whose 1958 book The Oak Island Mystery had made the Money Pit story known outside Nova Scotia: “His age in 1795 is unknown. His origin and parentage is unknown.” So where had the story of the sixteen-year-old boy who discovered the Money Pit come from? From Anthony Vaughan, mostly, it seemed. Vaughan, an old man by the time his memories were recorded for posterity, had been a main source for the first published account of what had taken place on Oak Island, which appeared in the October 16, 1862, edition of the Liverpool Transcript, a now-defunct weekly newspaper that was distributed throughout southwestern Nova Scotia during the mid- and late nineteenth century. Vaughan had actually told his story at length more than twelve years earlier, in an 1849 interview with a devout Presbyterian named Robert Creelman, who was a member of a treasure-hunting group known as the Truro Company. The author who made use of the Creelman interview for the Transcript article was Jothan (sometimes called Jotham) B. McCully, who had been part of both the Truro Company and the Oak Island Association, separate treasure-hunting groups that had worked on Oak Island between 1849 and 1865. McCully may also have written the second and far more detailed published account of the discovery of the Money Pit, which appeared in three consecutive editions of a Halifax triweekly called the Colonist in January 1864, although the author was identified only as a “member” of a team that had searched for treasure on Oak Island in 1861. The Transcript and Colonist articles each had relied on interviews with John Smith (who died in 1857) as well as those Creelman had conducted with Anthony Vaughan, but Smith apparently had been more taciturn than his old friend. Not so Smith’s daughter, Mary, who worked as the housekeeper for Judge Mather Byles DesBrisay, the county magistrate and local eminence who authored History of the County of Lunenburg (originally published in 1870), which included a two-page account of the discovery of the Money Pit that was the first to appear between hard covers. Mary Smith, apparently quite voluble, had told Judge DesBrisay the story from her family’s perspective on multiple occasions.
Those three accounts, published sixty-seven, sixty-nine, and seventy-five years after the putative date of the Money Pit’s discovery, were the core versions of the Oak Island story before Harris’s book was published. There were of course various documents and records dating back to the early nineteenth century that related to the assorted treasure-hunting companies that had formed to attempt the recovery of whatever might be buried on Oak Island. And the scene at the Money Pit had been briefly described in an 1863 volume titled Rambles among the Blue-Noses, written by British author Andrew Learmont Spedon, whose aim was to amuse the people back home with tales from the provincial wilds of eastern Canada. There was also an account of the discovery of the Money Pit written in 1866 by one Israel Longworth, but his work, “History of the County of Colchester,” had never been published. And only a fragment remained of a manuscript written in 1863 by another early treasure hunter, James McNutt, that described the early search for treasure on Oak Island.
So the early story of the treasure hunt on the island was based largely on the recollections of Anthony Vaughan and Mary Smith, along with various others who claimed to have heard it from Daniel McGinnis and John Smith. This paucity of sources and questions about their reliability have fueled rampant speculation about what really happened on Oak Island in those early days, everything from the allegation that the three young men cooked up a story to cover their tracks after finding a huge treasure trove on Oak Island to the claim that McGinnis, Smith, and Vaughan were the front men for a conspiracy of Yankee loyalists operating a smuggling operation out of Oak Island during the Revolutionary War. The evidence offered to back up these and the dozens of other alternative theories of what took place on Oak Island in the last years of the eighteenth century is of course even more meager than the evidence that supports what has become the more or less official version.
R. V. Harris wrote in The Oak Island Mystery that most of what could be actually known about Daniel McGinnis’s background had to be derived from “the origins and lineages” of Vaughan and Smith, whose family histories were much easier to find in Nova Scotia’s early public records. In my opinion, no one was in a better position to make such an assertion than Harris, who had served as the attorney to the two men who drove the treasure hunt on Oak Island for seventy years between 1895 and 1965 and who had inherited and relied on the vast collection of records and documents that now made up the bulk of the huge Oak Island file at the Nova Scotia Archives in Halifax. So I took his advice.
