Author: Kay McGinnis

Prosperity

Kay McGinnisLeave a comment

Amy Johnson Crow, who created the #52Ancestors prompts, says there is no such thing as falling behind in this challenge. Anything written is something more than you had to begin with. I agree with that concept, but I am also feeling like I really am weeks behind, and my attention feels very scattered in this weird and terribly sad time of COVID-19 shutdown.

So I am going to try to work on getting something done rather than nothing. I am also sticking to the #Next150 challenge. Buying from indigenous businesses seems like the best challenge to work on right now.

Prosperity was a prompt I skipped back before the pandemic fully hit North America. I couldn’t think of anyone to write about. But then, when the lockdown started in Toronto, I started doing some tidying and found a wonderful collection of family stories by my Great Aunt Gloria. She is a fantastic writer and it was such a joy to read her work again.

Among the stories was a memoir of her Weeber grandparents, Charles Weeber and Bertha Weeber (nee Cordes). They were the parents of my rather remarkable great-grandmother, Emilie Hickey (nee Weeber), the smart and stately matriarch we always called “California Nana.” Emilie married Patrick Valentine Hickey II, a lawyer several years her senior, and their family included my grandfather, Patrick Valentine Hickey III, Charles (Charlie) Hickey and Gloria Hickey. Aunt Gloria provided some facts about the Weebers that I hadn’t really absorbed before, with a story of their booms and busts, and that got me going again on exploring the family tree.

The records are very consistent that Charles Weeber arrived in America in 1888. He was said to be living on the Lower East Side in Manhattan and working as a labourer when he met Bertha Cordes, who was also from a German immigrant family, but born in America. They married and had three children: Bertha (also called Betty and nicknamed Honey by the family), Emilie (called Millie), and Charles Ernst (called Charlie).

The Weebers in Pforzheim were apparently very prosperous. The family manufactured jewellery, Pforzheim’s specialty for several centuries. It is possible to virtually tour some of the Pforzheim Schmuckmuseum collection of jewellery on Google Arts and Culture and there are some stunning examples of work produced in the city. Despite his privileged upbringing, Charles Weeber does not seem to have been afraid of hard work.

Thanks to German Lutheran church records on Ancestry, I learned that Charles Adolf Weeber, born March 2, 1866, was baptized Karl Adolf Weeber on April 1, 1866 in Pforzheim. His parents were Ernst Adolf Weeber and Amelie Weeber – a match with the names on Charles Weeber’s New York death record.  On his passport applications (one in 1903 and one in 1910), Charles Weeber says he arrived in America in April 1888 aboard the Noordland, sailing from Holland. If so, he must have returned to Europe from New Zealand somehow.

Bertha Cordes was the American-born daughter of German immigrants, with three older sisters who were all born in Bremen, and who had travelled to America with their mother Caroline Cordes as very young children, to join their father Henry in New York. The Cordes family were quite poor and lived in the bustling immigrant community of the Lower East Side, Manhattan. There, Bertha met Charles Weeber, who was recently arrived.  

Bertha and Charlie married in Manhattan on May 3, 1890. Charles became a naturalized U.S. Citizen on July 12, 1894, a few months after their second daughter (my great-grandmother) was born. Their address at the time was 340 5th Street, New York City, and he gave his occupation as Clerk. Their building still stands today, just blocks from the Tenement Museum.

The first Census record I can find the family listed in is the 1905 New York State Census. By then, they were living on East 9th Street, close to Kings Highway, in Brooklyn. Charles Weeber had launched his career as a builder and property developer and he was very successfully erecting house after house in this new section of Brooklyn. According to my aunt’s recollections, this was initially funded by an inheritance he received after reconciling with his father (Ernst Weeber died in 1901). The death of a wealthy uncle in Baden, who was also named Ernst, apparently resulted in a further inheritance, but I still haven’t found out who this Ernst was. Charles used this money to purchase land and build nice houses taking advantage of the growing market for housing in Brooklyn. As each one was built, the family would move in and enjoy the property for a while before moving to the next newly completed house.

For about a decade, Charles A. Weeber was a leading property developer and business leader in the Kings Highway section of Brooklyn. This ad from the April 18, 1909 Brooklyn Daily Eagle shows one of his duplex buildings.

In the April 18, 1909 Sunday Edition of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Charles Weeber was quoted on a real estate page promoting development in Brooklyn, “Seven years ago, when I first became interested in this section, there were comparatively few houses here and one could buy lots for $350. Now, as you can see, the entire section is being built up and lots at $1,000 are pretty scarce. I was attracted to the section because of its good location, and the level character of the ground. I own several more plots in the immediate neighbourhood, and as soon as my present operation is completed, will commence the erection of a number of high class one family houses, similar to the ones just finished on the corner of Avenue P and East 9th and East 10th Streets. The four tracking of the Brighton Beach line was certainly a great thing for this section.”

The newspaper noted that Charles A. Weeber had four one family homes under construction on East Ninth, near Avenue P. According to the paper, he was a director of the Kings Highway Building Corporation and a member of the Kings Highway Board of Trade.

In the 1910 U.S. Census, the family was enumerated on Avenue P, pretty much at the peak of Charles Weeber’s success. He was listed that year as an American-born contractor- “Charly” Weeber – living at 106 Avenue P in Brooklyn. By then, his eldest daughter Bertha had entered the workforce as a stenographer at a diamond house. They were living well, and Charly had became known as “Champagne Charly” among his associates, according to Aunt Gloria. Unfortunately, he let the good times roll a little too much and overextended himself.

A May 3, 1913 clipping from the Brooklyn Eagle – Charly Weeber’s rise and fall happened in the span of a single decade.

By the 1915 New York State Census, the family’s time of prosperity had come to an end. Charles, Bertha, Emilie and Charles Jr. were living in an apartment at 325 Jay Street, in Brooklyn, with both Emilie and Charles Jr. working in offices. Betty had married John Lucas. She and her husband moved to Minneapolis, where her family would soon join them. The Weebers were a tight knit family who supported each other through good times and bad, and seem to have been very resilient and resourceful throughout it all.

 It was while working in Minneapolis that Emilie converted to Catholicism, and then also agreed to marry Patrick Valentine Hickey, a Brooklyn lawyer and civil servant she had dated in New York. Their marriage took place at her church in Minneapolis on June 6, 1917, after which they returned to Brooklyn to live. They had a very compatible marriage and were blessed with three children.

