Happy Easter

 

                                                                            Daffodils, a sure sign of spring

Easter always makes me think of spring as, happily, they coincide, at least here in the Northern Hemisphere. But my childhood was spent in the suburbs of Montreal, so it was usual to still have snow on the ground when that particular holiday rolled around. I still remember spring flowers for the holiday because our school had a lengthy time off for the religious celebration. (It was Quebec, after all, a very Catholic province.) My family chose that time to leave the snow behind and go back to England. There were lots of spring flowers there and, even better, British chocolate!

May you enjoy your time at Easter as much as I enjoyed the Easter Eggs I ate during those English vacations!

Picturing social context part 3

 

                                             The interior of an early Ontario schoolhouse at Fanshawe Pioneer Village

After finding out about my family's roots in early Ontario, I revisited Upper Canada Village with my father. It was fun to see but the village didn't seem as big as it had when I was younger. By then I had discovered other living museums as well, so it didn't seem quite as much of a wonder.

Many of the other living museums I visited were also in Ontario. While Upper Canada Village depicted a place in what is now Ontario in the 1860s, the other outdoor museums covered a range of historic years. At Fanshawe Pioneer Village, visitors could walk into the primitive cabins of first settlers, where, we were told, the occupants slept sitting up so they wouldn't choke on the smoke of the fire keeping the cold at bay. Early schoolrooms showed battered desks, well-worn chairs, aged slates and primitive blackboards. I was especially interested in the framed houses including the large one with its Victorian sitting rooms and well stocked kitchen. Upstairs there was even an early Singer sewing machine, much like the treadle one that my mum used to have. I can remember getting her machine up to a speed high enough to drive a needle through one of my fingernails.

Some of my ancestors also lived for a time in Owen Sound. There, the Grey Roots Museum and Archives is a great resource. Many hours were spent in the archives trawling for family info. I found some which included photographs of my maternal grandmother as a child with her parents and some of her siblings. The museum part of the enterprise also had historic houses covering a few different eras but the thing that really caught my eye was the gravity fed gas pump. Old technology can be fascinating. 

                                                          Old time service station with a gravity feed gas pump

Picturing social context part 2

 

                                                   An Upper Canada Village view my father painted after a visit there

My interest in history started when I was young. One frequent family outing was a trip to Upper Canada Village. It wasn't that far a drive from our home in the Montreal suburbs but it was a world away in time. I was charmed by the cozy homes and primitive industries and they also made excellent cheese, as I remember.

At the time, I didn't think that the village's version of history had anything to do with my own family background. After all, most of us were immigrants to Canada although my mother did have roots there. But she came from Winnipeg, so an historic village in Ontario would have nothing to do with her family, right?

That was before I started family history research, of course. My preliminary forays into my mother's family history showed that her Scottish ancestors had lived in Ontario before the push west to the Prairie Provinces. It was also before I discovered the family line that moved from New York State just after the American Revolution. After those discoveries, the streets and buildings of Upper Canada Village became a window on my own family's past. 

Picturing historical social context

 

                                            Dr Williams Library in London holds records about nonconformist ministers

When adding depth to the world of an ancestor or ancestral family, I often turn to books about the history of an area or event. Because my family's past takes in so many places, that is a double edged sword as I often (probably too often) buy books about areas where they lived. That's especially the case when on research trips in places where they lived. Books can take up lots of space in a suitcase and on ever expanding bookshelves. 

Books and online searches aren't the only way to add context to past lives. If one is lucky, it's possible to find the buildings which featured in their lives still standing. That happened when on the trail of my 4 x great grandfather, Reverend Thomas Strange. He was the first Congregational minister to preside in that religion's church in Kilsby, Northampton. It was a thrill picturing where he would have stood preaching to the congregation. He was even buried in an aisle which meant that I walked on his commemoration stone.

                                                The burial stone in the aisle of the church in Kilsby, Northampton*

Taking my research further, I visited Dr. William's Library when I was in London. They have lots of information about the nonconformist religions. Among their records, I found some of Reverend Strange's sermons. Each sermon covered multiple pages in a notebook. Remembering the hardness of the pew in that Kilsby church when I sat on it and considering the length of the sermon in the books really brought home the experience of being one of the congregants in the church.

*Transcription of  the Strange burial stone

 

Finding deeper American roots

 

                                                      Did my early Ontario ancestors live in a rustic cabin like this?

My ancestors lived in many and diverse places, more than I imagined when I started my journey into family history. But even when I began, I realized that my parents came from very different backgrounds. So different that I knew that if I pushed the button available on some DNA sites to find out "are your parents related" it would always come out negative. Their backgrounds were different enough that it was easy to identify my maternal and paternal sides on Ancestry's DNA circles.

Not that there was huge diversity in those backgrounds. Both ancestral pasts were tied to the British Isles and, in fact, my parents were married there. A few years after their marriage they immigrated to Canada. But they weren't the first in the family to immigrate to that country. My mother's father had immigrated there in 1911. My mother had been born in Canada, daughter to her recent immigrant father and his wife, my grandmother, a product of two Scottish lines that had first set foot in Canada in 1843 and 1853. In the early years of my ancestral search, I confined my research in Canada and the province that was to become Ontario to records after those dates.

While those were early years in the history of what was to become Ontario, I felt I could safely ignore any history that came prior to those years in the mid 1800s as it wouldn't be relevant to my ancestors. In fact, the subtitle of a book in my personal library insists that where they settled had already been set up before they got there. That book was Upper Canada: The Formative Years, 1784-1841.

But I didn't pick up that book until later. When I first began my genealogical journey, the histories I read about Canada West were mostly confined to the years after my Scottish ancestors settled there. Even in the later years when they arrived, most of the towns and farms where still in the eastern portion of what eventually became Ontario. It wasn't until later in the century that settlers began to explore further west. My families followed that trail so far in that direction that they ended up on the Prairies.  

That seemed like a formidable start to those families experiences in North America and to my genealogical research but subsequent breakthroughs would show that some of my ancestors were in Canada West decades before the mid 1800s. In fact, they had been in North America for generations before then showing that my American roots were far deeper than I thought. Family history research can bring some surprising things to light!