Titus Smith Jr. was born on 4 September 1768 in
Granby,
Province of Massachusetts Bay. He was the eldest child of Rev. Titus Smith and Damaris Nash (née Waite). Titus Smith's father, a
Massachusetts native and
Yale College graduate, was an
itinerant minister with a keen interest in scholarly subjects. His mother died in 1779 at age 42, leaving four children, when he was only eleven. Smith's father remained loyal to the British Crown during the American Revolution. At the end of the
American Revolutionary War, the Smiths were among the
Loyalists evacuated from New York and moved to the
Colony of Nova Scotia in 1783. His family moved to a farm in the
Township of Preston, west of
Salmon River, in 1785, when his father assumed the role of elder at the
Sandemanian church in Halifax. In the early 1790s,
Sir John Wentworth, 1st Baronet, the
Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia, gifted the elder Titus Smith a complete collection of the botanical works of Swedish botanist
Carl Linnaeus. This likely inspired both father and son's interest in
botany. Wentworth had known the Smith family in
New England before the revolution. While living in Preston with his father, Smith Jr. read literature, including Shakespeare, studied botany, and worked on land by clearing, felling timber, and building stone walls. He read natural history books mainly in Latin, including
Christiaan Hendrik Persoon's
Synopsis Plantarum and Linnaeus'
Systema Naturae. In 1796, Titus Smith Jr. moved to Dutch Village (now
Fairview), west of Halifax. The area of Dutch Village was settled by emigrants from the Netherlands and Germany. After leaving Preston, he resided there for nearly 50 years. ==Career==