Charles and Bertha Weeber later followed Betty and John Lucas further west to California, but would return to Brooklyn regularly to visit the Hickeys. They were at the Hickeys’ house at 241 Van Sicklen Street at the time the 1930 Census was taken, staying in the neighbourhood that Charles Weeber had originally helped build. And they were there again when Charles Weeber died of cancer on November 8, 1936. Charles Weeber became a Catholic at the end of his life, and he is buried in Holy Cross Cemetery, Brooklyn. His obituary in the Brooklyn Times Union, under the headline “Charles A. Weeber, Builder, Is Dead: Had been prominent in development of Kings Hwy. area,” was published November 9, 1936. It  highlighted two things, his building career and his family:

“Mr. Weeber built several rows of homes in the Kings Highway section, about 25 years ago, at Avenue P and East 19th st. In 1915 he went to Minneapolis, Minn., to engage in railroading. Five years ago he retired, moving to San Diego, Calif., where he lived for some time.

“Surviving are his wife, the former Bertha Cordes; two daughters Mrs. Hickey and Mrs. Bertha Lucas, a son, Charles E. Weeber; five grandchildren, two great grandchildren, and in Germany two sisters.”

Luck

Kay McGinnis3 Comments

Last week was the week that Covid-19 isolation hit North America for real. We were supposed to be in New York for March Break, and we cancelled the trip just in time. As I finish and publish this, Toronto and many other places are in a state of emergency. New York is suffering and we are thinking constantly of the people there, and throughout the world.

Most of the things we were planning to do last week are in lower Manhattan. It’s been a long time since I was last a tourist in New York, and the Smithsonian Institution now runs the National Museum of the American Indian – New York there. The Lanape were living on the island of Manahatta when the Dutch arrived and allegedly purchased the land, and certainly occupied it. A 2018 article in Smithsonian magazine, “The True Native New Yorkers Can Never Truly Reclaim Their Homeland” talks about how the Lenape were forcibly dispersed, and today are working to preserve their culture in New York and also to save the highly endangered Lenape language.

Part of the work by some Lenape who still live in New York is a movement to bring forward a century-old proposal to build a monument for Native Americans on Staten Island. This was first pitched in 1911 by the department store owner Rodman Wanamaker, who wanted to erect a colossal statue — taller than the Statue of Liberty – with a museum. The campaign fizzled after a ground-breaking ceremony in 1913 – World War I helped sideline the project — but the U.S. Federal Government retained the land. In 2017, a new proposal was made to President Donald Trump and the National Parks Service, led by Margaret Boldeagle. It doesn’t seem to have moved forward, and now we have the incredible disruption of COVID-19.

I started writing this post on St. Patrick’s Day, trying to get back to blogging after slipping a few weeks behind in my #52Ancestors posts. Like just about everyone in the world, we had other plans for this day, but instead we’re making the best of things at home and honestly feeling lucky to be here.

In preparation for the trip we didn’t take to New York City, I also spent some time gathering together a few facts about two Irish ancestors I hoped to learn a little bit more about while we were there. They are my three-times-great grandparents Murtha and Margaret Fleming. Originally from Arles, Queens County (Co. Laois), they emigrated to the United States sometime after 1852 [1]. They settled in lower Manhattan, where Murtha became a produce dealer in Gansevoort Market (now called the Meat Packing District).

I don’t have any information that was passed down in the family about Murtha and Margaret Fleming, so everything I know about them is pieced together from records. I am really looking forward to someday walking around their historic market neighbourhood , visiting the National Museum of the American Indian, finally seeing the Tenement Museum, and checking out the Museum of the City of New York.

According to two obituary notices (one a brief article, one a death announcement) published in the New York Sun on October 7, 1894 and October 8, 1894, Murtha Fleming was 75 when he died at his residence at 419 West 33rd Street. I find it interesting that this is the address today of the Sisters of the Presentation and I wonder what connection there is, if any.

Based on the obituary, he was born about 1819, and was in his 30s when he and his family came to America. I think it’s fun that my husband’s great-grandparents came from Co. Laois as well. Google tells me it would take a full work day to walk from Arles to my husband’s family village, Ballyfin.

Like my husband’s family, the Flemings were Roman Catholics. Murtha, who often gets transcribed on Ancestry as Martha, sometimes making him hard to find, married Margaret Hayden and they baptized their daughter Maria at the Catholic church in Arles on September 4, 1853. Maria (who later was known as Maria Catherine) had at least three brothers, and so far, I know the name of one son, James, who was born in New York City in 1861.

The Sun obituary says, “Mr. Fleming came from Ireland about 33 years ago and embarked in the produce business, afterward establishing the firm of M. Fleming & Sons.” I found him listed in the New York City directory, 1870/71, digitized and hosted by the New York Public Library, as a Merchant located at 360 Greenwich. He was living at 469 West 32nd. In the New York City directory, 1872/73, the business is listed as John and Murtagh Fleming, Produce, at 163 Reade. The Flemings had moved house and were living at 433 West 33rd. Google Maps sort of helps, but I don’t think it is possible to really grasp their geography without a visit.

In the 1880 U.S. Census, Murtha & Margaret Fleming were living at 428 West 35th. Only James was still living with them, and both he and Murtha worked at the “Produce Commission” (The Greenwich Village Society for Historical Preservation has more about Gansevoort Market but it says the market was formally sanctioned by the city in 1884. There is a lot more to learn about the trade there, and some very interesting facts, such as the introduction of distributed refrigeration. By the time of the 1880 Census, Maria Catherine Fleming had married a liquor salesman named Michael E. Carley and had given birth to my great-grandmother’s two older siblings, Katherine and William Merwin Carley. Agnes, the grandmother we know as Nana Murphy, was the baby of the family, born in 1892.

Before our trip, I was feeling frustrated to not have more time to comb through directories and hunt for clues of Murtha and Margaret’s lives that I could take to New York City. Today, I feel lucky that we didn’t get there only to have to turn back to Canada, and also lucky that I have so many gaps left to fill in on a very interesting ancestor. Genealogy must be one of the most calming distractions possible, and the fact that I can rely on it now is the luck of the Irish, indeed.

[1] Their daughter Maria Fleming (Later known as Maria Catherine Fleming) was baptized in Ireland on September 4, 1853 and is found in the Irish Catholic parish registers for Arles in the Diocese of Kildare and Leighlin. I can’t quite make out the writing for the Townland. Another job to add to the list!

[2] According to Murtha Fleming’s Sun obituary, he was survived by his wife, three sons and a daughter.

Disaster

Kay McGinnis1 Comment

The Halifax Explosion of December 6, 1917 was one of the largest man-made explosions in history and its deadly impact still ripples through Nova Scotian family histories today. Much of this is from the collective trauma that resulted from an explosion that levelled swaths of the city, killing almost 2,000 people and injuring an estimated 9,000. Some continues from colonial erasure, which has just started to be addressed.

