One of the things one reads when doing Nova Scotian Genealogy is that people who went there from the colonies did so exclusively as loyalists. If you do any amount of research or reading on the subject, you find out how quickly this is not true. In notes I just received on my Pratts in Nova Scotia it quotes from a 1930s letter from an Esther Pratt to a cousin Clara Pratt in Texas. In part it reads: "John Pratt who married Martha Archibald had fled the colonies along with the Archibalds and others to Nova Scotia because they were loyal to England and did not want to fight with the colonists for indepenedence."
This statement is demonstrably untrue since the Archibalds moved to Nova Scotia in the early to mid 1760s. The conclusion of the French & Indian War had made Nova Scotia an English colony and the French moved out, thus opening the land to New England settlers. These people are called planters. Some came from New England such as the Archibalds and Thompsons, about whom I've written, while others came directly from Ireland (such as my ancestors the Spencers) and some from Scotland. The loyalists came much later in the late 1770s and in the 1780s.
One cannot discount the possibility of John Pratt who first appears in records in 1791 as being a loyalist, but he certainly married the daughter of a planter, so there is some reason to think he was in Nova Scotia earlier and for another reason.
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