Tag Archives: Eastern Townships

Quebec, Scotland

Scottish Gaelic Settlers in Québec

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Oatmeal and the Catechism – Scottish Gaelic Settlers in Québec – Margaret Bennett
QFHS # HG-153.99 B65
345 pages

Oatmeal and the Catechism is the story of emigrants from the Outer Hebrides to Québec in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Most were crofting families from Lewis who had suffered the severe effects of the potato famine of 1846-51. As a solution to the increase pressure on landlords and government relief bodies, they were offered free passage to Lower Canada and given land grants in the Eastern Townships and more precisely within Compton County. To this day place-names such as Stornoway, Tosta, Ness and Dell in Canada testify to the strong links these communities kept with their homeland.

An article in The Clansmen News of 1970, based on local interviews and entitled ‘The Scottish Highlands of Quebec: Gaidhealatachd Chuibeic’, states:

At the time of the first Great War there were approximately two thousand five hundred Gaels in Marsboro (Marston) alone. We were talking with a man who was born in Milan, who told us that he did not know that there was any other language in the world but Gaelic until he was seven years old.

In Compton county, in the Eastern Townships of Québec in the years of 1851 to 1891, the language distribution in the following towns and villages could convincingly be reconstructed as follows:

> Marsboro – Gaelic (c. 75%), French (c. 20%), English (c. 5%)
­> Milan – Gaelic (c. 95%), French (c. 5%), English (c. 0%)
> Scotstown – Gaelic (c. 50%), French (c. 25%), English (c. 25%)
> Springhill – Gaelic (c. 50%), French (c. 25%), English (c. 25%)
> Stornoway – Gaelic (c. 95%), French (c. 3%), English (c. 2%)
> Red Mountain – Gaelic (c. 75%), French (20%), English (c. 5%)

…. a grasp of the history and folk culture of Gaels from the Outer Hebrides who settled this comparatively small area of Canada will contribute to a better understanding of the Eastern Townships and of Québec.
Margaret Bennett
Winner of the 1999 CLIO Award of the Canadian Historical Association

Posted by Jacques Gagné for Genealogy Ensemble

Quebec

Borderland Religion 1792-1852 by J.I. Little

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Borderland Religion – 1792-1852 – The emergence of an English-Canadian identity – J.I. Little
QFHS Library #HG-100.44 L5 – 385 pages

In December 1811 ‘A Poor Farmer’ in Shipton Township wrote the following plaintive words to the editor of the Québec Gazette:
Eleven years have elapsed since I first entered these woods, with my family, and seven years since my residence in this Township … On my first arrival in these woods, with my wife, both of us about the age of Twenty, we had one child, at present we have six, and have lost three. Our first care and inquiry was, in what manner shall we have our children Baptized, Educated, and taught the true Religion of Christianity. Hope led us to believe, living under so good a Government, we shall shortly have men placed among us for these purposes. Alas, Eleven years are now gone over, and I dont see the least prospect of these blessings.
With what sorrow do I declare that in the Townships, in this District, it is estimated that near Two thousand Children live without Baptism, upward of Six hundred men and women live together without lawful marriage; and that the greatest part of these people have not, for the last Ten years, heard the Word of God on a Sabbath day; as for our dead, they are disposed of in the same manner that most people dispose of a favorite Dog who dies, by placing him quietly under a Tree.

In the 1831 census the largest cohort in the Eastern Townships declared no religious affiliation whatsoever. By this time, however, British missionary societies had been attempting to fill the religious vacuum for more than a decade. Many who declared affiliation with the Church of England were probably doing so because it was the only one available to provide the basic services of baptism, marriage, and burial.
J.I. Little

Other books by J.I. Little, on the subject of the Eastern Townships of Québec;
> Loyalties in Conflict: A Canadian Borderland in War and Rebellion, 1812-1840
> The Other Quebec: Microhistorical Essays on Nineteenth-Century Religion and Society
> State and Society in Transition: The Politics of Institutional Reform in the Eastern Townships 1838-1852
> Crofters and Habitants: Settler Society, Economy, and Culture in a Quebec Township, 1848-1881
> Nationalism, Capitalism, and Colonization in the Nineteenth Century Quebec: The Upper St Francis District

Posted by Jacques Gagné for Genealogy Ensemble