dynamics of frontier migration at the family level or to draw out the contributions of successive generations of pioneer families to the movement of the frontier itself. The difficulty of obtaining data is an obvious explanation, although a few recent studies have shown the usefulness of such sources as church registers, newspapers, residence histories, and naturalization records.² The purpose of the present essay is to draw further attention to the value of this approach by focusing on a specific Ontario example - a volume entitled Pioneer Life on the Bay of Quinte. ³ This book was published in 1904 and it contains data which permit the nineteenth-century migrations of some Bay of Quinte families and their descendants to be traced.