About the owner
About me, kind of.
I'm a small town, rock hounding, metal detecting, history dork. I grew up in little village in New Brunswick. I collect antiques, I love to explore. I have a lot of hobbies from crafting to fishing. However, one of my favorite hobbies is History. I grew up in the woods and travelled around New Brunswick. I've spent a lot of time at the surrounding lakes and the Saint John river. Often I would come across old foundations or rock walls and piles, old walls or huge holes in the middle of nowhere. When I would ask my parents or grand parents, they didn't seem to have much insight. The older I got the more grown over those places have become. I've also learned that a lot more people had no idea about any of those things. A lot were destroyed during construction and expansions.
Over the last ten years I've spent a lot of time doing my own personal research. There are a lot of useful tools out there that people can use to understand what's around us. What artifacts and old foundations are actually right under our feet. We've utilized old routes and established close to or on old sites because they were readily accessible either by trade or by taking it. Fishing and fur trades were something that happened for thousands of years. My ancestors are spread throughout a lot of cultures and its fascinating to learn about how they all interacted for thousands of years.
What motivated me
I enjoy helping others identify artifacts and items they've found. I may not be able to come up with %100 correct answer. But I can usually send you in the right direction at the very least. Of course there's always things you cannot figure out without actual testing.
Finding an old iron nail sometimes is my favorite, I call myself the square nail queen. I've found many of them, but no coins. People forget how much history sits behind an old hand wrought nail.
Watching the artifacts pop up on social media's and in the news is exciting, we are getting closer to finding out more about the worlds history. I watch the show, The Curse of Oak Island, and have since the show began. Because we have not had anything like that in this area happen, I would watch all these places around us find ancient ruins and burial sites. Nothing here. I was hooked and still am. It can be a controversial show. But its extremely interesting what they have come up with. I researched about the different leads they had. I scoured the archives, whatever I could find. There were things that started to click. There was a lot of movement between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia during the 1600s and for hundreds of years prior. The history of John gyles was a very insightful read with a lot of information. It tells of his time in captivity with the Maliseet. They travelled the rivers and lakes and created routes to get from the ocean up into the middle of the province of New Brunswick, to Boston and Maine and up to Montreal. They traded from the coast and supplied other countries with resources available here. This became a destination for other countries who wanted to get to Montreal. It wasn't that easy to access and very little detailed written evidence of the routes have been found. Only trails of artifacts that are slowly disappearing. This is something we will discuss in a later post.
Take advantage of resources. The more you look into the archives, look at maps, old maps and current, compare them with lidar and crown land. You can start to put a bigger picture together, with a lot more pieces to look for.
I think the more we come together and teach eachother, collaborate with similar researchers, we would get further faster. If you wish to submit any photos of neat places you've found in Eastern Canada, or have any questions, you are more than welcome to reach out.
*we will not give away or sell your images without permission. Images may be used for blog posts, educational purposes and to assist in identifying other objects.