About

I'm a twelfth-generation Nova Scotian, and I've been writing software for 35 years.

Ten of those years were spent working on Legacy Family Tree, where I learned what genealogists actually need from a program — which is not always what a developer would guess.

MudCreek has been going since 2000. The utilities came first, each doing one job properly. Bricks is the newest, and the biggest thing I've built.

Why MudCreek?

History of Mud Creek, Nova Scotia, Canada

Long before there was a Mud Creek, there was Mtaban — the Mi'kmaq name for this place, translating roughly as "mud-catfish catching-ground." The mud was in the name from the very beginning.

My Acadian ancestors settled the Minas area around 1680 and did something remarkable with all that mud: they walled it out, using aboiteaux to drain the salt marsh into some of the richest farmland in North America. Sections of those seventeenth-century dykes still hold back the Fundy tides today. That world ended in September 1755, when roughly 2,000 Acadians were deported from the area.

New England Planters (my wife's ancestors) took up the vacated lands after 1760, settling here in Horton Township. The cluster of houses around the tidal inlet got called, with zero ceremony, Mud Creek.

The creek drained Wolfville Ridge into a shallow inlet on the Minas Basin — later billed as "the smallest registered harbour in the world." Small it may have been, but it worked. Ferries ran from here as early as 1764. Daniel Bigelow built ships beside the harbour and sent vessels to the Grand Banks. By the early 1800s, the bowsprits of ships in the inner harbour hung out over the road.

Then, in 1830, the name became an embarrassment to the local gentry. As the story goes, two granddaughters of Judge Elisha DeWolf worked on their uncle, Elisha DeWolf Jr. — who happened to be the postmaster — until he agreed something better was needed. On August 13, 1830, he petitioned to have the post office renamed. The new name honoured his father, patriarch of a family so thick on the ground here that the choice was obvious. Mud Creek became Wolfville.

The town changed fast after that. A Baptist academy, opened in 1828, became Acadia University by 1838. The railway arrived in 1868, and its bridge closed off the old harbour for good. Steamers worked the basin for decades — ending with the Kipawo — every departure timed to high tide. Wolfville incorporated in 1893.

The inner harbour was filled in to become Duck Pond, then Willow Park. If you've walked there, you've walked on Mud Creek's harbour.

And nearly 200 years after the DeWolfs got the name scrubbed off the post office, the town still throws Mud Creek Days every summer.

You can change a name on paper. The place keeps its own record.

That's the business I'm in too — names, families, and the records that refuse to stay buried. Hence MudCreek.