Hannay, James

• DICTIONARY OF CANADIAN BIOGRAPHY ARTICLE: D. G. Bell, “RAYMOND, WILLIAM ODBER,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 15, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003. https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/raymond_william_odber_15E.html
• DCB profile notes:
  • HANNAY, JAMES, lawyer, newspaper editor, and writer; b. 22 April 1842 in Richibucto, N.B., son of the Reverend James Hannay and Jane Salter; m. 1864 Margaret Ross, and they were without issue; d. during the night of 11–12 Jan. 1910 in Saint John, N.B., and was buried in Fredericton.
  • The senior James Hannay emigrated as a Presbyterian minister to eastern New Brunswick in 1833, but returned in 1845 to Scotland, where his son James spent much of his youth. The junior Hannay was back in New Brunswick by the late 1850s, however, finishing his education at the Saint John Grammar School. After a brief connection with the dry-goods establishment of John Boyd and Thomas Wilder Daniel, Hannay was articled to an uncle, the distinguished Saint John lawyer David Shank Kerr. He was made an attorney on 15 Oct. 1866 and called to the bar on 12 Oct. 1867. In the latter year he succeeded John Campbell Allen as official reporter of the Supreme Court; he held the position until 1873, producing what are now numbered as volumes 12 and 13 of the New Brunswick Reports.
  • Though he spent more than 25 years in active journalism, Hannay lived long enough to see his reputation as an historian overshadow his newspaper connection. His early writing – an edition of John Gyles’s captivity narrative (1875) and a history of Acadia (1879) – reflects a typical late-romantic enthusiasm for native peoples and for the French regime. Here his assiduity in “trac[ing] every statement to its original source, and . . . accept[ing] no fact from a printed book at second hand where it was possible to avoid doing so” brought to his work a firmness of expression that often gave way to mere historical journalism in later writings. By the 1890s his interest had shifted forward in time, to the loyalists. William Odber Raymond, who was staking out loyalist New Brunswick as his own territory, found Hannay’s work disconcertingly anti-American, though a “wholesome antidote” to the hagiographic treatment usually accorded the patriots.
• Great Grandson of Proven Loyalist in the Loyalist Directory – https://uelac.ca/loyalist-directory/detail/?wpda_search_column_id=4426
• Find a GRAVE: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/204496188/james-hannay