The Stabilizing Force Behind the Family Unit

          

            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.