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The earliest documentation of Joseph Carpenter and Hannah (Jeffreys) on PEI occurs with the register of the baptisms of their nine children in the St. Paul’s Anglican Church records. Documentation within these baptismal records, provides us with a little background of Joseph and Hannah.

Their first child, James, born in 1791, was baptized in Charlottetown in 1799. In this record, beside Joseph’s names in brackets is the word “Lascar.” A "lascar" has been defined as "an Asiatic seaman, native of the British Empire," but the term is also applied to the many seafaring inhabitants of East Africa. Most of these are the Christian inhabitants of Goa, in Portuguese East Africa, who excel as ship's cooks. the word derives from the Persian "lashkar," meaning an army or a camp. In time it came to mean a soldier, and in the seventeenth century it was first applied to sailors. When their second son William was baptized in 1796, beside Joseph and Hannah’s names was written, “Parents born in the East Indies.” St. Paul’s Anglican Church records also document Hannah’s death, which occurred on the 10 October 1840, at seventy-nine years of age.

The nine children of Joseph and Hannah have all been traced. Marriage references for eight of the nine children are documented, as well as their children’s marriages. In the 1901 census, only one Carpenter man was living on the Island, William Carpenter who lived in Charlottetown with his mother Frances. Today, the only Carpenter families living on the Island live in the Rollo Bay and Souris area and are descended from the Island’s early Acadian settlers. Research has uncovered, however, that descendants of Joseph and Hannah’s daughter, Hannah, who married James Fisk, still live on the Island. Hannah and James eventually settled in Grand Tracadie where many of their descendants are buried in the St. Bonaventure Roman Catholic cemetery.

Surnames appearing within the descendants of Joseph Carpenter and Hannah Jeffreys:
  • Beer
  • Corsage
  • Fisk
  • Howe
  • Johnson
  • Laurice
  • MacCartney
  • Potter
Legend