“Indian School at Tufts Cove” Taken from A.W. Griswold, 30 Views of Dartmouth Disaster (Dartmouth, 1917). Date: 1917. Reference no.: Nova Scotia Archives F107 H13 Ex7 no.9

Imagine if you knew your family had died in a horrifying disaster and yet no one took notice or believed what you said. At the time of the 100th Anniversary commemoration of the disaster in 2017, the research of Mi’kmaw playwright and filmmaker Catherine Martin was instrumental in sharing the memory of the lost communities of Kepe’kek and Maskwiekati Malpek in the media and correcting the public record about how many lives had been lost at the places called in English Turtle Grove or Tuft’s Cove. Each year on the Dartmouth shore of Halifax Harbour, Catherine Martin calls out the names of the Mi’kmaq who died, among them her family members, a remembrance of the people who lived there. The Globe and Mail article is just a glimpse: “My great aunt Rachel Cope, my great grandma Sarah, and her little baby Annie, who was two. Leo, little Frankie, who was three – oh my God, I just imagine him. Little Henry … .”

Their community on the harbour was completely destroyed, but with great resilience the Mi’kmaq of the area continued, the few survivors holding the memory of what they knew happened. In a report digitized by the Nova Scotia Archives, relief official J.H. Mitchell described his visit to the community immediately following the disaster. The dismissive language (rejecting the number of casualties reported as exaggeration, for example, and saying that the informant Mr. Moore had been drinking) seems chillingly at odds with the horror of the scene he describes in his notes, where the survivors were still finding parts of people who had been blown up: “Very near the explosion. The houses used to be shaded by pines, now everything is gone. Of some houses, there is absolutely no vestige, not even of ashes. Others are buried under the shattered trees… The devastation is incomprehensible.”

For the government, this devastation conveniently concluded the land expropriation that was already in motion at the time of the explosion. Very recently, the Millbrook First Nation, where many of the surviving families relocated, settled a land claim and are working on redeveloping the area. The lands returned to them are contaminated and will require extensive environmental remediation by the previous occupants.

On the other side of the harbour, at 29 Kaye Street in Halifax’s North End, my grandmother’s aunt and uncle, Frederick and Rose Killam, lived with their four children in a very different world. They had a comfortable house next to the Methodist Church. Fred, who had grown up in the fertile Annapolis Valley, was a florist who managed Nova Scotia Nursery – a greenhouse and florist business at nearby 254-256 Lockman (now Barrington), right next to the Admiralty Grounds and Wellington Barracks.

A February 26, 1908 Dalhousie Gazette ad for Nova Scotia Nursery from the Dalhousie Archives. The Nursery, featuring 17 greenhouses, was located across from the Intercolonial Railway Station. Footage of the destroyed station can be seen in the silent film about the explosion that is linked elsewhere in this post.

Aunt Rose, (born Rosina Maude Theakston) was the granddaughter of prominent Halifax printer and missionary Major Paylor Theakston. She was mother to a young family and active in the church community. Fred was a few years older than my great-grandfather Dr. Harold Edwin Killam, and he and Rose had housed Harold so that he could complete medical school at Dalhousie University. The brothers were close and their children were loving cousins as they grew. The distance between their respective homes, in Halifax and in the Annapolis Valley, was shortened by the train nicknamed the “Blueberry Express.” Fred Killam was frequently called back to the valley to decorate for hometown weddings.

Most of I what know about what happened to our family on December 6, 1917, comes from the unusually brief story Nana told about the explosion, which I think was a result of the trauma and “the less said about it, the better.” This is augmented by a neighbour’s first-person account held in the Nova Scotia Archives and in an article that Nana’s sister Kathleen Cogswell wrote in the Nova Scotia Medical Journal about their father’s practice. [1]

On December 6, 1917, Fred Killam was not at work at the Nursery. Instead he was sick in bed with diphtheria. Rose, who was expecting a baby, was at home looking after him. It was a Monday morning, and Aunt Rose was starting another housekeeping week in the cellar. It was wash day. Because of Fred’s illness, the children had been sent to stay with her family at 56 Seymour Street, on the other side of town in South End Halifax. The whole family would have been grieving, as Rose Theakston’s father Henry had just died on December 3, 1917, of heart disease.  Rose was not aware that in the harbour down the hill, two ships had collided and a fire aboard one of the boats was catching the attention of those on shore.

What happened next, at 9:05 a.m. when the munitions ship Mont Blanc detonated, was described in the long letter Ethel Jane Bond wrote to her Uncle Murray Kellough in Winnipeg, 10 days after the disaster. Ethel Bond’s family lived at 35 Kaye Street next to the Killams. Her father Alexander Bond was killed immediately by the blast, and both sisters, Bertha and Ethel, were injured. Even so, they went to the aid of their neighbours immediately following the explosion.

Finding their father killed near the house, under debris, the sisters attempted to uncover his body, but “the cries of the living who needed help were so insistent that we simply had to leave and help them. Fires started as soon as the explosion came and we were forced to act quickly. Our house did not catch immediately. Killams were calling. Mr. K. was in bed and the kiddies were out here at Seymour Street with the Theakstons. Mrs. Killam was in the cellar at the time and thought she had done something amiss with the furnace and it had blown up. She had a very hard job getting out and strained herself badly. Mr. K. was blown out of bed and could not do much to help himself. The whole back of their house was slid around and the upper floor was blown down on a slant, so Bid and I guided him as he slid down in his night clothes. We got him onto a mattress that Mrs. K. threw down and covered him with blankets while Mrs. K. got some clothes for him. We left them and went over the field to the parsonage, not expecting to see one of them alive.”

Soldiers standing guard in the midst of the devastation on Kaye Street east of Gottingen Street, Halifax.  Date: 1917 or 1918. Photographer: W.G. MacLaughlan , Reference no.: Halifax Relief Commission Nova Scotia Archives accession no. 1976-166 no. 36 /  negative: N-2303

In the immediate aftermath, Ethel and Bid (Bertha) found that the minister Mr. Swetnam and his young daughter Dorothy had survived, while Mrs. Swetnam and their child, Carmen, were killed. They helped Mr. Swetnam rescue Dorothy from the ruins, as the parsonage caught fire. Eventually, after salvaging what they could from their burning home, Bertha Bond was sent in a car to the Theakstons with the Killams, while Ethel evacuated to the woods, along with Rose Theakston’s visiting sister and brother-in-law (he was a minister in PEI – it is not clear where they were staying). The Bond sisters were reunited at a friends’ home on South Street, where they stayed.

