All Our Relations

Recently, I had occasion to go through some of the very earliest parish registers in BC, for the Church of England in Victoria, starting in 1837. I didn’t find the persons I was looking for, but I learned something very interesting about the population at the time: 90% of the men appearing in the registers were white, with a surprisingly large contingent of “Sandwich Islanders” (now Hawaiians) thrown in and, even more surprising, a few Iroquois who were probably working for the Hudson’s Bay Company. In contrast, at least 75% of the women appearing in the register were indigenous, the wives and children of the above white men. So, almost all of our early settler families here on the Island (and elsewhere in BC) are very likely to have at least some indigenous background in their lineage!