“It’s all down to my great-great-grandfather,” explains historian Lucille Campey (MPhil History 1987) about why she became a leading expert on emigration to Canada. “He left Scotland for Nova Scotia in the early 1800s. I wanted to discover his story and this led me into Canadian immigration history.”
Twelve books written by Lucille have now been published in Canada about the Scottish, Irish and English who left their homes behind to settle lands across the Atlantic and the thirteenth will be published next year. Lucille, herself, crossed the Atlantic in the reverse direction in 1967 when she left her native Canada to marry her English husband. Her MPhil dealt with the medieval settlement patterns of villages in the north of England. “Acquiring the techniques needed for my dissertation provided a grounding for my later immigration research,” said Lucille. In 2016, she was awarded the prestigious Prix du Quebec in recognition of her ongoing contribution to Canadian immigration studies.