Category Archives: genealogy

genealogy

American and British Isles Settlers in Western Quebec

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This compilation looks at the towns and villages settled by the British and Americans in the early 1800s in what is now usually known as the Outaouais region of Quebec. This area is north of the city of Ottawa and the Ottawa River, which forms the boundary between Ontario and Quebec.

It is an area of great beauty, with ancient hills and many lakes and rivers, but its winters are long and cold. Many settlers were drawn here to work in logging, paper mills and other resource-based industries. Today the area’s population is primarily French-speaking. Most of the region remains rural, with the only large urban center being the amalgamated city of Gatineau, which includes the former city of Hull and surrounding town.

American & British Isles settlers in Western Quebec rev25 02 2016

genealogy, Scotland

A Small Life

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I hold the documents as gently as I would the child for whom I have searched for so long. A birth certificate. A death certificate. Four days apart.

My husband knew he had a sister but that’s all he knew. The family never spoke of her and Jim grew up an only child. He did not even know his sister’s name. Thoughts of having a sister, however, evoked a tangle of fragmented memories and emotions that over the years he tried to shape into a plausible scenario. My searches on-line for a female Smith born to Jim’s parents came up empty. It was only last summer, when Jim was seventy, that a cousin found a name on a family tree she had been given: Elizabeth followed simply by a “d”. No dates. The name was enough to find the records.

Elizabeth Smith was born on December 18, 1943 to Peter Dudgeon Smith and Mary Ann Syme. She was born at home at 36 Bentinck Street in Glasgow. Bentinck is a street of tenement buildings near Kelvingrove Park. Today the area is very trendy, but during the war two families often lived in a single tenement sharing the kitchen and bathroom. Such was the case for Jim’s family. His father was in the navy and away at sea for weeks at a time. Given the cramped living quarters, it was very likely that Jim was witness to the sounds and sights of his mother’s labour and delivery, at best confusing for a two year old but likely quite terrifying. Certainly he would have seen the newborn and perhaps even held her although no picture exists today to document this event.

Elizabeth died at home between four and eight a.m. on December 23rd. I vision her mother nursing her in the middle of the night, returning her to her crib, falling back to sleep herself only to wake sometime later to find the tiny body. The cause of death was listed as congenital debility, a vague term explaining little. Was it clear at her birth that she would not live long? Was she not transferred to a hospital because nothing could be done? Or might congenital debility have been a term for what today we call Sudden Infant Death Syndrome and her death actually a shock to her parents?

Jim has a strong memory of his father being angry with his mother over the death. Was what Jim interpreted as anger actually grief? Or was it in fact anger? At what? His parent’s silence over the years is strange. Perhaps they felt Jim was too young to have remembered the event or they may have wanted to protect him from the tragedy. How much information he may have absorbed from adult conversations he overheard across the years is anyone’s guess. Collecting facts in bits and pieces without an understanding of the context would only serve to compound his confusion. He made what sense of it he could and eventually believed his sister was hit and killed by a car.

The location of Elizabeth’s grave is still not known. She is not buried with the Smiths in Greenock Cemetery. She may be with her mother’s people in Blantyre. What is known, however, is that Elizabeth lived for four days and is remembered by her big brother.

genealogy

Congregational Churches of Lower Canada and Quebec

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This compilation looks briefly at the history of the Congregational church in Quebec. Many communities in the Eastern Townships had been settled by Loyalists from the United States, and many of those people were Congregationalists. Montreal’s first Congregational church opened its doors in 1831, while Quebec City had had Congregational services since 1800. Researcher Jacques Gagné also explains where the records of these early churches might be found.

Congregationalist Churches in Quebec-1

genealogy, New Brunswick, Writing

Sister Pilgrimage

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Early Sunday morning, dressed in our special t-shirts, we left in plenty of time for the morning church service at St Martin’s-in-the-Woods.  The greeter welcomed us warmly, and we asked if there might be any Haningtons at church that day.  She beckoned down the aisle to her husband who then introduced himself as Allen Hanington. 4-1StMartin-Haningtons (9) Overjoyed, we threw our arms around our surprised distant cousin and snapped a commemorative photo.  And so our journey began.

