twentieth century as the “McGinnis place.”
Finally, I consulted a volume titled Families of Western Shore, recommended to me by the South Shore Genealogical Society as the most accurate source available. There was a lengthy section in the most recent edition of the book on the “McInnis-McGinnis” clan that began in the late eighteenth century and ended in the late twentieth, when the book was published. The first entry described the arrival in Nova Scotia of a Donald Daniel McInnes, a “Planter” of Welsh descent, who came to Chester from New England with, among others, “the Vaughan Brothers” in or around the year 1772. McInnes (whose family name became McGinnis at some point before the end of the eighteenth century) was described as having “settled on Oak Island.” The only confusing entry was one showing that McInnes had been awarded a Crown grant of one hundred acres near Chester in 1784, which suggested that was when he came to Nova Scotia, rather than with the Shoreham Grant immigrants who had arrived in 1772.
My bearings were further shaken when Karlie Morash, who runs the museum on Oak Island, gave me a copy of a document that had been prepared by “the McGinnis family” that she said showed Daniel McGinnis had been thirty-six years old at the time of the Money Pit’s discovery. These family members had relied mainly on three documents: an “Application for Compensation for losses” suffered during the American Revolutionary War that was dated April 7, 1785; a related submission “To the Honourable Lord Commissioner of his Majesty’s Treasury” dated February 17, 1785; and the application for a memorial to Donald McInnes, “Captain of the North Carolina Militia.” On the basis of those, the family had created a time line for Donald Daniel MacInnes (yes, yet another spelling) that followed him from his birth in Scotland in 1759 through his immigration to America in 1770, his residence with his parents in North Carolina, his enlistment in the ranks of the loyalists in 1776 when the revolution broke out, his service under General Angus McDonald and then with Lord Charles Cornwallis, his command of a gunboat in Charleston, South Carolina, and his eventual relocation to Nova Scotia (in or around the year 1785). The final event listed on the time line was the man’s attendance of the baptism for his grandson Johan James MacInnes in Chester in 1795.
I was flummoxed. When I went back to Families of the Western Shore, however, I found that the genealogy in that volume passed from Donald Daniel McInnes, to a “Daniel Jr.” who had “found ‘The Money Pit Site’ in 1795.” The only explanation I could come up with was that either Karlie or the McGinnis descendants had confused Daniel McGinnis, discoverer of the Money Pit, with his father. But what about the claim that family records showed “Donald MacInnes” attending the baptism of his grandchild in Chester in 1795? That might be accounted for by the other available eighteenth-century document relating to either Donald or Daniel McInnes in Nova Scotia (found in the archives of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), a copy of the record of the marriage of Donald Daniel McGinnis to Maria Barbara Saller at St. James’ Anglican Church in Lunenburg on September 8, 1795. Daniel Jr. was supposed to have been sixteen when he found the Money Pit a few months before that date, but a marriage later that year hardly seemed out of the question, given that his friend John Smith had been only fifteen when he married. But what about the alleged baptism of the grandson of Donald MacInnes? I went back to Families of the Western Shore, where, with both a sense of relief and a conviction that I could be done chasing the ghost of Daniel McGinnis, I discovered a reference to a document recording the baptism of one James Johan McGinnis, son of Daniel and Maria Barbara, in Chester on July 26, 1797.
I was satisfied that I had a working model of who Daniel McGinnis had been and where he had come from: the son of a Scottish or Welsh father who came to America as a boy, lived with his family in North Carolina, joined the loyalist side in the Revolutionary War and emigrated to Canada after the British surrender, accepting the grant of one hundred acres near Chester that he worked as a farmer. If Donald Daniel Sr. had been born in 1759, then it made sense that Donald Daniel Jr. might have been born twenty years later in 1779, which would have made him sixteen years old in 1795. The story held up, but only to a point.
It seemed clear that the tale of young Daniel McGinnis rowing out to a mysterious uninhabited island where he was startled by the discovery of a weird depression in the ground was not exactly how things had really happened. In 1951, the Nova Scotia Bureau of Information (a government agency that no longer exists) published the first official account of the Oak Island story. The document’s concise summary of the Money Pit’s discovery reads as follows: “Anthony Vaughan, Jack Smith and Dan McInnes, on a shooting trip to Oak Island from the neighboring mainland, found an aged oak with a sawed short limb from which dangled a stout line and pulley. Under the tree was a depression in the ground, apparently man made.”
Among the many problems with that account is that Oak Island was inhabited in 1795 by John Smith and his family among others. It was possible Smith already owned lot 18 on Oak Island when the Money Pit was discovered at some date after June 26, 1795. (One account of the Pit’s discovery placed the year as 1799.) Daniel McGinnis might have rowed out to the island—almost certainly had rowed out to the island, if he wasn’t already living there—but it could have been for the purpose of visiting his friend John or doing some work for John’s family. Or maybe he was tracking game; Frederick Blair, the dominant figure in the Oak Island treasure hunt from the late nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth and the greatest researcher of the Oak Island story, wrote that McInnes had been “partridge hunting” when he found the Money Pit. Other accounts say that he was cutting trees for either Smith or Vaughan when he stumbled on the anomaly that would launch what has become the longest treasure hunt in human history.
What exactly that anomaly had been was yet another question for which a variety of answers had been offered.
The account of the discovery in Judge DesBrisay’s book read:
McInnes one day discovered a spot that gave evidence of having been visited a good many years earlier. There had been cuttings away of the forest, and oak stumps were visible. One of the original oaks was standing, with a large forked branch extending over the old clearing. To the forked part of this branch, by means of a treenail connecting the fork in a small triangle, was attached an old tackle block. McInnes made known his find to his neighbors.
No mention of a large circular depression. Also, DesBrisay’s account made it sound as if McGinnis was living on the island at the time, as were “his neighbors” Smith and Vaughan. Only when all three went back to the spot the next day did they notice that the ground beneath the tackle block had “settled and formed a hollow,” according to DesBrisay, who wrote that the three “cleared away the young trees, and removed the surface soil for about two feet” before finding the tier of flagstones and the entrance to a shaft.
The first newspaper account written by McCully for the Liverpool Transcript also described McGinnis as initially being curious about the stumps of old oak trees crowned with thick mats of moss and then noticing that the trees growing among the stumps were younger than the other oaks in the forest. The descriptions of “oak stumps” and “young trees” seemed especially significant to me, because, if true, they almost certainly ruled out a number of the theories of Oak Island that had been offered over the years, some of them dating back a thousand years or more. There was no way (and arborists hired by The Curse of Oak Island have confirmed this) that McGinnis would have noticed either the oak stumps or the young trees if the “cutting away of the forest” had occurred centuries earlier. To me, that almost certainly meant that whoever was responsible for the original excavation in that spot had done the work no earlier than the seventeenth century. This considerably shortened the long list of candidates who had been proposed by literally dozens of theorists.
The Colonist articles of 1864, also possibly written by McCully, made less of the oak stumps than of three remaining oak trees that grew in an equilateral triangle around the Money Pit. The articles make it clear that those three trees were what marked the ground between them. The Colonist articles also state that after observing the triangle of trees, McGinnis noticed that the bark of each trunk had letters and symbols carved into it. This description