Meanwhile, in the Annapolis Valley, Dr. Harold Killam was doing double duty, serving in the Canadian Army as a Medical Corps Captain at Aldershot Camp and continuing his practice as a country doctor in his off hours. When news of the explosion reached the Valley, Dr. Killam was put on the first relief train into the city along with other medical personnel. He was sure his family members had been killed, and when the train was halted at Rockingham due to the destruction, his fears increased.

In her article, Kathleen Cogswell wrote, “soldiers there were turning away all those without urgent business in the city and providing what transportation they could to doctors, nurses, and much-needed supplies. My father was assigned a seat in a truck. “I know this is a foolish question,” he said to the driver, “but do you happen to know a Fred Killam, of Nova Scotia Nurseries?” To his surprise and relief, the driver did and also knew that he and his family had survived while every other family on that street had had fatalities and whole families had been wiped out. The doctor could get on with his nightmare job of giving emergency aid in the then new Camp Hill Hospital without the fear that the next victim he saw might be a member of his own family. (A sister and her family also lived in the city but not so close to the explosion site and, he thought, would have been in less danger. They also escaped, some with bad cuts.”

The article, “On the Frontlines of Disaster” on the Canada’s History site tells more of the medical story in Halifax following the explosion, focussed on the efforts of another Aldershot physician, Dr. DeWitt. The article describes the conditions at Camp Hill, where Sisters of Charity nursed the wounded and dying. “Since the regular operating room in Camp Hill had not yet been fitted up, doctors performed surgery wherever they could find space. Temporary operating rooms were set up in the kitchen and dining room. The doctors operated on kitchen tables, and, in many cases, were forced to use kitchen utensils in lieu of surgical tools. And when surgical thread ran out, they resorted to using ordinary cotton thread to stitch up the wounds.” It is no surprise, reading this, that Dr. Killam did not speak of his experience, other than to tell his family of his relief that his brother and family members had survived.

I don’t know how long exactly Captain Harold Killam remained in Halifax, but I recall my grandmother saying that her father worked almost around the clock for several days, treating the wounded. A silent film available from the Nova Scotia Archives shows some of the relief and medical efforts amidst the devastation of the city, which was both burning and blanketed by snow immediately after the blast.

Despite their miraculous survival on Kaye Street, Fred and Rose Killam’s family was not untouched by death. In the aftermath of the explosion, Rose Killam lost their baby. Her grandfather, Major Theakston, still working at his mission to the poor in the city’s North End, also died as a result of injuries sustained in the explosion. The whole city’s recovery was arduous and the grief was intense.

“Plan Showing Devastated Area of Halifax City, N.S.” shows the Killams’ and Bonds’ Kaye Street neighbourhood in the area of “Burned Ruins.” Date: 1918. Reference no.: N.S. Board of Insurance Underwriters Nova Scotia Archives V6/240 – 1917 Halifax loc.4.2.3.2 / negative: O/S N-111

Eventually, the Killam family rebuilt at Kaye Street and Nova Scotia Nursery, which must have been levelled in a lethal shower of glass (at least one of Fred Killam’s employees was killed), was re-opened. McAlpine’s Halifax City Directory for 1919-1920 lists the business in the same location, on the re-named Barrington Street (1086-1090 Barrington St.). Major Theakston’s North End Mission continued as well, under the direction of his fifth son, George W. Theakston.  

Rev. Mr. Swetnam’s church on Kaye Street was also rebuilt, as a memorial to the victims of the disaster. It became the first congregation to bring together Methodist and Presbyterian worshippers in a “united church.” (Closed as a church, the building is now one of Canada’s most endangered historical sites.)   And although she continued her work at the church and at home, Aunt Rose (like most other survivors, I imagine) was quietly said by some family members to never be the same again.

An 1894 advertisement for the North End Mission from the Theakston newspaper, The Northern Light. Clipped with gratitude from https://oldnorthend.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/north-end-the-northern-light-1894.pdf

[1] The Nova Scotia Medical Journal, Volume 71, Number 4, August 1992. “Dr. Harold E. Killam, A Country Physician at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. First Years 1906-1918” Pages 147-153.

Favourite Discovery

Kay McGinnis1 Comment

I don’t like picking favourites, but I can’t help it here. My favourite discovery was learning that my three-times-great grandmother Anne Kavanagh, nee Nugent, was a published author. This past week, I held her little book of collected stories, The Gift, for the first time.

Also this past week, on Twitter, Jane MacNamara (Where the Story Takes Me) recommended an article by Cindi Foreman, “Telling My Ancestor’s “Settler Stories,”” a family history post that looks, in part, at how the Irish, oppressed by the English, could then turn around and do the same as settlers taking Indigenous Peoples’ lands in North America. In the article, Foreman looks at her own family history in Ontario and offers a list of ten things genealogists and family historians can do, as well as a number of resources for further reading and learning.

Because I was thinking about 19th Century women writing, and about First Nations and colonialism, I looked to see if recent research had added to the list of First Nations women writing in the 1800s in the 30 years since I was in university. As far as I could tell, the answer is no. Emily Pauline Johnson — Tekahionwake — is alone on that list. I have only read the tiniest bit of her work, so I’m doing some catching up now.

The list of 19th Century Irish women writers is considerably longer than Pauline Johnson’s one-person list. However, it seems very few have been remembered and are only now being re-evaluated by scholars. I don’t know where The Gift, Containing Three Catholic Tales would rank among forgotten Irish literature. It is a very Catholic book and at the time it was published, it was described as “suitable for young people” — two things that might make it easy for a modern reader to discount. To me, it is an incredible family record, too good to be true really. I still get teary when I look at it. But it is also a fascinating snapshot of a middle-class, intellectual woman’s thinking in 19th Century Ireland.  It is a little miracle — not only that any copies of the book survive, but that it exists at all.

The Gift, by Anne Kavanagh, published in 1863.

I can hold it in the palm of one hand, this tiny relic with its bright blue cover. It was published in the spring of 1863, embossed and bound 157 years ago in Derby, England. Anne Kavanagh was 41 years old. She and her husband Professor James William Kavanagh had just celebrated their 20th wedding anniversary and she was pregnant with their 15th child. The family lived in Sutton, Howth (Dublin) in a gothic revival house called St. Laurence Lodge, which was owned by the Earl of Howth and still stands today.

Professor Kavanagh had not always been a university lecturer. He started out as a school teacher, and then rose to the position of head teacher and ultimately head inspector of Ireland’s National Schools. The National Schools were a ground-breaking attempt at public, non-denominational primary education, but James William Kavanagh found problems during his inspections and was vocal about them. In 1857, he took a principled and public stand against what he said was use of Protestant materials to teach Catholic children in an attempt to convert them, in schools that were supposed to be secular. His superiors were furious and in February 1858 he lost his job.  

