Robert Carter Journals – 1832-1852

The Process of Transcribing and Digitizing the Journals of Robert Carter for the Period 1832-1852


Robert Carter (1790-1852) was a merchant and magistrate who was born in Dartmouth, Devon, England on October 12th 1790. Although his family had resided in Ferryland on the Southern Shore of Newfoundland for three generations at this time, it was not uncommon for many family members to maintain dual residency, keeping one foot in England and one in Newfoundland, as it were. Such was the case for his father, also named Robert Carter, and his mother, Elizabeth Harris Howe. Indeed it is believed that his mother may never have come to Newfoundland, though his father certainly resided there, as did his grandparents, the first Robert Carter in this line and his wife Ann Wylly.

Robert Carter was a 1st cousin of my 3rd great grandmother, Anne Sanders.

Through multiple generations, this family was involved in the commerce of the fishing and shipping trades. But also, they served in various legal and governmental capacities, as was common for the merchants in Newfoundland outports in those days.

It was therefore the case that this particular Robert Carter was appointed as a Stipendiary Magistrate, Justice of the Peace and “Keeper of the Rolls”, amongst many related governmental appointments, for the Ferryland district. And, as was the custom for such figures, Robert Carter maintained a diary or occurrence book for the period between 1832 and 1852, until a few days before his early death on October 7th, 1852.

These diaries, or those of them that remain, were recorded in Twenty-three small, hardcover record books of the kind that might have been used for the financial records of a fish merchant, such as he was. The three missing volumes were lost at some point over the intervening 150 years. At that time, Jean Carter Stirling, Robert’s second great granddaughter, took an interest in the diaries, which had been rediscovered in the attic of a cousin of hers, John Carter, MLA. She borrowed them and began the painstaking task of transcribing every volume still available. When the task was completed, along with a friend and distant Carter relative, Ida White Michael, and additional assistance of Dr. Jim Tuck and students at MUN, she prepared two indices, one covering the names of every person mentioned in the diaries and one doing likewise for all of the shipping and fishing vessels mentioned. Finally, to make the product as complete as possible, she also extracted and commented upon the entries from the Daily News in 1928 which excerpted selections from these diaries considered timely or interesting, and which were composed under the nom de plume, of Viator, who was widely believed to be the publisher of the Daily News, the Honourable J. A. Robinson.

Having completed this monumental task, Jean Carter Stirling chose the Centre for Newfoundland Studies (CNS) as the most appropriate institution to entrust with maintaining her Magnum Opus. CNS retains the original typescript.

Recognizing that a way of searching the body of work by electronic means was vital for researchers, in 2021, I used modern scanning and optical character recognition software to make page by page text files for each page in Jean Carter Stirling’s three volume transcript.

The original Robert Carter diaries have been donated by the family to the Provincial Archives Division of The Rooms Corporation, as has a photocopy of the Jean Carter Stirling transcript.

In 2014 and 2015, three members of the S.S. Daisy Legal History Committee of the Law Society of Newfoundland and Labrador (Gerald Barnable, Christopher Curran and Melvin Baker) re-transcribed the diaries and published them in two volumes as A Ferryland Merchant – Magistrate : The Journal and Cases of Robert Carter, Esq. J.P., Parts I and II. This treatment gave greater attention to the legal aspects of the diaries.

Jean Carter Stirling’s transcript and my parallel text versions of each page were published on the Memorial University of Newfoundland’s Digital Archives Initiative (DAI) on July 26, 2021, with the able assistance of the DAI administrator, Don Walsh and the support of Colleen Field, Division Head of the Centre for Newfoundland Studies. Soon afterwards, with the kind permission of Greg Walsh, the Provincial Archivist and Director of the Provincial Archives Division, I made digital photographs of each page of the Robert Carter Journals and these now accompany Jean’s revised text on the DAI. The link to this collection is given here:

https://collections.mun.ca/digital/collection/robertcarter

To facilitate even more the browsing of these journals, here are my complete Word file text transcripts of each of Jean Carter Stirling’s work:

ROBERT CARTER’S JOURNALS – Volume I – Complete

ROBERT CARTER’S JOURNALS – Volume 2- Complete

APPENDICES – Complete

 

An Annotated Transcript of the Journals of Robert Carter of Ferryland, Newfoundland


In 2023, I came to the conclusion that it would be worthwhile to reorganize the transcripts of the Robert Carter Journals prepared by Jean Carter Stirling into published paperback books, with the addition of copious explanatory notes on the people and events mentioned in those Journals and some added background and relevant images. This work was completed in 20 volumes, produced via the Kindle Direct Publishing platform and available on Amazon.com.

In this latest series, the text is based exclusively upon Jean’s earlier transcript. The Law Society’s transcript was referenced only in a few instances where there was significant difficulty in interpretation of the handwriting in the journals.

This “Annotated Transcript” subdivides Jean’s original transcript to correspond with each of Robert Carter’s surviving Journals to form a series of 20 annotated transcripts, including the entries in the two indices which are associated with each volume.

I am greatly indebted to Greg Walsh, Provincial Archivist and Director of Archives at The Rooms, for permission to use the page images from the original journals, which form an integral part of this series.

A word of explanation concerning formatting is in order. When Jean prepared her transcript, she attempted to mirror the spelling used by Robert Carter for the most part but chose to use her own capitalisation, punctuation and paragraphing to reflect modern usage. Since this new annotated version includes both the image of the original page from Robert Carter’s diary and the transcript prepared by Jean, one method or the other needed to be chosen rather than having a discrepancy between the two. In earlier publications I have prepared based upon old diaries I have found it preferable to reflect as closely as possible, not only the spelling (antiquated or in some cases erroneous as it might be) but also, to the largest extent possible, the forms of capitalisation, punctuation or lack thereof, and paragraphing, or lack thereof, used by the original author. I have therefore adjusted the text from Jean’s transcript to reflect this method. In other respects, I have only made very minor adjustments to Jean’s text where minor errors were found to have crept into her transcript.

Finally, special thanks is owed to Jean’s children, Anne and Scott Stirling, for allowing their mother’s magnum opus to be prepared in this form. On April 25, 2023, they provided their consent in these words:

“Chris Morry has requested and received permission from Jean Carter Stirling’s children and estate to reproduce the transcription and notes of Robert Carter Diaries of Ferryland, NL (24 August 1932-05 October 1852) as part of his publication, An Annotated Transcript of the Journals of Robert Carter of Ferryland, (working title) covering the period mentioned.”

 

Find Us

Address
204 Kippewa Drive
Ottawa, ON, K1S 3G3
1-613-219-9193

Site Information

You are visiting the website of the Morry family of Newfoundland, ex Devon

Our Purpose

We hope that this site will serve as a link and a gathering place for the scattered remnants of the Morry Family, whose ancestor, Matthew Morry, came from Stoke Gabriel via Dartmouth Devon, England, to Newfoundland to make a living in the fishing trade some time before Sept. 1784. At that time we know he was granted land for a fishing room in Caplin Bay (now Calvert) near Ferryland, a tiny fishing village on Newfoundland’s Southern Shore that we, his descendants, think of as our family seat.

All information on this website is © Christopher Morry 2003-2024
Home

Where to find me

Click to open a larger map