The priests of St. Peter's Roman Catholic Church, Sheet Harbour during the period covered by the transcriptions of the parish marriage and baptismal records - 1857 - 1910.

The accuracy, particularly of spellings of names, is very much a function of the attention the priests paid to details. Some were more administratively minded than others. It is also a function of their familiarity with the language (much of it heavilly accented) of their parisioners. One priest who served here and in a number of other parishes of Nova Scotia, Martin(us) Maas, was an especially creative speller. Among other interesting things he spelled Tracey, Thrussy.

Robert Kim Stevens, in his book "The Families of Ship Harbour", states the following about the early history of St. Peter's Church and its priests:

"One of the "Romish chapels" was the Roman Catholic chapel at Lower Ship Harbour, served out of St. Anselm's, West Chezzetcook, until about 1857 when a glebe house was built at Lower Ship Harbour and occupied respectively by Revs. D. O'Connor, Alexander McIssac, Thomas Daly and Martin Maas, the later a Belgian missionary. The chapel and glebe house burned down on 5 Feb. 1871 and were not rebuilt; Rev. Maas was replaced by Rev. *Thomas Butler who resided instead at Sheet Harbour."