Healys and Crosbys from Massachusetts to Chebogue, Yarmouth, Nova Scotia

From Cape Code to Nova Scotia to Beverly, Massachusetts

My ancestor Joseph Edwin Healey arrived in Massachusetts from Nova Scotia sometime between his marriage in 1848 and the birth of his first child in Beverly, in 1852. I’m not sure if he arrived on a boat, but being a mariner, he probably sailed to his new home with his new bride. He is listed as a sailor or mariner on his children’s birth records in Beverly, and as a fisherman on the 1860 Federal Census records.

His wife was Matilda Weston, also born in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. Her father was Zadoc Weston, a direct descendant of Edmund Weston of Duxbury, Massachusetts, who was apprenticed to John Winslow. There was much intermarriage between the Westons and Mayflower families. It is from this side of the family that I gained seven Mayflower ancestors. These families removed to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia as part of the Planter Movement. They received free land upon the removal of the French Protestants in the wake of the French and Indian War. In the Old Cemetery at Chebogue Town Point, near Yarmouth, I found the gravestones of these families.

The Plymouth County farmers who removed to Nova Scotia received land for farming, but it must have been a very rough existence, because within two or three generations, my lineage came back to Massachusetts. Several years ago we took a family vacation to Nova Scotia, and I was able to visit the towns, churches and cemeteries where my predecessors once lived. Although it was beautiful, Yarmouth was also rocky, bleak and poor farming country. Some stayed, but some returned to New England.

Joseph and Matilda lived at 43 Bartlett St., Beverly, and their daughter, and then their granddaughter raised their families there. My mother remembers visiting her grandmother there. I was born in Beverly, and every time we passed Bartlett St. my mother would say “That’s Nana’s house!” Using the street view on Google maps I can still visit there.

Old Cemetery at Chebogue Town Point, Nova Scotia
GPS coordinates N43 46.61 W 66 05.907
Behind the Chebogue Congregational Church

Epitaph of Comfort Healy (Joseph Edwin Healey’s grandfather):
In memory of
Mr. Comfort Healy
who died May 15, 1821
Aged 67
Hear what the voice from Heaven proclaims
For all the pious dead
Sweet is the savior of their names
and soft their sleeping bed
Them while ye hearing heart strings break
How sweet my minutes roll
Immortal paleness on my cheek
And glory in my soul

Also a Chebogue
(a new memorial was raised above the original stones of Jonathan and Hannah Crosby, Matilda Weston’s great grandparents, because the originals were illegible)

Jonathan Crosby
1703-1782
Hannah Crosby
1704-1791
Came to Chebogue
June 11, 1761

Jonathan Crosby came to Chebogue, Yarmouth County, Nova Scotia from Mansfield, Massachusetts, via Saybrook, Connecticut in Jun 1761, and settled on what was afterwards called Crocker's Point. The Crosbys with six other families sailed in a small vessel up the coast and into the harbor at Chebogue. He died at Chebogue on the 26th July 1782, aged 78 years and 10 months, his wife surviving him. The Yarmouth church records give a list of people who had been members "in full communion of some church heretofore" and among these original members were "Jonathan Crosby and Hannah his wife, members of the First Church in Mansfield, New England, the Rev. Richard Salter, Pastor." (New York Genealogical and Biographical Record, January 1941)