In search of missing links

                                                                 Early Ontario log house

Translating the information in Alexander Mathison's letters into clues as an aid to finding records to search for the McPherson family is proving more difficult than I thought. I'm looking for the first name of Mrs. Angus Clark in an effort to connect her to her birth family. According to one of Alex's letters, she was the daughter of  Donald McPherson. I was hoping for some short cuts. The thought was that I would be able to plug in the names of Angus Clark with a spouse with the last name of McPherson and search under marriages, Ancestry would deliver the record and I'd be off the the races. That didn't work.

So, I went back to the source letters to see what Alex wrote about the elusive Mrs. Clark. In one of the first batch of letters he wrote in 1895, he wrote "Moving must have been a great task for Mrs. Clark at her advanced age." That puts a new complexion on things. I had begun my search for a younger woman, one who married after 1869 when civil registration in Ontario began. But the information in the letter shows that she was old in 1895, although old can be a relative term based on the speaker and the times they lived in.

I decided to take a different tack and start by trying to find a likely family of Clarks by searching censuses in Ontario. In the 1881 census one entry looked particularly promising. It was for Angus Clark age 70, his wife Margret age 60 and eight children ranging in age from 26 down to 17. The family was living in the district of Bruce South, sub district of Kinloss. In his letter of June 21, 1895, Alex mentions sending a letter to Mrs. Clark in Lucknow. When that letter finally got to her she told him that she hadn't lived in Lucknow for 20 years. While the years between 1881 and 1895 don't add up to that length of time, 20 strikes me as more of a good round number grabbed out of the air to denote a long time and, according to Wikipedia, Lucknow, Ontario is in the township of Huron-Kinloss.

In 1871 and 1861 what looks to be the same family with Angus Clark as the head was living in Puslinch, Wellington County which was where Alexander Mathison and his family were living in 1851. According to his letters, Alex was in Puslinch until 1855 so it's quite possible there was an overlap with the Clark family who showed up on the 1861 census for the area. That also means that the Clark family, and more particularly, Margaret Clark, were likely there when Alex returned to Puslinch in 1858 or 1859 to find his family gone.

That part looks plausible but now I have more questions. I need to find out if Margaret Clark's maiden name was McPherson. A marriage record would come in handy but where did the marriage take place? The censuses consistently record Angus Clark's birthplace as Scotland but that of Margaret Clark as a dash in 1881, O in 1871 and the name of Angus's wife in 1861 was recorded as Ms or Mr with a birthplace of P.E. Island. Was the person recorded in 1861 even the same woman? It looks like more research is needed. 

Sources:

Ancestry.ca census searches

Wikipedia post about Lucknow, Ontario https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucknow,_Ontario