Supported by the Catholic hierarchy, Kavanagh’s battle continued. In 1859, there was an inquiry in the British House of Commons (just reading the inspector’s correspondence leading up to his dismissal is exhausting). There were many who wanted to discredit him personally and professionally, and he remained resolute in presenting his evidence. I think he and Anne were incredibly brave to take on this battle, sacrificing their livelihood and risking their family’s future to speak out.

James William Kavanagh cobbled together a freelance income, continuing the freelance writing and editing work he had been doing. He toured around Ireland to give popular public lectures on science and literature. One topic I would have loved to have heard was on the contributions of women geographers to the field. He was also given a position as a professor of mathematics at the recently founded, and unaccredited, Catholic University founded with Saint John Henry Newman as its first Rector.

Anne Kavanagh was a writer and a French translator, according to her daughter Agnes Hickey’s obituary [1]. I wonder if Anne Kavanagh started publishing in this uneasy period, to supplement the family income, or if she had always taken time to pursue and publish her writing? I have so many questions and I can’t imagine how there could ever be answers unless there is some dusty hidden archive somewhere, waiting to be found — like the blue book sitting on the table beside me.

A review published in The Freeman’s Journal, August 6, 1863, says the stories in The Gift had been previously published – I’m assuming in the periodical press. Are there more stories by Anne Kavanagh out there? It seems possible at least. If I had unfettered time and money, I think spending some time looking for Anne is what I would do with it.

A review of The Gift published in The Freeman’s Journal, Dublin, August 6, 1863.

When did she manage to write? She was a middle-class lady, and so must have had the advantage of household help. But she would have had plenty of non-writing work to do, and unlike most women writing at the time, she had a large family of young children to care for. Did she stay up at night, with her husband out at one of his committee meetings or lectures, the house quiet with children sleeping for the moment. Did she carve out time in the morning, sitting at a desk near the fire? Did she rise early, stay cozy in bed with writing paper and pencil at the ready? Did Professor Kavanagh support her work and encourage her? Did the children know to leave Mamma alone at certain times, when she was doing her work? Did the impulse to write contribute to her early death?

For a few years, I didn’t know the title of Anne Kavanagh’s book – I just had the reference in the Brooklyn Eagle to her being a writer. Then I had another “favourite discovery”. I met (online) two amazing cousins descended from the O’Raffertys and the Kavanaghs, living in Australia. This was when some things started to fall into place.

How was Anne Kavanagh educated? I still don’t know, but thanks to my cousin Pauline Newell, I do now know that Anne Nugent’s mother was Bridget O’Rafferty, a sister to the influential Parish Priest of Tullamore, Rev. Dr. James O’Rafferty. Bridget married William Nugent, a Tullamore linen and woolen draper. Anne was born in 1822, so her infancy and early childhood would have coincided with Daniel O’Connell’s fight for Catholic emancipation. The penal laws that forbade education for Irish Catholics and any others who did not conform with the Church of Ireland, were still within living memory. My ancestors’ families clearly had the ability to pay for private education over the years, but what was it like?

I don’t know if there was a girls’ school in Tullamore. Anne was a young teenager by the time the Mercy Sisters established their first convent outside Dublin in Tullamore, at the invitation of Rev. Dr. O’Rafferty. The Sisters’ Sacred Heart school for girls in Tullamore was not opened until 1839, when Anne was already 17. Was she tutored? Did her parents teach her? Did she go to a school in Tullamore, or elsewhere? She certainly learned French well enough to be a translator, and also to have a deep interest in France, where two of her short stories in The Gift are set. I also wonder if it was education, or their interest in intellectual pursuits, that brought Anne Nugent and James Kavanagh together in some way.

The title page of The Gift. A main theme of the three stories is to be spiritually ready at all times for death. Said to be suitable for young readers, Anne Kavanagh did not spare them violence, bloodshed and the cruelty of humanity. She also makes political statements, against war and suppression of religion.

The couple were married in Tullamore on October 10, 1842, when she was 20. The horrors of the first famine years were just receding and the Great Famine had not yet started. The couple did not settle in Tullamore, and in 1850 Anne’s parents William and Bridget Nugent, along with all of Anne’s siblings — James, Mary, and Kate Nugent — left Ireland for America. They settled in Ohio, where they were resident in time for the 1850 U.S. Census. Learning this was another of my favourite genealogy discoveries, because Pauline Newell was able to give meaning to a random scrap of hand-me-down family tree that I had in a box. It was meaningless to me, but Pauline was able to find in it information she was looking for and the story finally came together.

But it was our other cousin, Ian Thomson, who manages a Wikitree for the Kavanaghs, who got the whole discussion going in the first place, who filled in more Kavanagh detail, and who made it possible to find The Gift.

Ian shared the information he received about the Kavanaghs’ eldest daughter Brigid Mary, who became Mother Mary Patrick, a Superior of the Presentation Convent in Galway.  He had requested information from the convent and a Sister kindly sent him a transcription from the annals that included an unsourced newspaper clipping of Mother Mary Patrick’s 1933 obituary. The Irish clipping provided much more about her parents including: “[J.W. Kavanagh’s] wife, the mother of Mother M. Patrick, was author of an exquisite volume, The Gift, and engaged on a Life of Joan of Arc when she died at the early age of forty. The family resided at Sutton, Dublin, where they had a wide circle of friends, including the late Margaret Stokes and her distinguished father.”

With the title, it was possible to find the book at last. A digitized copy is available from the British Museum library through Google Books, but I now see it is very different to see the physical book. I feel so lucky to have found a surviving printed copy at all. It was only because I was fact-checking for the initial research for this writing prompt, that I discovered a copy was actually for sale.

Now that I have this amazing little source, there is so much more to discover about Anne Kavanagh’s life – what she was reading, who her friends were in Dublin, what they were thinking and talking about, and their activism. I wonder what we’ll discover next.

[1] Brooklyn Eagle, February 6, 1939

Same Name

Kay McGinnisLeave a comment

Doing this project, I’m trying to learn about a few different things this year. As I progress into Month Two of 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks and the Next 150 Challenge, I find I am slowing down. Not in learning, necessarily, but in pace and in the volume of what I am trying to take in. I noticed I am starting to read in a more focused way and thinking more deeply about each thing that I study. An article I read this week was an example of this.

