1755	Westmoreland County	Parishes prior to 1805	Parishes between 1845 and 1847	1897

Parishes and Communities of Westmoreland 1895	Parishes and Communities of Albert 1895

Our first ancestors to come to British North America were a group of Germans from the Rhine region in southwestern Germany who emigrated first to Philadelphia in the mid 1700's and later came to Monckton Township (encompassing present day Moncton).  A humble group of farmers seeking a better life, they came under contract with Benjamin Franklin and Co., a land speculation company headed by John Hughes of Philadelphia.  The company's five families departed April 26 or 27, 1766 accompanied by the company's agent John Hall, along with six other families from other companies, and arrived at the bend in the Petitcodiac River on June 3, 1766 to settle land that had been vacated by the Acadians, evicted by the British some eleven years previously.  Genealogist Les Bowser's research has unearthed the name of the ship carrying the 11 families, namely the 50-ton single-masted sloop Lovey captained by Nathaniel Shiverick.  As reported by Bowser in the Winter 2008 issue of "Generations", the names of the ship, captain and destination were published in the weekly Pennsylvania Gazette on Apr 24, 1766 (before departure) and May 1, 1766 (after departure).

Les Bowser's book "The Search for Heinrich Stief, A Genealogist on the Loose" (Nimbus Publishing Limited, 2001) reported the discovery of an extremely informative list of the 5 families' members from 1766 which lists the children in descending order of age:

Anna Jones was descended also from Robert Cummings through his daughter Elizabeth. Cummings and four other members of the Nova Scotia Council were granted the large township of Hillsborough south and west of the Petitcodiac River on October 31st, 1765.  Robert's portion was 23,750 acres and he was land agent for the settlement. Nothing is known of his ancestry at this time but he was a nephew of Adam Hoops, an entrepreneurial land speculator from Pennsylvania.  Cummings fathered a child with Rosanna Trites, who was the daughter of Jacob Trites mentioned above. This daughter, Elizabeth Cummings, was born in 1770, possibly in Monckton.  (Unfortunately, Cummings thereafter returned to Baltimore, Maryland where it appears he had a wife in the wings!  He built an estate outside Baltimore called "Monckton Mills").

Another ancestor was Robert John Colpitts.  Robert first came over from England in 1775 on the ship Jenny in search of a better livelihood, landing at Fort Cumberland.  He returned to England to collect his family but their final emigration was delayed until 1783 after the American Revolution had died down.  They settled an area near the mouth of the Little River, a tributary south of the Petitcodiac.  When New Brunswick was established in 1784 this area was still contained within Westmorland County. 

In 1903, the Little River post office was renamed Colpitts Settlement in honour of the by-then well-established Colpitts family.

West of here, in 1808, Charles Jones (the grandson of Carl Schantz mentioned above) and his wife Deborah Somers (granddaughter of Matthias Sommer) settled on the Pollett River, in Salisbury Parish.  Presumably that is where his son Abner was born four years later.  (Charles Jones and his father Henry were buried in the Old Pioneer Cemetery on Grub Road, between Pollett River and Little River.)  In 1835 Abner would marry Adelia Colpitts, granddaughter of Robert Colpitts, and later move from Salisbury Parish to Moncton where their youngest daughter Anna Adelia Jones was born in 1857.  Abner Jones' home address is marked on an 1862 Moncton map on the north side of Main St. just east of the "European and North American Railway" tracks.

John Givan first came to St. John, New Brunswick in the 1820's where he was a merchant on Water Street. At that time St. John was a busy port settlement with a population of 8,488. He chartered ships to bring goods and passengers to and from Ireland. Later he settled back in Nova Scotia where the rest of his family lived, but three of his children later returned to New Brunswick as follows:
William Roger Givan went to St. John where he married Mary Elizabeth Rising and later settled in Moncton. 
Mary Givan moved to Moncton where she married Charles Jones, a son of Abner. 
Captain Henry Peel Givan likely moved first to St. John and then to Moncton where he married his brother-in-law's younger sister, Anna Adelia Jones.  They later moved to Shediac Cape, north of Shediac. William Roger, Mary and Henry Peel are buried in Elmwood Cemetery in Moncton along with members of their families.

This map shows Shediac Cape, an ocean front community north of Shediac.  This is where ship captain Henry Peel Givan settled with his wife Anna Adelia Jones and their children.  As well, Reverend A.F.B. Burt moved here with his wife Matilda Sutherland and two children Frances and Percy in 1893.  Here young Harry Edward Givan met Frances Burt, and much later they were destined to marry and settle in Toronto, Ontario in 1929.