Come they
with or without money, come they with great working
sons or with
only useless girls, it is all the same, The Scotchman is
sure to
better his condition and this very silently and almost without
complaint… *
The quote above was extracted from information read to the
1841 Emigration Select Committee by Dr. Thomas Rolph, a former Upper Canada
Emigration Agent. I am sure that the information was accepted by the select
committee as read but the phrase “with only useless girls” trips up the modern
reader.
The phrase not only goes against our pc culture, it also
wasn’t true, although maybe the male select committee or the person who wrote
the quote hadn’t really thought about the value that girls and women brought to
the development of Upper Canada and early Ontario.
Running a farm required lots of labour in the fields and in
the home. Everyone played their part in the time when there were few labour-saving
devices. It was also the custom in families where the father had a marketable
skill that he would go in search of work after harvest time leaving his wife
and children to keep the farm going during the winter months. ** This way he
could earn money to invest back in the farm. In many ways, it was the women who
kept the family unit together.
Sadly, my 3x great grandmother, Ann Ross, the wife of Kenneth
Matheson died shortly after her last child was born. The child’s death followed
shortly after. The censuses after her death show Kenneth and family living in
one place after another as he pursued work as a stone mason. As the children grew
older they left to start families of their own but the first to leave, the
oldest boy, Alexander lost touch with his birth family for 40 years. They left
no notice of where they were going when they upped stakes from the scene of
their family tragedy. Would they have left so precipitously if the family unit
had stayed intact?
Sources:
Campey,
Lucille H. The Scottish Pioneers of Upper
Canada, 1784-1855: Glengarry and Beyond. Natural Heritage Books, Toronto,
2005 *p127
Glazebrook,
G. P. de T., Life in Ontario: A Social
History. University of Toronto Press, 1968. **p143
The letters
of Alexander Matheson to his sister, Margaret Thomson.
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