Some of my female ancestors are almost invisible. They got married, had children and left no other traces of their lives. But a few left paper trails such as letters, journals and drawings. My two-times great-aunt Amelia Josephine Bagg (1852-1943) was one of them. Married twice but with no children of her own, she became deeply involved in the family real estate business.
Amelia was the third of the five children (one boy, four girls) of Montreal landowner Stanley Clark Bagg (SCB) and his wife, Catharine Mitcheson Bagg. The children grew up in the family home, Fairmount Villa, near what is now the corner of Sherbrooke and St. Urbain streets. There, they had a big garden to play in and no doubt a nanny to care for them when they were little and a governess to educate them.
Unlike many women of her time and class, Amelia found the opportunity to use her education.
SCB had inherited several large properties on the Island of Montreal, extended along the west side of St. Lawrence Street (now busy Boulevard Saint-Laurent). During his lifetime, this was agricultural land and, although he was trained as a notary, SCB made his income by leasing his properties to farmers.
He died unexpectedly at age 53, in 1873, when Amelia was just 21. SCB named his wife and her brother (who was a Philadelphia lawyer) as executors of his estate.1 Son Robert Stanley Bagg (RSB), a recent law graduate from McGill University, took on the responsibility of managing it. Over the years, the widowed Catharine and her daughters had a great deal of input into decisions about the estate, with Amelia being the daughter who took the greatest interest.
Around the end of the century, Montreal grew rapidly. Business leaders developed new industries, founded banks and built railways, and immigrants arrived to fill newly created jobs. Property belonging to SCB’s estate could now be divided into lots and sold to people who wanted to build homes or invest in rental housing. Around 1890, some legal hurdles prevented the family from selling the most valuable properties, however, the family managed to resolve these problems. That will be a story for another time.
With these issues resolved, Amelia and her siblings divided up some of the land and became owners of lots that they could sell or buildings they could rent out themselves. Amelia became an independently wealthy woman.
She also developed an interest in the details of the family real estate business, keeping track of land prices, interest rates and other factors influencing real estate sales. In the fall of 1890,2 while her brother took his wife and children on an extended trip to England, Amelia coordinated decisions on new property sales. She wrote to ask for his advice and to bring him up-to-date on family news.3
“Fairmount, Nov. 6th
“My dear Brother,
“I thought I would write and tell you that we are about to sell some lots on the ‘Clark Estate’ but I do not know whether you will be quite satisfied or not. They are twelve lots on St. Urbain Street, from Guilbault St. down, and we are taking 50 cents “en bloc” for the twelve lots. I know that you said 60 cents per foot for single lots but as this is for twelve lots we thought perhaps it was better not to lose the sale.4 Bob said that you told him we could take less than the price named, and McMann said he was selling lots of Park Avenue for 45cts.7 I hesitated for a long time as I did not wish to make a sale that you would not approve, but Kate was in favor of selling, so also was Bob, and Helen and I did not know what to do….5
“Vipond has paid his interest today which I will deposit in Merchant’s Bank. Thomson has not yet paid but I had sent him another bill before hearing from you. Of course for the present all money both interest and capital will be deposited in the bank, but when you return we think it would be better for us to draw the interest and leave only the capital in the bank.….”
Row houses on St. Urbain Street near Prince Arthur. Google Street View
Much of the Bagg estate was still leased out to farmers at that time, and one day a month was reserved for tenants to deliver the rent. In the same letter, Amelia referred to this so-called reception day, but she was actually describing the arrival of her sister Mary Heloise Lindsay’s fifth child on Nov. 3, 1890. Mary and her husband Robert Lindsay lived at 436 St. Urbain. Amelia told her brother:
“Kate and I made out the Nov. statements of rents due and gave the list to Bob so that when the people paid he could check them off. We were surprised at an unexpected arrival at 436 St. Urbain Street on Monday. It is true that is the reception day there now, but this particular visitor was not expected just then. It was a dear fat little girl! She arrived at 8 o’clock in the evening.”