On Twitter, I’ve read some really good and provocative threads lately about family – who our “real” families are, what we can know or not know, how family is severed in the trauma of forced separation, death, genocide, migration, emigration, war. How family can re-connect or re-discover someone lost and try to heal. How sometimes that is not possible at all.

We have examples of many of these things in my own family history – most humans must, I think – but what is undeniable for me is that so much that was “lost” is fairly easily searchable and found. Not every time, but it is there for the most part. It really is not that hard to do genealogical and family history research when you are a North American settler from Europe. The system is set up for us, by us, about us.

The article I read this week pointed out that the many records and sources that make my favourite hobby fun for me, even when confronting what is broken and painful, will not be in any way an easy experience for others. “Settler Records, Indigenous Histories: Challenges in Indigenous Genealogical Research” by Stacey Devlin and Emily Cuggy really gave me pause and if I’m honest, made me cry. What can undo the damage of the past?

I turned back again to my own family. I decided to choose a single individual for this week’s theme, “Same Name”: Emma Josephine Killam. The reason is that she shows up twice in my maternal grandmother’s family tree – once on Nana’s father’s side and once on her mother’s side.

When I first saw this in my growing online tree years ago and realized I was looking at the same person, Nana (who died eight years ago this week, may she rest in peace) laughed and told me her mother and father liked to sometimes joke that they were actually cousins. And they were, too, by marriage.

Emma Josephine Killam was born to Amasa Killam III and Amy Rand in the Annapolis Valley in Nova Scotia, on November 16, 1835 [1]. Her father was descended from the New England Planters who settled on land unceded by the Mi’kmaq, but occupied by French Acadians regardless. When the English colonial forces forcibly removed the French, the New England Planters moved in. Emma’s mother Amy was sister to the Baptist missionary and linguist Silas Tertius Rand, who was first educated at home by his father and then went on to become a minister amongst the Mi’kmaq, learning and writing several First Nations languages in his efforts to convert the Mi’kmaq and other Indigenous Peoples to Protestant Christianity.

Whenever I get stuck on this particular family line, my go-to is the venerable internet source, The Sprague Project. It’s not flawless, at least not for my family line, but it is very, very good and certainly far better than my own half-rebuilt online trees. The Sprague Database tells me that Emma Josephine Killam was the fifth of six children. Her next eldest sibling, William Henry Killam, born March 18, 1833, grew up to marry Amanda F. Woodman. They then became the parents of many Killam children, including my great-grandfather, Dr. Harold Edwin Killam, who married Ora Louise Webster.

If I was any good at genealogy, I would write this all out properly, but I haven’t learned how yet. Here’s a little drawing, though, because I think it helps. At least it helps me.

Ora Louise Webster was the daughter of Samuel Webster and Louisa D. Robinson. Ora’s maternal grandfather, Benjamin Enoch Robinson, remarried after Louisa’s mother, Abigail Tupper Patterson, died (I did toy with making Tupper my “same name” topic – we sure have a lot of Tuppers). Benjamin’s second wife was none other than Emma Josephine Killam [3], who then became Ora’s step-grandmother as well as being Dr. Harold Killam’s aunt.

Benjamin Robinson and Emma Killam were married October 21, 1864 in Cornwallis, NS. He was a 45 year-old widowed farmer at Aylesford. She was a 29 year-old “tailoress” from Cornwallis. Nana said that her Killam aunts were “wonderful needlewomen.” They could apparently make anything. (I have several Killam cousins today with those same gifts and they are amazing!) An interesting side note is that Rev. E.M. Saunders was their minister – at the time of this wedding, he would have been the young father of Marshall Saunders, who grew up to write the best-selling horse story, Beautiful Joe.[4]

I just decided I need to start a page of books mentioned on this blog because I think I am going to want it later. Before I do that, though, I should note that Benjamin and Emma had at least two surviving children together before his death on July 9, 1900. [5] Based on the 1871 and 1881 Census of Canada records, they were Della Robinson, born about 1866, and Myron Robinson, born 1876.

I don’t know why, but I have always loved this particular census record. I love the way the census taker wrote down “Emmer,” which I’m sure is how Emma’s name would have been pronounced. I love seeing my great-great grandmother Louisa recorded as a girl of 17. Five-year-old Abigail was the last child born to Benjamin and Abigail Robinson, and was named for her mother. Adelia (Della) was the first child born to Benjamin and Emma. And I love seeing the extended family unit, even though I wonder if it would have been a tricky blend in real life. Benjamin’s 90 year-old mother was living with them, and I think that Deborah Patterson would have been a sister of Benjamin’s first wife. Perhaps she was caring for the children after her sister’s death. Later, Louisa named my great-grandmother Ora, after the name Deborah, and I wonder if she was thinking of her aunt (it was also Louisa’s grandmother Deborah Patterson’s name).

After Benjamin’s death, Emma Robinson lived out her years in Aylesford, Nova Scotia, with her daughter Della (Adelia), who had married James Burton Nichols. Emma died on October 16, 1921, at the age of 85 and is buried in the Old Morristown Cemetery. [7]

I am still irritated with myself that I did not get good enough pictures in the Old Morristown Cemetery during a 2015 visit to Nova Scotia. I do love seeing my mom’s arm there in the picture though, because I know she is explaining about our ancestors to my children (who still complain about how many cemeteries we visited that year.) This is Benjamin Robinson’s lovely marble monument. I don’t have photos of the whole monument, or the other sides. Hopefully someone will go back with me again.

NOTES:

[1] Library and Archives Canada. Census of Canada, 1901. Ottawa, Ontario, Canada: Library and Archives Canada, 2004. http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/databases/census-1901 . Year: 1901; Census Place: Millville, Kings, Nova Scotia; Page: 10; Family No: 106 (via Ancestry.ca)

[2] Judith Fingard, “RAND, SILAS TERTIUS,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 11, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, accessed February 8, 2020, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/rand_silas_tertius_11E.html.

[3] Nova Scotia Historical Vital Statistics. https://www.novascotiagenealogy.com/ItemView.aspx?ImageFile=1826-2&Event=marriage&ID=84814

[4] Gwendolyn Davies, ed. Fiction Treasures by Maritime Writers: Best-selling novelists of Canada s Maritime provinces 1860-1950, Formac Publishing, 2015. p. 337.

[5] Date is from his monument in the Old Morristown Cemetery, Morristown, Nova Scotia.

[6] Library and Archives Canada. Census of Canada. 1871; Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Census Place: Aylesford South, Kings, Nova Scotia; Roll: C-10542; Page: 45; Family No: 165 (via Ancestry.ca)

[7] Nova Scotia Historical Vital Statistics. https://www.novascotiagenealogy.com/ItemView.aspx?ImageFile=93-29&Event=death&ID=173970

So far away

Kay McGinnis3 Comments

If I wanted to fly from Toronto, Canada, to Melbourne, Australia, Google tells me it would take 1 day and 1 hour. That’s pretty far for this week’s 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks prompt, “So far away”.

