Loyalists in the closet

John Trumbull’s "Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker Hill".
(Boston Museum of Fine Arts/BOSTON MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS)

On a recent Facebook forum someone I don't know commiserated with me for having Loyalist ancestors. My first reaction was to laugh. I mean, I'm a white woman with a 400 year family history in a nation founded on genocide and slavery. If Loyalists were the worst my family tree had to offer, I'd be thrilled.

I'm extremely grateful that some of my ancestors, and many other men and women of the time, chose to fight for our independence, but it is laughable to think that that choice was obvious, except with 20/20 hindsight (and not necessarily even then). After all, freedom and justice are wonderful values to fight for, but so are loyalty and patriotism, both of which motivated those who supported the British crown. Furthermore, while some of the liberties our ancestors fought for are rightly enshrined as fundamental human rights, some points of contention between us and the British, like slavery and white expansion into Native lands, were cases where we were definitely on the wrong side of history.

I have a post listing of all my ancestors who served in the American Revolution. But what about my Loyalist ancestors? I want to create a list of them, too, not, perhaps, out of pride, but to acknowledge this face of our past. What I've found is that Loyalists are surprisingly hard to trace. While organizations like the Daughters of the American Revolution provide "proven" genealogies to link us back to the soldiers who fought on the side of independence, there is no such organization that does the same for Loyalists (at least, not one so well-funded and comprehensive). In fact, I don't have proof that any of my ancestors fought for the British, there's just the suspicious coincidence that many on the Kinney line moved to Canada during or after the war, and they were particularly concentrated in the areas of Nova Scotia where the Loyalists were resettled. I've decided to focus some real effort on this question now, however, and will update as I find information.