Amelia also kept track of the sales of lots from the estate between 1890 and 1900 in a hardcover ledger with ruled pages. My mother eventually inherited that ledger. Her cousin had given numerous family letters, business records and other documents to the McCord Stewart Museum (a Montreal museum of social history) some years earlier, but my mother hung on to the ledger. After she died, I found it in a desk drawer in the spare bedroom.
When I started to research the Bagg family and their role in Montreal history, the ledger’s importance as a record of those land transactions became clear, so I donated it to the McCord.6 I hope Amelia would have approved.
City of Philadelphia (Pennsylvania). Register of Wills Office; Wills, No 772-802, 1887, Ancestry.com. Pennsylvania, U.S., Wills and Probate Records, 1683-1993 [database on-line, entry for Catharine Mitcheson Bagg, accessed April 2, 2023], original data: Pennsylvania County, District and Probate Courts. This is a copy of the will that is very easy to read. It was probably copied in Philadelphia because McGregor J. Mitcheson, Catharine’s brother and an executor of SCB’s will, died in 1886. About a month after SCB’s 1873 death, notary J. A. Labadie deposited at the land registry office in Montreal a copy of the 1866 will and the 1870 codicil and a declaration of death. Bureau d’enregistrement Montréal-Ouest, no 74545, registered 6 September 1873; at Registre foncier du Québec, online.
Amelia did not note the year on her letter, but we know it was written in written in 1890 because that was the year her niece Marjorie Mary Clark Lindsay was born.
4. RSB must have told them to hold out for the full price. The lots were not sold until the following year. On Nov. 18, 1891, real estate agent and furrier Robert Lamb purchased not just the 12 lots mentioned here, but an extended row of 22 lots, paying 60 cents a square foot.
5. The people mentioned here are probably Amelia’s sisters Katherine Sophia Mills and Helen Frances Lewis. Bob was likely Robert Lindsay, her sister Mary’s husband. McCann was a real estate agent.
Before 1900, photography was the domain of the expert. Cameras were complicated, film was bulky. That year, the Eastman Kodak company introduced the Brownie camera, a simple box with a lens, loaded with a roll of film, and photography became available and affordable to the general public. My grandmother’s family were early adopters of this new technology, and my grandmother, Gwendolen Bagg (1887-1963), became an enthusiastic photographer.
One of her first subjects was her own house in Montreal’s Golden Square Mile. She photographed not only the exterior, but also the drawing room (living room), with its ornate mantelpiece and heavy drapes.
The majority of photos were taken during summer vacations with the family. Many Montrealers left the city in the summer, not only to escape the heat, but also to avoid the outbreaks of disease that plagued the city in those years. In the early 1900s, the Bagg family went to Cacouna, on the shores of the St. Lawrence River, and they also spent time at a lake near Ste. Agathe, in the Laurentians, north of Montreal.
Gwen photographed her father stretched out on the lawn at Cacouna, her mother in a wide-brimmed hat, and her older sister on horseback and in a canoe. Her little brother, Harold, was a favourite subject. In one picture, taken when he would have about five years old, he posed with his two girl cousins. According to the custom of the day, he had long hair and was dressed exactly like the girls in what appears to be a dress. The following year, his blonde hair remained long, but Harold wore a sailor suit.
In her late teens, Gwen photographed her friends, wearing elaborate bathing costumes on the beach near Kennebunk, Maine. On the porch at the hotel where they stayed, all the young women wore light dresses that reached the ground and covered their arms to their wrists. They must have been very hot.
In 1913, Gwen photographed her mother, by now a widow and dressed in black, leaning up against a big log at Kennebunk Beach, chatting with a friend. By this time, her sister Evelyn was married, and Gwen liked to photograph her little niece, Clare.
The camera must have been a good one, and whoever Gwen shared it with (probably her mother), was also a good photographer. All these photos were in focus, well exposed and tightly composed. Most importantly, Gwen put her photos into albums and identified most of the people, places and years they were taken. She got married in 1916, and after that, although she continued take family photos, the prints ended up in a box, loose and unidentified.
Gwen kept these albums and my mother inherited them and then passed them on to me. Several years ago, I asked the McCord Museum in Montreal whether they would like them. The McCord already had a collection of letters and business ledgers that had belonged to the Bagg family, so these photos shed light on another aspect of their past. The albums are now part of the Bagg Family Fonds, and a few of them have been digitized and can be viewed on the McCord’s website at http://collections.musee-mccord.qc.ca/scripts/explore.php?Lang=1&tableid=18&tablename=fond&elementid=31__true (go to the very bottom of this page).