Canada, where I live, and Australia — 25 hours away by plane — have many similarities in their histories of settlement and racist British colonial policies. In each country, there are recent improvements for Indigenous Peoples and also many recent setbacks for human rights and reconciliation.

Both countries were among the four nations that voted against the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, along with New Zealand and the United States (Eleven other countries abstained). It took Australia two years to change its position about UNDRIP, which it did in 2009. Canada followed, endorsing UNDRIP in 2010, but only officially removing objections to it in 2016.  

In Canada, only the province of British Columbia has tabled a law adopting UNDRIP, which it did in late 2019. The Federal government position is that it is a non-binding declaration. A private member’s bill was defeated last year.

Indigenous People’s rights to land and to decision-making about natural resources are clearly stated in UNDRIP. And Canada’s natural resources are the backbone of the economy. This 2017 Globe and Mail editorial was clear about the fear-factor, saying application of UNDRIP for anything more than consultative decision-making would be “disastrous.”

But would it really? Sadly, the first thing I think of when I hear “Australia” today is the continuing severity of the 2019/2020 bush fire season. These fires have had a terrible impact on Indigenous communities as well as settler communities and have brought increasing attention to the benefits of Aboriginal fire management practises in Australia. In reading more about this, I also learned about the work of Dr. Amy Cardinal Christianson, a Métis/Cree woman raised in Treaty 8 territory and a fire scientist. Her podcast series Good Fire, made last fall with Your Forest host Matthew Kristoff, looks at Indigenous fire practices around the world.

Even though Australia is so far away, it is surprisingly close. I wonder if my stepfather’s ancestor Esther Anne Howard (nee Camplin) and her family found it to be similar when they came to Canada from Australia in the 19th Century.

Esther Anne Camplin was born in Emerald Hill (now part of Melbourne), Victoria in 1857, on the traditional lands of the Wurundjeri people. The year of her birth is noted in the Australia Birth Index on Ancestry. Her parents, Edward Miram Camplin and Lucy Melchar Edwards, had been married in Melbourne, at St. Peter’s Anglican Church, which still stands on Eastern Hill in Melbourne. Rev. William Merry performed the marriage ceremony on February 11, 1851.

Lucy Melchar Edwards was born in Islington, Middlesex, England in about 1833. A passenger list shows her listed among the “Female Immigrants” who arrived in Victoria from England on the ship Culloden, on July 5, 1850. Lucy Edwards was an 18 year-old housemaid. (Victoria, Australia, Assisted and Unassisted Passenger Lists, 1839-1923, Public Record Office Victoria via Ancestry). She was part of an immigration society scheme focused on getting women to immigrate to Australia.

Dispatch No. 25 dated July 18, 1850, from C.J. La Trobe Esq., Superintendent of Port Phillip, to the Secretary of State for the Colonies (published in Accounts and papers, Volume 10, Great Britain House of Commons) noted, “I take leave to apprize your Lordship that the ship “Culloden” arrived at this port on the 5th instant, bringing out 36 females sent by the above Association. They were immediately upon their landing, received in the immigration depot, where, fortunately, the requisite accommodation could, without difficulty, at this time be afforded, and placed under the charge and the superintendence of the local Immigration Board. The great majority, I may add, have readily met with engagements with respectable employers.” This seems true for Lucy Edwards, who was noted as going to Mrs. Fyffe in Melbourne.

It doesn’t seem that Lucy stayed in employment for very long though, as she and Edward Camplin were married within months of her arrival. Edward Miriam Camplin was also English born, baptized at St. Swithin’s in Lincoln on January 4, 1829, according to the Family Search index England, Births and Christenings, 1538-1975. I haven’t yet found any records of when or how he arrived in Australia, or what he did there. However, Edward and Lucy Camplin had at least three daughters in Emerald Hill: Eliza (1854) in Australia, Esther (about 1857), and Emma, who died in infancy.

The journey to Australia could take up to four months, in absolutely dismal conditions. It seems incredible to me that Edward and Lucy would be willing to take another voyage, but they did make that decision. They certainly covered more distance in their lives than I have in mine, and they had to do it in fetid sailing ships supplied with contaminated water and disgusting food.

I also haven’t found anything conclusive about when the Camplin family left Australia or when they came to Canada. It seems most likely that they would have sailed back to England and then travelled to Canada. In any case, they arrived in Toronto in time for the 1871 Census, living in St. George’s Ward. They were not an economically well-off family. In the Census Edward Camplin was working as a labourer, and the couple’s two surviving children, 17 year-old Eliza and 14 year-old Esther were a servant and a seamstress respectively. Lucy Camplin, who was 38, was keeping house. The 1872-73 Directory of Toronto lists Edward Camplin, labourer, at 36 Bathurst Street, near Niagara Street, a home the Camplins shared with another family.  

Map via Nathan Ng’s site Old Toronto Maps, showing the neighbourhood where Esther Camplin and Alfred Howard lived in the early 1870s. Alfred was at Queen and Portland at the top of the map, while Esther’s family lived at Bathurst and Niagara, near Victoria Square. (Wadsworth & Unwin’s Map of the City of Toronto [shewing real estate exemptions from taxation], compiled and drawn by Maurice Gaviller, C.E. & P.L.S., from plans filed in the Registry Office and the most recent surveys, 1872. Wadsworth & Unwin, P.L. Surveyors, Toronto, Sepr. 1st, 1872. City Engineers Office, Toronto, Jany 1878 [Signature illegible]. Copp, Clark & Co. Lith. Toronto. Entered according to Act of the Parliament of Canada, in the year 1872, by Wadsworth & Unwin, in the Office of the Minister of Agriculture. http://maps.library.utoronto.ca/datapub/digital/NG/historicTOmaps/wadsworth1872n0025641k_a1.pdf

Here in Toronto, Esther met a Quebec City-born blacksmith named Alfred William Howard. In the 1872-73 Directory of Toronto, he was located at 415 Queen Street West, just near the corner of Portland Street, a few buildings away from the intersection with Bathurst. Since they lived in the same neighbourhood and were both Church of England, they may have gotten to know each other at nearby St. John’s Church.

However, the couple weren’t married at St. John’s. They married with a license in Streetsville, a community far to the west of Toronto, now part of Mississauga. On their marriage certificate, he gave his age as 27 and she as 22 years old when they married on May 24, 1875. Other records would suggest that their actual ages were a bit different than the ones they gave to the minister. She would have been 18, and he 31. Did they elope to Streetsville, I wonder, or decide to have a destination wedding in an attractive spot?