4-1StMartin-Haningtons (8)

My 3x great grandfather, William Hanington, was the first English settler in Shediac, New Brunswick, in 1785.  He was an amazing fellow who emigrated from England at the age of twenty-six, built a whole community, set up lumber exports, built ships, married a PEI girl and had a family of thirteen.   Later in life, in 1823, he donated a piece of land and built St Martin’s-in-the-Woods Anglican Church, where he was buried in 1838.St Martin's in the Woods

4Shediac (23)
Front: Sister Pilgrimage July 2015 Back: William Hanington – 3x Great Grandfather 1759-1838

This past July, my sister and I decided to go on a one week “sister pilgrimage” to explore our family history in Shediac from 230 years ago.  We ordered our specialized t-shirts and planned our family-and-friends-fun-filled trip to the Maritimes. A very special trip for us both.  We hadn’t travelled together before and my sister, recently widowed, was embracing a “carpe diem” attitude.

Peggy’s Cove was our first  tourist attraction and we enjoyed a stroll around the lighthouse and its spectacular rocks overlooking the ocean. The quaint little shops were charming and the local afternoon tea was delicious.

On our way to Shediac, NB, we visited my sister’s friend Helen who was new to the area and provided us with a hearty lunch.  We checked into our B&B in Shediac, and set off to explore the delightful little town.  On the waterfront, we climbed onto the famous giant lobster to pose for the ultimate tourist photo.  4Shediac (17)Afterwards, while strolling along the boardwalk, we came upon a historical monument dedicated to our 2x great grandfather Daniel Hanington, a famous politician in his time. What a terrific surprise!

6AppleBlossomCafe (4)
The Anglin Sisters meet the Wallace Sisters.

Hopewell Rocks was our second tourist attraction with its incredible change in tides.  That morning, we walked along the “beach”.  Then we lunched nearby at the Apple Blossom Café, run by three retired schoolteacher spinster sisters.  What a hoot they were!  After lunch, we returned to find high tide had completely transformed the whole bay.  Amazing!

The next morning, our GPS helped us find our way to tiny Clairville, NB, to visit my friends Carol and Bruce.  Their cozy place was beautifully perched up on a hill overlooking a vast field.  After a tour of their house and garden, we had a delicious lunch and then set out for Charlottetown, PEI.

While driving across the spectacular Confederation Bridge, it was difficult to imagine how William and his Indian guides paddled across the Northumberland Strait in 1792 to claim his bride in Summerside, PEI (then known as Ile-St.Jean).

We checked into our B&B in Charlottetown and headed off to meet Anne of Green Gables, our third tourist attraction.  Luckily for us, there weren’t many visitors that day and she was able to personally fill us in on all the latest town gossip.

On our last day, we visited our mother’s best childhood friend. who is living with her son and family just outside Charlottetown.  Our mother passed away when we were very young, and AuntJean“Auntie Jean” has been a precious source of their childhood tales. It was such a thrill to see her again.

Later on that Sunday after the morning service at St Martin’s-in-the-Woods, we visited with Allen’s charming sister Lillian, the family historian who knew our exact location in the Hanington family tree!

And just down the lane from the church, off  Hanington Street, was our grandmother’s summer cottage.  Our grandfather, Canon Lindsay, would fill in as their pastor from time to time over the summers and several people at church that morning remembered him fondly.

Finally, as we drove down the driveway to visit with Allen and his wife Willa, there they were sitting on the porch swing waiting to welcome us into their home. 4-1StMartin-Haningtons (18)The afternoon flew by with lemonade and homemade treats and eventually we bid farewell to our cousins with heartfelt promises to keep in touch.

