| Abstract: | 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. |
