A lot of the information on this site is derived from public internet sources. Here are some of the sites that I have found useful.

• Vital statistics online for the Province of Nova Scotia This site displays images of records of births, marriages and deaths recorded in Nova Scotia in parts of the 1800's and early 1900's. Records were not required to be kept in some of those years, and the existing records are released 50 and 75 and 100 years after the event, depending upon the type of record. However, for some periods they can be extremely revealing. You will have to download a free viewer to see the pages, but it works well.

  If you are searching Huestis' be sure to check all of the variants of the name: Huestis, Heustis, Hustis, etc.

  There is an un-connected Huestis family based in Yarmouth County, descended from William Huestis who emigrated to Nova Scotia to Yarmouth in 1798. They are related to the Wallace folk but not closely. There is a Mrs Caroline Huestis in the Parrsboro area, who married a John Huestis, railway contractor from New Brunswick. That John Huestis is descended from Philip Huestis, a Loyalist who settled in the Saint John area.

  There is a Thomas Huestis and family in the Annapolis Valley, but to my eyes it looks like the name is actually "Houston". My favourite odd Huestis entry is the record of the death of Edward Huestis in Halifax. He was born in England, and the cause of his death is given as "suddenly". He and his wife sold liquor on the Halifax waterfront, so I wonder what caused his "sudden" death.

• Canadian census records for 1901 and 1911 This is a lovely site. Volunteer researchers have indexed the censuses for the entire country (as it then existed). You can search for names of interest, see a text facsimile of the census sheets, or view an image of the actual sheet itself. Again, be sure to search for all variants.

• Cumberland GenWeb Site This site is just full of useful information, especially the census records. A gentleman named Don Lewis has transcribed census records from 1861 to 1891 for Cumberland County, and has released these as spreadsheet files. I find them very useful because one can view households: I highlight the entire spreadsheet, and then sort first on Census district, second on household number, and third on age (descending). The resulting sort gives me the households as units, so I can see a maiden sister living with a married sister, for example (with two different surnames). Or I can see who has domestic servants. Many thanks to Don Lewis for this effort.

• Canadian Directories This site has lots of indexed and searchable city and provincial directories, which were almost the pre-telephone equivalent of a phonebook. The directories for Nova Scotia and for Halifax have been very useful. Edward Huestis (above) and his widow sold liquor near the waterfront for most of the 1880's and 1890's. I don't think that they were from our line. :~)

• Cyrus Black's little book. Writing in 1885, Cyrus Black published a thorough history of his ancestor William Black and his descendants in Cumberland County and beyond. The book is about the size of a pocketbook, hardcovered, and delightful to read. There is a copy in the reference section of the Cumberland Regional Library in Amherst, NS. The complete text of this book has been transcribed and in available on the internet; our family appears in Chapter 4, when Joshua Huestis married Sarah Black.

More to follow as time permits . . .