PS  The August 2015 family newsletter, the Hanington Herald, just arrived by mail! Included in the comments from the President’s Desk (that would be our cousin Allen!), it says: “We just experienced a lovely visit from the Anglin sisters; Lucy (Montreal) and Margaret (Ottawa) who were visiting in the area and attended morning service at St Martin’s-in-the-Woods Anglican Church on Sunday, July 5th 2015.  We had a very nice visit on Sunday afternoon.  They are descendents of Daniel Hanington.”

genealogy

Our Contributors

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GE group2Some of the volunteers who contribute to Genealogy Ensemble got together this week to plan the blog’s schedule for the coming months. We’ll be posting our stories on Wednesdays and Jacques Gagné’s compilations will go up on Sundays, as they become available. We also hope to eventually welcome new contributors. Pictured here, left to right, are Mary Sutherland, Sandra McHugh, Claire Lindell, Janice Hamilton, Marian Bulford, Lucy Anglin and Tracey Arial.

genealogy

A Visit to Goshen

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Genealogy has taken me many places including Scotland, Philadelphia and Winnipeg. Last week my husband and I visited New York State to research my three-times great-grandmother’s family, the Thompsons. I wanted to find out whether there was a link between the 18th century Thompson family of Goshen, Orange County, New York and the John Thompson family of Sophiasburg Township, Ontario, Canada.

Orange County is located in the Hudson Valley, about 60 miles (100 km) north of New York City. It has gentle hills, historic villages and rich agricultural soil. The area was first acquired from the Munsee Indians in 1703.

New York State is not an easy place to do genealogy research, especially for this early period before there were vital records or detailed censuses. My ancestors were Presbyterians and I did not expect to find a neatly microfilmed database of church records. But the Orange County Genealogical Society (OCGS) has a research library in Goshen, staffed by a handful of knowledgeable volunteers, and an expert on the Thompson family lives nearby.

The trip was worth the effort and I came home with enough information to show that these families are related. (I’ll explain in another post.) With that link established, I can now take the male Thompson line to Ireland in 1729.

The Thompsons are confusing because there were several families of that name in Orange County during the 18th century, including individuals in every generation named John, George, William and James Thompson. There were even two George Thompsons, both born in 1719, both married to women named Elizabeth, and both died in 1782. One was a soldier in the American Revolution, the other was not, and more than one descendant has confused them.

I tried to prepare thoroughly before I left home. First, I researched my three-times great-grandmother Elizabeth “Betsey” Thompson’s siblings and children in Ontario. Their death certificates were particularly helpful since some indicated place of birth. I should have spent more time on Betsey’s father, John Thompson, his siblings, aunts and uncles and nieces and nephews. It would have been easier to sort out Goshen’s Thompson families if I had known more about them.

When we got to the OCGS, I looked through several excellent collections of research done by now-deceased Orange County genealogists. There were also several family histories of the Thompsons and four large file folders full of query letters and family group sheets submitted by members. Unfortunately, the documents in the file folders were mixed up. I suspect that, when it came to filing, the society’s volunteers had as much trouble sorting out the Thompsons as I did. I photographed all the documents I thought were relevant and brought them home for a closer look.

After lunch, we visited the person who knows the most about this family in her big old house in the countryside. Elmire Conklin’s husband was a Thompson descendant and she has been researching them for more than 35 years. She has a degree in botany, and that scientific training helped make her an excellent genealogist. In an article she wrote for the OCGS Quarterly (May, 1991), and in her correspondence with other researchers, she zeroed in on inconsistencies and proposed logical answers to some of the questions that arise about this family.

The whole experience reminded me of three things. First, we cannot just do genealogy research online. Second, we have to be grateful for the generosity and hard work of genealogists who have preceded us. Third, we have to question their work: when family stories and genealogies contain errors, those mistakes are easily passed down through the generations and they are difficult to correct.

This article has also been posted on writinguptheancestors.blogspot.ca

See also: http://writinguptheancestors.blogspot.ca/2015/05/looking-for-thompsons-of-sophiasburgh.html

Research Remarks:

The Orange County Genealogy Society website is at www.ocgsny.org/. The society does not have an e-mail address; if you want to contact them, you have to do so by snail mail. If you intend to visit, take note of the hours: the research library is only open two mornings and one full day a week.

I have several other ancestral families in New York State, so I recently joined the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, www.ocgsny.org/. It now partners with Findmypast.com to make its records available, and The New York Researcher magazine it publishes is extremely helpful in explaining where and how to find New York records. In addition, the society recently published the must-have New York Family History Research Guide and Gazetteer.

genealogy

Anglican Churches of Quebec City and Surrounding Area

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The current-day province of Quebec was called New France until British soldiers defeated the French at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham near Quebec City in 1759. The French permanently surrendered their Canadian colony to the British a few years later in the treaty that concluded the Seven Years War (also known as the French and Indian War.)

