Provincial
Archives of New Brunswick
Database of Daniel F. Johnson's
Vital Statistics from New
Brunswick Newspapers
I
was hoping to hear some of Grampy’s really interesting stories but
instead tonight, he seemed to be in a pensive mood of reflecting on his
life.
As the smoke curled from his pipe, he remarked, “I have been doing a
lot of thinking. I wonder in the years to come, who will remember the
details about my life?" “Who will remember that I hauled hay to
Saint John by horse and wagon?” “Except for my tombstone, who will
remember my name?”
The folk doing genealogy will remember Danny Johnson’s name for many,
many years to come due to his work in compiling Vital Statistics from
New Brunswick Newspapers. This project started out in 1982 with Danny
being the chair of a group of members of the New Brunswick Genealogical
Society who began work on extracting vital statistics from the
newspapers of 1784 to 1815. When the group disbanded three years later,
having completed four volumes to cover the years up to 1834, Danny
continued the project on his own, turning it into a commercial
operation, if anything so modestly remunerative could be called
commercial. He copied out notices of births, marriages, deaths,
ship wrecks, crimes, and many other events containing names that might
further the search for an ancestor or other individual, compiled these
into books, and marketed them to libraries and private researchers
around North America. By the time of his death in 2005, he had
compiled and published 102 volumes of data from 75 newspapers covering
the period up to 1896. Now, a database containing all of the
information in these 102 volumes has been mounted on the web site of
the Provincial Archives of New Brunswick.
Who was Danny Johnson? According to the information on the web site, he
was born in 1953 in Fort Fairfield, Maine, the youngest child of Fay
(Tregunno) and Verdell C. Johnson. He grew up in Perth-Andover, New
Brunswick, and graduated from Southern Victoria High School in 1971. In
1975, he obtained a Bachelor of Business Administration degree from the
University of New Brunswick and settled into employment in the
commercial and insurance fields. However, in the mid-1980s, his
love of history and genealogy prompted him to give up his day job in
favor of compiling the Vital Statistics and taking on related
projects. These are too numerous to list, but they included books
of tombstone inscriptions, works on the military service of New
Brunswickers in the US Civil War and South African War, and updates of
various older genealogical works.
All of Danny’s work is of lasting value, but it is for the massive
vital statistics project that he will continue to be known to most
researchers – a body of information which Professor W. D. Hamilton
described in his 1997 Dictionary of Miramichi Biography as “a godsend
to historians, biographers, and genealogists alike,” and which a
correspondent of mine referred to as “unique in scope, going far beyond
any newspaper statistics project undertaken elsewhere in Canada or the
United States.” In making the fruits of his labors freely
available, Danny’s heirs and those who conceived of mounting the
database as a tribute to him have made a huge contribution to the
Internet services provided by the PANB. There was probably no archival
site more informative than the PANB’s before this addition, and the new
database secures the PANB’s position as a pioneering institution on the
Internet, with a world class inventory of offerings.
Database searches can be done by surname by using the Name Index or by
Full-Text Search which enables limiting by county, place, year and
newspaper. In such a brief space, it is impossible to do justice
to all the potentialities. Suffice it to say that the Provincial
Archives of New Brunswick deserves a tip of the hat from every one of
the thousands of researchers in the province and throughout the world
who will be making use of this marvelous resource.
**
PANB web
site address is www.archives.gnb.ca
Daniel F.
Johnson's
New Brunswick Newspaper Vital Statistics
Web site
address
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