I began with Vaughan. Government and church records established that he was the son of an Anthony Vaughan Sr., who had come to Nova Scotia from Massachusetts in 1768 to claim his piece of the British Crown’s Shoreham Grant: two hundred acres on the mainland almost directly across from Oak Island. Anthony Vaughan Jr. was thirteen years old in 1795, which offered at least some tangential confirmation that his friend Daniel McGinnis probably had been a teenager also. Judge DesBrisay, in his book, described Vaughan and his family as living on the mainland in 1795 and that jibes with what other early writers up to and including R. V. Harris have maintained. But there was little question in my mind that the boy’s family owned land on Oak Island well before the discovery of the Money Pit. There are deeds that show Anthony Vaughan Sr. acquired lots 15 and 17 on Oak Island in 1765 (which wouldn’t seem possible if he had emigrated to Canada in 1768) and lot 14 in 1781. One of Vaughan Sr.’s brothers bought lot 13 in 1781. It is also clear that the Vaughans were operating a lumber mill on the mainland directly across from Oak Island. In 1788 they petitioned the Surveyor General of Woods in the province of Nova Scotia for permission to cut down “Sundry Pine Trees” on nine hundred acres of land for the purpose of farming the land and milling the trees. So there seems little doubt that by 1795 the Vaughan brothers were using or intended to use the trees on their Oak Island properties as timber for their mill and that Anthony Vaughan Jr. must have had some familiarity with the island.
John Smith was almost certainly living on Oak Island in 1795. In fact, he may have been born there, but it appears more likely that he moved to the island in 1786 at the age of eleven. Born on August 20, 1775, he would have been nineteen years old in the spring of 1795 (more support, in my mind, that Daniel McGinnis really was sixteen years old or so at that time). Smith’s family, like Vaughan’s, had come to Mahone Bay as part of the Shoreham Grant immigration. An Edward Smith, who was most likely (though not certainly) an uncle of John Smith’s father, had acquired the title to Oak Island’s lot 19 on March 8, 1768. John Smith himself made a first appearance in the public record on September 28, 1790, when he married (at age fifteen!) one Sarah Floyd. He next publicly registered his existence on June 26, 1795, when he purchased lot 18 on Oak Island from a Chester merchant named Casper Wollenhaupt for £5. It was the plot of land where the Money Pit was located. That purchase seems to have been the main basis for the claim that the Money Pit had been discovered in the late spring of 1795, the assumption being that Smith had bought the property to secure access to the presumed treasure. Not unreasonable, but far from conclusive.
But back to Daniel McGinnis. I was distracted briefly by the claims of a handful of amateur historians (and the subject of Oak Island is beset by literally thousands of amateur historians) who doubted that such a person as Daniel McGinnis had actually ever existed, their claim being that the Smith and Vaughan families had used this fictional character as a front to cover their own secretive activities on the island. Judge DesBrisay had described Daniel McGinnis as one of the earliest settlers on Oak Island, but there is no record of anyone named McGinnis owning property on the island prior to 1795. Some of the doubters pointed out that there was no Daniel McGinnis listed in the records of the poll tax imposed on Nova Scotians by the British Crown in 1791, but that merely suggested to me again that McGinnis probably had been a teenager, because only those over the age of twenty-one were required to pay the poll tax and therefore would be listed in the Crown records. Others who questioned whether McGinnis was a real person also pointed out that no grave marker with his name had ever been found in Lunenburg County. The early newspaper accounts, though, had described McGinnis as having been buried on Oak Island, and there is to this day a collection of rocks on the drumlin where the Money Pit is located that could very well mark his final resting place. A shard of broken stone from that pile was found to have letters and numbers that could have been consistent with the name, the date of birth, and the date of death of a Daniel McGinnis. On top of that, records existed of various McGinnises living on Oak Island throughout the 1800s. And on the southwest end