Following their victory on the battlefield, British soldiers stayed in Quebec City to defend the territory and British bureaucrats arrived to manage the colony. Soon British merchants, shipbuilders and their families joined them. Although the population of Quebec remained primarily French-speaking and Catholic, there was now a significant English-speaking population too.

Most of these people were members of the Church of England or Church of Scotland, or they were Methodists. Protestant church services were introduced to serve their religious needs, with the first Anglican church in Quebec City established in 1760. Eventually, new Protestant churches were erected in the communities surrounding the capital.

If your ancestors were among these settlers, you’ll appreciate a new compilation from Montreal genealogist Jacques Gagné. This compilation will help you find the baptismal, marriage and death records of your Anglican ancestors in Quebec City. Jacques has listed the repositories where these records are held if they are somewhere in North America, although some early records may be stored in England.

Anglican Churches of Quebec City

genealogy

Hart Island

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This article is a follow-up to a recent blog entitled “Harbour Lights”.

Harbour Lights

It was noted  that Alpo Hjalmar Lindell had died in the Bowery in New York City and was buried on Hart Island, a Potter’s field. Here is a brief summary of Hart Island.

Hart Island

Hart Island 1

A 101 acre potter’s field

Under the jurisdiction of New York City

Largest tax-funded cemetery in the world

Records are found on microfilms in the Municipal Archives in Manhattan

More than one million dead are buried there

Approximately 1,500 burials a year

One third of the burials are infants

Dead are buried in pine boxes in trenches

 

Hart Island 2

Babies are placed in various sized coffins and stacked five coffins high

Adults are stacked three coffins high in two rows and 25 across

Trenches were used to facilitate disinterment

Ceremonies have not been conducted at the burial site since 1950

No individual markers are set

Currently historic buildings are being torn down to make room for new Mass burials that are conducted by Riker’s Island inmates who are paid 50 cents an hour

Burials are of those people who could not afford private burials

Those unclaimed within a two week period by relatives were also buried there

Burial records are currently kept within the prison system

New York City Department of Corrections created a searchable database starting in 1977

It is not possible to visit the actual grave where a loved one may be buried

There is one ferry to the island every month, other than the ferry used to transport prisoners from Riker’s Island who work at Hart Island

April 30, 2012 jurisdiction of Hart Island was transferred to the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation from the Department of Corrections

 

Hart Island 3

In 2008 a Freedom of Information Act request for 50,000 burial records was granted to the Hart Island Project.

“Since 1994, The Hart Island Project has independently assisted families in obtaining copies of public burial records. The group also helps people track down loved ones and negotiate visits. An ecumenical group named the Interfaith Friends of Potter’s Field has intermittently conducted memorial services on the island.”

Visit the following websites :

https://www.hartisland.net/        a video clip

https://www.hartisland.net/burial records/search/plot=317

 

Source for the above information:

Hart Island, New York    From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Further Reading:

  • Visiting the Island of the Dead A Rare Visit to New York’s Potter’s Field on Hart Island

                By COREY KILGANNONNOV. 15, 2013   The New York Times

 

  • Is your family member buried on Hart Island, off the coast of New York? Sorry, you can’t visit

            PRI’s The World  February 17, 2015 · 1:45 PM EST

Reporter Alina Simone 

 

 

genealogy

Presbyterian Churches of Lower North Shore and Gaspe Peninsula

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Today, most of the people who live along the north and south shores of the St. Lawrence River east of Quebec City and in the Gaspé Peninsula are French-speaking. But in the late 1700s and early 1800s, after the British took New France and began to govern it as Lower Canada, they encouraged English-speaking colonists to come to these regions of Quebec. The settlers included British, Scottish and Irish Protestant immigrants, as well as Loyalists from the United States. Many of these people were Presbyterians, and the records of their births, marriages and deaths can be found in Presbyterian church archives and various other repositories.