I cannot say for certain that my grandmother had a Brownie, but she certainly had some type of simple box camera. The square photos in her album are approximately 3 ½” x 3 ½”, corresponding to the Kodak film sizes 101 and 106. This chart on the Brownie website describes the different sizes of film that Brownie cameras used over the years: http://www.brownie-camera.com/film.shtml. If she did have a Kodak, it was probably similar to the camera described on this website: http://www.historiccamera.com/cgibin/librarium/pm.cgi?action=display&login=no2bullet
Many people have old family treasures such as letters and albums in the attic. In my family, a collection of 200-year-old business records made their way from the attic to a Montreal museum, and now some them have been digitized and placed online for everyone to explore. Part of the Bagg Family Fonds housed at the McCord Museum, these newly digitized images include records from the store where the workmen who built the Lachine Canal in the early 1820s bought their bread and rum.
The project to digitize these and other documents was financed by Library and Archives Canada to mark the 150th anniversary of Canadian Confederation and Montreal’s 375th anniversary. The McCord Museum in Montreal is posting some 75 000 images from its collection of textual archives to its website (http://collections.musee-mccord.qc.ca/en/keys/collections/).
The website provides an introduction to the Bagg family and to the scope of the Bagg Family Fonds (P70): http://collections.musee-mccord.qc.ca/scripts/explore.php?Lang=1&tableid=18&tablename=fond&elementid=31__true. At the bottom of this page are links to four sets of digitized documents: the Laprairie Brewery (1821-1832), the workmen’s store in Lachine (1822-1823), a child’s scrapbook and a young woman’s autograph book that probably dates from around the turn of the century.
My three-times great-grandfather Stanley Bagg was one of the four main contractors in charge of building the Lachine Canal in Montreal in the 1820s. He also ran the store that supplied the workers with bread, tea, sugar, pork and occasionally fish, eggs and butter, although rum and beer seem to have been the most popular items. Some pages list the names of the customers, the items they purchased and the prices they were charged.
Other images record cash payments related to the canal construction, including planks, nails, wheelbarrows, hay (probably for the horses), blasting powder and wages for day labourers.
Another set of records is related to the brewery owned by Stanley’s brother, Abner Bagg. The LaPrairie Brewery account books list expenses such as barley, charcoal, transportation costs and wages. Both the store and the brewery records contain many names of suppliers and customers.
Both of these collections provide a window into life in Montreal some 200 years ago. For example, Quebec historian Donald Fyson used these records as a basis for his thesis, “Eating in the city [electronic resource]: diet and provisioning in early nineteenth-century Montreal” Montréal: McGill University, 1989. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/thesescanada/vol1/QMM/TC-QMM-55597.pdf
No one really knows who had the foresight to save these records, or how they ended up at the McCord. According to one of my cousins, these account books were found in the basement of the Redpath Museum at McGill University, but no one knows who put them there in the first place. Clare Fellowes, daughter of Evelyn (Bagg) Davis, gave an additional gift of textual documents to the museum in 2002 and 2003.
Documents in the Bagg Family Fonds that have not been digitized includes copies of letters that Stanley and Abner wrote to each other and to business colleagues, and a ledger belonging to butcher John Clark, Stanley Bagg’s father-in-law. Documents related to another generation of the family date from the final decades of the 19th century when the Baggs were property owners and real estate developers. This includes a ledger showing property sales, and letters between the Bagg siblings as they discussed and sometimes disagreed about business decisions. There are also personal documents such as a list of wedding presents, recipes and several albums of family photos, taken in the early 1900s by my grandmother, Gwendolyn Bagg. More recently, the late Joan Shackell, a descendant of Abner Bagg, donated a number of items related to her line of the family.
Members of the public can visit the archives at the McCord Museum to consult the Bagg Family Fonds and other collections, but they must make an appointment weeks in advance. It is encouraging to see that some of these documents are now available online.
Genealogy Ensemble 