And now.
Tag Archive for genealogy
Half Lives, and Stones Unturned
Siobhan handed me a stack of disorganized family photos, letters, and random notes about birth- and death-dates of various relations. They’re from her mother’s family history files. Siobhan’s mother was interested in genealogy, but never really got to wrangle it in any organized way.
I told Sio that I’d take a stab at organizing the information, but it’s pretty chaotic. One of the first juicy bits I pulled out relates to a family of McFaddens. Someone had sent Sio’s mother a list of birth-dates, marriages and death-date hand-written on both sides of a sheet of lined paper.
Sadly, the dates appear to be fairly inconsistent with various documents that I’ve been able to look up. And there are other oddities, too.
Read moreAnd More…
I’ve just started exchanging messages with a woman in Alberta who’s a descendant of part of this Stretton family. A thing that’s interesting: a lot of Strettons have come to Canada.
I’ve never had a 100% clear idea of what brought the Holmeses to Canada. They left before the famine, and the Molly Maguires might be a factor.
But now it seems like the Strattens were far more numerous than the Holmeses. In addition to the Strattens I mentioned in a previous post, there are two other Stratten sisters — married with their own families (and recorded under their husbands’ last names) — listed in Toronto Gore.
It’s starting to appear that the Strattens could have been the ones who started the exodus to Canada, and dragged their Holmes relations along.
I can’t currently link John Stratten/Stratton to this family, except via his physical proximity at the time of the 1851 census. It looks like the family had additional brothers, William and James (based on another family tree). I’m inclined to think that either William or James is the father of John, and late husband of Mary Ann, but that’s merely a guess. I’m keen to see what I can learn from this new contact.
Stratton Clues
I’ve just had some interesting clues come to light about the Stratton family.
Going back to F.M. Emerson Holmes’ genealogy, he claimed that the Holmes family came to Canada with their second-oldest daughter, Margaret, and her husband, John Stratton. I’ve been pursuing some clues that suggest that the Holmeses might have lived in a small area of County Cavan called Corresmongon, near the village of Bawnboy. There are a number of reasons why this story is compelling, not least of which is that there are a family of Dowlers very nearby. The eldest Holmes daughter married a James Dowler in Ireland before following the rest of the family to Canada. To date, though, we haven’t found much about a Stratton family before arriving in Canada.
Read moreA Rose by Any Other Name
Some time ago, I was pinged on Ancestry by a distant relative who was happy to have come across portions of my family tree that overlapped with her family. I try to always respond to folks on Ancestry; I’ve almost-always had good experiences there. My correspondent was much newer to genealogy than I was, and was therefore able to quickly learn a great deal about at least one line of her family.
She was a descendant of my great-grandmother’s brother. It’s a line of the family that I don’t have very deep records about. My info basically ended at her grandparents. But it was still helpful to her.
So, that’s cool. But because of that recent interaction, I found myself poking that part of the tree again. I located a picture of her great-grandfather, Alton Carol “Al” Kehoe (with my great-grandmother, Mary Ann “Mae” Houle), as well as an obituary, and uploaded them, then sent her a note with links.
But that’s when, all of a sudden, I noticed an unexpected hint that Ancestry was suggesting that I look at. The hint was a marriage record from Ohio, and I was originally inclined to dismiss it because this family lived in Port Lambton, Ontario. It’s not uncommon for my ancestors to get married in Michigan, but Ohio? On the other hand, Alton Carol Kehoe is a pretty unusual name, and I couldn’t overlook that.
According to the marriage record, Alton Carol Kehoe was marrying Rose Skeens on 10 Dec, 1927, in Ohio. Who was Rose Skeens? I’d never heard of her before.
The Strattons
I continue to enjoy filling in some of the gaps in F.M. Emerson Holmes’ genealogy of the Holmes family. Recently, I’ve dug a bit deeper into the Stratton family.
Margaret Holmes was the second child of Andrew and Susannah Holmes and she travelled to Canada with her husband, a man named Stratton. F.M. Emerson’s genealogy for the Stratton family is threadbare in a lot of place. He knew very little about Margaret’s husband (only that his last name was Stratton) but he did have a pretty good picture of the eldest Stratton child, Mary Ann. The other two children, Joseph and Elizabeth were pretty sparse on details.
It was pretty easy to determine that Margaret’s husband was named John Stratton; they appear in several of the Lambton County censuses, living in Oil Springs. They disappeared after the 1881 census, but a few weeks ago, I found a record of a Margaret and John Stratten (note the ‘e’) buried in the cemetery in Strathroy, Lambton County. According to the cemetery transcription website that I found this data on, they died within a few months of each other in 1883. There’s no photo of the headstone, so I’m not sure if the transcriber spelled the last name incorrectly, or if the headstone is incorrect. (It’s also possible that this headstone is a completely different family). It’s also true that the Strathroy cemetery hasn’t been fully transcribed on other cemetery transcription websites, so I haven’t been able to cross-reference.