This compilation lists the towns and villages where these people lived and identifies the churches or missions that served their spiritual needs. These communities were located in the territories of Cornwallis, Devon, Dorchester, Hertford and Northumberland. Today, these counties are known as Bellechasse, Bonaventure, Charlevoix, Gaspé, Kamouraska, L’Islet, Matane, Montmagny, Rimouski, Rivière du Loup and Témiscouata. Most of these areas were, and still are, rural, but they include towns such as La Malbaie (formerly Murray Bay), Métis, Gaspé and Tadoussac.

Eventually, many of these people left their farms and villages and moved to Montreal, to Upper Canada (Ontario), western Canada or the United States. This compilation is designed to help their descendants track these family roots in Quebec. Thanks to Jacques Gagne for preparing it, and to Claire Lindell for editing.

Presbyterian Churches of Lower Canada North Shore and Gaspe Peninsula

genealogy, Quebec

My friend Ruby….

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……..of Morin Heights Quebec now of Dollard-des-Ormeaux, is 93 years old.

I have known her for about three years. We talk for an hour every day about her young life and all sorts of interesting subjects. I find her quite open minded with regard to religion, the latest news on the radio, world affairs and articles I download and read to her, as her eyesight is failing.

Ruby was born in Morin Flats, as it was called until 1911, when the name was changed to Morin Heights.[1] There were 5 children in the family, one boy and four girls.

Her great-grandparents were pioneers who came to the area from Ireland in the 1800’s possibly due to the potato famine. Her parents met and married and worked a cattle and dairy farm first in the 1890’s in Leopold, Quebec, but when family started to arrive they moved to Morin Heights so the children could be educated, and they ran the family farm, called ‘The Red and White Farm’ where Ruby was born.

The first settler in Morin was Thomas Seale, from Connaught, Ireland, who had started clearing his farm at Echo Lake in 1848. Families that had originated as pioneers in Gore, Mille Isles and other townships settled Morin along with emigrants directly from Ireland.[2]

The first Census in the area was the 1861 Census of Morin Flats, County of Argenteuil, Quebec, Canada and many of the 470 people named on it when I read them out to her, were familiar to Ruby either as family, friends, or neighbours’ names.[3] So it would seem the residents of Morin Heights tend to stay put!

Ruby’s family farm had four Jersey milk cows, one Holstein, which she tells me gave ‘blue milk’ which was fat free milk, one Ayrshire and 2 Clydesdale horses and some chickens. The family farmed hay, oats, corn and buckwheat. The River Simon ran through their property and Ruby often fished for perch and bass, and her mother cooked them for the evening meals. Ruby told me that they had a small spring next to the river from which her father piped water, into the barn and the house, and that the water was ‘fresh, cold, and the best water around’

In the winter, Ruby had to shovel snow, help in the kitchen and anything else that needed to be done. As she told me ‘We were never bored, we had no time to be bored’
In April, all the family spent a week in the fields, with the ‘stone boat’ a large piece of wood, with ropes at each end. All in a row, and bending down the family cleared the whole field of stones and debris, putting them on the ‘stone boat’ and either pulling it as they went or hitching up one of the horses.

 

Stone boat  A STONE BOAT

 

The stones would then be piled in a corner of the field, often higher than the children and then Father could plough and sow the fields.

At 4am every day, her Father would rise, curry and comb the horses, clean and feed the animals put wood in the wood burning stove and boil the kettle. By that time Mother was up and the family day began. In summer and spring, Father would milk the cows then put the milk into the metal churns, take it to the road running outside the property and leave it for pickup. Once a week, they received a cheque.

Some milk would be kept back for Mother to make her butter, to sell in the village for extra income. It was Ruby’s job to churn the wooden churner, with the family dog standing very close by, waiting for the butter milk he knew he would get at the end of the churning. Her mothers’ dairy was scoured daily and kept spotless. After the butter was churned and firm, which could take up to three hours or longer, her mother would take the two large wooden paddles and shape the butter into one pound blocks. Then they were wrapped in parchment paper for the trip to the village to sell them at the local shop.

