Newfoundland's Grand Banks Message Board

Hi, I am Cindy Hardy Sellers from Southport, NC, not new to genealogy, but new to Newfoundland research. I am very impressed with this website and have scoured it for info. Had to research the geography first. The map on the website is a great start, but it is hard to know what is a town, a county (do you have those) etc within the districts. I will be focused on St Marys Bay, Newbridge and Salmonier areas up to 1920. I look forward to accessing census records for prior years, and if there is a resource for them I hope someone will point me to it. Found many of our family in your church records on this site, thanks to all who have provided transcriptions. Please keep up the good work. I will post specifics about our family names in the surname section, and I look forward to hearing from anyone connected or who might help. Perhaps we have info that might help some of you.

Your research friend down South,
Cindy

Hi Cindy,
It's always great to see folk from away on these boards trying to figure out their Newfoundland roots. For someone like yourself, I can see how it would be hard to identify with the geographical terms we use. I find I have the same trouble when tracing things back to England in my own research. To answer your question about counties, we do not have any of those here. Records are usually kept according to individual communities or bays. Since most of the information is based upon church records, there are many instances where a single minister would travel between a number of different smaller outport communities in a particular area, so you may need to find where the parish records were kept for the community you're looking for. Also, many communities or areas have much better and older records than others; it usually depended on the minister and/or church. Another couple of things to take note of are that many of the smaller comunites from years ago no longer exist, or the names have been changed, or there may be many different communities with the same name. This can throw you off course in your research, so the more info you have, the better.
I'm not really familiar with there area of the island that you're researching. Hopefully you can make contact with someone on here who is and who has a wealth of information from there. I've met quite a few people via these boards all with a great deal of info. All the best in your research.

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James Lander

Hi, I live in Colinet St. Mary's Bay and am related to BONIA's in Colinet. My husbands father's sister married a BONIA from Colinet, she was Anne Josephine Downey Bonia, born Aug 31 1908 & died Jan 4 2006. Thats what I have in relation to the BONIA"S but may be able to give you more regarding her family etc.
Linda