Strathroy is a bit of a hike from Oil Springs, but not unreasonably so. It’s also worth nothing that, at the time of their deaths, their eldest daughter, Mary Ann, appears to have been living in London, Ontario, which is closer to Strathroy than to Oil Springs. That might have something to do with the decision to bury the parents in Strathroy.
Elizabeth Stratton’s details were pretty easy to track down on Ancestry. Elizabeth Stratton married Samuel Wright, and they also went off to live in London. There are, in fact, a few extra children that F.M. Emerson didn’t know about: Margaret, Andrew and Fanny. Andrew and Fanny appear to have died young. Margaret disappears; perhaps she also dies young.
For a long time, I hadn’t been able to make any headway on Joseph Stratton. F.M. Emerson’s birthdate for Joseph (circa 1844) looks like a guess to me. Mary Ann was born in 1842, so I think he guessed the the next two kids arrived every other year. I can find the family in the 1861 and 1871 censuses, and Joseph’s birthdate looks like it should be closer to 1852 or 1853.
Good Golly, Miss Molly Maguire
I’ve made my first real progress with the Irish roots of my Holmes ancestors. It’s not much progress, mind you, but it’s not nothing.
I’m pretty much resigned to the fact that the Holmes family will be a perpetual brick wall (a term that genealogists use to describe families that one can find no further data about, thus acting as a barrier to any further knowledge about ancestors). To some extent, this isn’t shocking: pursuing Irish genealogy frequently stumbles on the problem of the destroyed records. In 1922, the Public Records Office burned in a civil war battle, and most of the censuses (and many other records) were lost. I’ve seen a number of Irish genealogy presenters talk, encouragingly, about how it’s wrong to think that all records have been destroyed. Ireland had plenty of records, still, and you shouldn’t write off the possibility that there are some records to be found. But it’s increasingly looking like the records for my Holmes ancestors have not survived.
I’ve certainly had no luck with any of the searches I’ve tried in various online databases. But I decided to hire a professional genealogist to see if anything could be discovered. Several days ago, I received their report. And while they have also failed to find any definitive records, they did uncover some clues that might tell us a thing or two. But it’s in the realm of speculation, rather than “clear record.”
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Two Viola Duet
Are these two Violas the same Viola?
There’s a distant bunch of Bantam relatives who went off to live in Kansas. It starts with the family of John Sylvester Bantam, who moved from the Bantam homestead in Port Rowan, Ontario to Norton County, Kansas. John has a son Gilbert (“Gilley”) and Gilley has a son, Harold John Bantam, born 21 Apr 1907. According to Don’s notes, Harold married a woman named Viola. Don doesn’t know Viola’s maiden name.
(I’ve just reviewed his notes, now, and noticed something that I had recorded incorrectly: I had Harold listed as the father of Viola’s two children, Jerome and Carolyn, but Don is clear that the two children were from an earlier marriage).
So I went spelunking on Ancestry to find out more information about Viola. The suggested hints that I’ve found aren’t entirely clear on the topic, but there are two dominant stories. The first is that, according to some sources, Viola’s name is Viola C. Lamb. The primary sources for this are some other folks’ Ancestry records, and a reference to a headstone-recording website. That website is telling me that Viola’s name was Lamb (but that doesn’t appear to be data on the actual headstone). I’m guessing that the other Ancestry users picked up that name from that website. Many of these websites are transcribed and maintained by genealogy societies, and they may bring other sources to bear to flesh out the data, but it’s not clear where the name “Lamb” originates. Her headstone says that she was born on 16 Sep, 1910. Her headstone is shared with Harold, so this is clearly “my” Viola.
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Poor Marion
More learnings: Marion and Milton had just been married. Marion was 35 in December 1937, when she married Milton McVicar. On Jan 3, Marion’s younger brother Beverly died (he’d had poor health for all of his life). The following month, Milton died.
Weird Connections
I’m putting together details about some of my Smith relatives. The Smiths were the oil family, and many of them became involved in local politics.
My great-grandfather’s sister, Marion Gertrude Smith married a man named Milton Duncan McVicar, who was a member of the Enniskillen Council, and later Reeve, and Lambton County Warden, but in 1934, he was elected to the Ontario legislature as a Liberal-Progressive.
As an M.L.A. (although in Ontario, these days, we tend to say M.P.P.), he had a number of successes which made him popular back in Lambton County, but in 1938, he caught a serious cold/influenza/pneumonia and died on Feb 3rd, 1938.
2000 people attended his funeral, “representing every walk of life in the country.” Newspaper write-ups described it as the largest funeral in town in years. The Premier, Hon. Mitchell F. Hepburn sent provincial secretary, Hon. Harry C. Nixon to represent him at the funeral (probably because McVicar died while in office).
Here’s the connection that really jumped out at me: one newspaper write-up includes this tidbit: “It was largely through his [McVicar’s] efforts that the Government established a park at Ipperwash Beach.”
Ipperwash Provincial Park, of course, is the site of the Ipperwash Crisis and the death of Dudley George.
