Branch
Branch is a small community of approximately 400 people located in St. Mary's Bay on the Cape Shore of Newfoundland's Avalon Peninsula. The first permanent settler to the area was Thomas Nash-- a fisherman and boat builder from County KiIlkenny in Ireland. He arrived on the Southern Shore in 1765, to the Calvert region but eventually settled in the Branch area. He had five sons and two daughters, who grew up in Branch and helped to form the foundation of what would become a well-established fishing community. Many descendents of the Nash family continue to live in Branch to this day.
The Branch inventory is a collection of photographs and associated information on the places in and around Branch, St. Mary’s Bay. The collection focuses on place names and their history as a way to portray the close relationship between people, land and ocean. Examples of interesting place names in Branch include the Gut, Naked Man, Landwash, and Back of the Beach. The intangible cultural heritage of Branch is centered around how the people in community interact with nature. This collection provides a glimpse at the vast repository of local knowledge around migration and settlement history, as well as self-sustainability in outport Newfoundland.
