My family’s roots run to Stoney Island, in Shelburne County, Nova Scotia — fishing
country, where a surname can be spelled three ways in the same church register and
nobody thought twice about it.
Salt Water Roots began with a search of my own — not for money, but for people.
I set out to find my father’s birth parents, and when I finally found them,
another door opened: I wanted to know my grandmother’s birth parents too.
Working through the records, I learned how easily a person disappears from them —
not because nothing exists, but because their name sits under a spelling nobody
tried. A Mac that became a Mc. A maiden name nobody wrote down. A name recorded
a hundred years ago, waiting for someone to ask for it the right way.
In the end, the searching worked: I found my father’s birth parents, and
found my grandmother’s father, along with answers to many other
long-unanswered questions about my own family. That is what this work can do —
and it is why Salt Water Roots exists: to do the same for other families.
Finding my family gave me what I had been missing my whole life: roots. For the
first time, I felt part of something much larger than myself — a long line of
people who worked these waters and passed my name down to me. And the calling I
had always felt to the ocean finally made sense. It was never wanderlust. It was
blood. Salt water runs through my veins — it always had. I was only ever finding
my way back to it.
That search became this business. I help Nova Scotia families — and the lawyers
working to settle their estates — run the search properly: every variant, every
registry, every result written down. Whether the answer is a found balance or a
documented negative, it is an answer you can rely on, and file.
Robin Bond
Founder · Salt Water Roots Genealogy