Ruby commented, that in the winter months cows are usually ‘dry’ and calving but Father still had plenty to do. He would go into their woods, and bring out the huge trees, and ‘skin’ them ready for the warmer months, and on the first day of February, he would go to the river and cut huge ice blocks, bring them back and store them in sawdust in the barn, ready for the ice-box in the summer.

When spring came, the cows had fresh green grass, and a herb called Sorrel that they loved to eat, the butter was a beautiful yellow. In the winter, and early spring however, when the cows could not get the lush grass and herbs, Mother had to add a drop of carotene to make the butter look more attractive.

butter churn  CHURNING THE BUTTER

 

The barn which Father built by hand, was very large, clean and warm and held the cows and two Clydesdale horses. Clydesdale’s can grow to over 18 hands tall. A hand is four inches, so this would be 72 inches or 6 feet. A horse is measured from the ground to its withers. If you feel at the end of a horse’s mane, you will find a small flat spot, which is the withers. [4]

Ruby Father granddad.JPG
RUBY’S FATHER WITH THE CLYDESDALE HORSE

Ruby said that the horses drank an enormous amount of water daily and they had to have their water buckets filled three times a day. They were gentle and calm and the children never felt afraid being in their presence, unlike the Jersey cows! One day, she said, one of the Jerseys kicked her younger sister for no reason and the next day, Father sold her! The Jersey cow, not the sister.

The barn was kept free of rodents by the barn cats, who were never allowed in the house, but fed daily at milking with warm milk given to them on the porch by Mother. The house was lit by oil lamps until Ruby left home at 16 and for a few years afterwards. On a Saturday, it was Ruby’s job to wash the glass chimneys trim the wicks and fill all the lamps in the home. She would also walk to Christieville a long walk, to pick up the mail and shop.

The cast iron wood stove was where Mother did all of her cooking and baking. Ruby said, Mother never made cookies, they were too expensive! Everything else was home made. During the hot days doors and windows were always kept open for a clear draft through the house, to cool the cook.

The girls went berry picking in the summer, looking out for bears whom they could see had left their imprint, whilst they too, picked the berries. Always on 12 July, next to the river, they had a celebration picnic of the ‘Glorious 12th’ an Irish holiday celebrating the Battle of the Boyne where the Protestant King, William of Orange ‘beat the Catholics’ in 1690.

Ruby was home schooled until she was about seven years old, as before that it was too far and too cold for a youngster to walk or ski to school. Of course, there were no school buses. Ruby frequently skied to school in winter and walked there and back in Summer. Occasionally, if the snow was very deep her father would hitch the Clydesdale’s to the sled and take them to school, but not very often as he was too busy!

The one room school house for the high school children, had one teacher, hired from England and he taught them every subject, at every level, including French with the curricular coming from England and exam results sent ‘away’ for marking. There was a total of 8 pupils in Ruby’s high school. At lunch time everyone including the teacher, brought the same thing every day – a peanut butter and jam sandwich, and occasionally a cookie or piece of cake, They drank water. In the summer they all played baseball after lunch and in the Winter, skied. Ruby had homework every single night, and that had to be done after household chores. Ruby left school after passing all her exams, when she was 16 years old.

Ruby SAchool Ruby on Right.JPG

RUBY’S ONE ROOM SCHOOL – RUBY ON THE FAR RIGHT

Whenever I download historic information regarding Morin Heights to read to Ruby, she points out that the people I am reading about were her uncles, cousins, her fathers’ brother, or mothers’ family and other family members. There is a Rural Route named after her family and there are many historical articles about the building of churches and other buildings, where her family names are mentioned frequently.

Her Irish/Quebec roots run deep and many of the pioneers of Morin Flats were connected to her or her family, friends or neighbours she remembers.

You can learn a lot from the elderly and I love talking to Ruby about many things, which I hope to continue for many a year, but her stories of her early years are the most interesting!
Sources:
[1 2] http://www.morinheightshistory.org/history.html
[3] http://www.morinheightshistory.org/census/1861MH.html
[4] http://www.clydesusa.com/faq/
……and particularly, my friend Ruby.

Ruby McCullough Clements passed away peacefully on 24 November, 2016, RIP.

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