Certainly the Howards had a long marriage and raised a large family of children together,. They lived in a nice house at 172 Windermere Avenue, in the Village of Swansea, which is now part of West Toronto. There is a great family photograph of them posted here. Alfred died in 1915, and Esther 20 years later in 1935. Her death record notes her far away birthplace of Australia.

Close to Home

Kay McGinnis2 Comments

This week, for the #Next150 Challenge, the assignment I’ve taken is to understand all the articles of UNDRIP, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The challenge from Ry Moran, the director of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, makes the point that every person should know these articles. It also offers a quiz to help gauge how much I have taken in. It is my goal to spend more time this week studying than writing.

The Week 4 prompt for #52Ancestors is “Close to Home.” I am going to interpret this as geographically close. I live in Toronto (home today to the largest population of First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples in Ontario). Not far away, about one hour by commuter train, is Hamilton, where the city flies the Haudenosaunee Confederacy Six Nations Flag, the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation Flag, the Métis Flag and the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami Flag. When I pass my UNDRIP quiz, I am going to return to the Hamilton website and read more about the Urban Indigenous Strategy the city adopted last year.

Hamilton, Ontario, looms large in my personal research lore. Deep in postpartum depression more than a decade ago, I found a thread to hang onto by researching an odd reference to an early 20th Century American hotel keeper in Harbourville, Nova Scotia (my childhood summer home and still my favourite place on earth). As I searched, I found that he was the black sheep of his family, a conman and a bigamist, and I started following his trail of destruction around North America, finally tracing him back to Hamilton. In fact, the first time I visited Hamilton was to spend a couple of days in the city’s wonderful library, looking for clues. By the time I was able to make contact with his descendent, who was looking for his disappeared grandfather, I was hooked. The grandson was an amazing genealogy researcher and he filled in some more gaps and taught me a lot as we corresponded. My heart broke a little when he found that one of the conman’s wives died in childbirth. I sought treatment for the depression, and I moved on with my life — and my research.

Chasing after a dishonest man who left a trail of wives and children in his wake, in multiple provinces and states, turned out to be quite a good crash course in family history research. I learned the effectiveness of working backward. I learned that people in the past could move farther and faster and more frequently than one might assume they would be capable of. I learned how much I love city directories. And I learned to cross reference different records, look for other family and business relationships, life events and the movements of other family members.

Even with all these lessons under my belt, I was in disbelief when a search for children of my Irish three-times great grandparents, William Kavanagh and Mary Byrne, brought me straight back to Toronto and Hamilton. There on Ancestry was a John A. Kavanagh, son of William Kavanagh and Mary Byrne, married to Eliza O’Flaherty at St. Michael’s Cathedral, Toronto, in 1858. The cathedral would have been about 10 years old at that point, and it was still being decorated by Bishop de Charbonnel.

At the time of their marriage, John Kavanagh was 32 and Eliza O’Flaherty was 19, the daughter of Morgan O’Flaherty and Jane Grey. They were both born in Ireland. The entry in the register is unusual. There is no date for the wedding, which was entered in 1858, after an entry for May 31 and another for June 16, 1858. My best guess is that their wedding was also on May 31.* What is a little weird, though, is that the first entry for the couple is hash-marked out, but then exactly the same information is immediately re-entered. The priest was the Vicar General of the Diocese, Father Jean-Marie Bruyère. It’s hard not to wonder what was going on with John and Eliza that day, as the month of the Blessed Virgin was coming to a close in famously anti-Catholic Toronto. And why would one of my Kavanagh relatives even be here?

FamilySearch.Org hosts this image of the marriage register for St. Michael’s Cathedral, Toronto. Why was my relative’s marriage crossed out and re-entered. I don’t see any mistakes in the first entry.

Surely it was just a coincidence – it could easily be another William Kavanagh and Mary Byrne who had a son named John. Lacking information, I shoe-boxed the Archdiocese of Toronto record from “Ontario, Canada, Roman Catholic Baptisms, Marriages, and Burials, 1760-1923” and forgot about it for awhile.

Then, thanks to Wikitree, I had the opportunity to meet some cousins in Australia and New Zealand who have amazing research skills. They reminded me that newspapers are a great key to Irish ancestry and also introduced me to the Irish newspaper collection on Find My Past. I got back into trying to find about my 3x great-grandfather James William Kavanagh (often called J.W. Kavanagh or Professor Kavanagh) and, I especially hoped, something, anything about his wife Anne Nugent, a writer.

Suddenly, I came across some evidence that the John A. Kavanagh living here was indeed related to us. The Monday, September 8, 1862 Evening Freeman (via Newspapers.Com) carried a short notice under Deaths: “August 21, in the city of Hamilton, Canada West, of jaundice, John A. Kavanagh, Esq., aged 37 years, brother of Professor Kavanagh, of the Catholic University of Ireland. May the Lord have mercy on his soul.”

I don’t yet have a death record to completely prove that this is the same John Kavanagh who married Eliza O’Flaherty in Toronto four years earlier. I also should be able to find them in the 1861 Census, and I haven’t confirmed an entry for them there, either. Thanks to the digitization efforts of the Toronto Public Library and the Hamilton Public Library, I did find a couple of city directory listings for “J.A. Kavanagh”. In Toronto, he was listed with the address “Board of Works” in the 1859-1860 Caverhill’s Toronto City Directory. A further hunt for what the Board of Works was has been inconclusive so far.

In 1861, there was no listing for John A. Kavanagh in Brown’s Directory of Toronto, but I did find his father-in-law Morgan O’Flaherty, who was a customs house agent, living at 23 Bishop Street near Queen Street. According to the 1858 map of Toronto digitally compiled by Nathan Ng, this was just east of the old site of Trinity College. Today, there is a great city park there, called Trinity Bellwoods. Other efforts to trace John Kavanagh haven’t turned up much more.

I did find an 1871 record showing that Eliza Ada Kavanagh, widow, daughter of Morgan and Jane O’Flaherty, was married again in Toronto on May 10. Her spouse was Charles Merrick Edwards, a 27 year-old bookkeeper born in Ledbury, England. Eliza had apparently left the Catholic Church, as she and Charles both belonged to the Brethren Church. Eliza remained Brethren until her death in Toronto, on August 29, 1899. There is an entry in the Mount Pleasant Cemetery register for her; she is buried in a plot that belonged to Jane O’Flaherty.

Eliza Ada Kavanagh’s age at the time of her second marriage was given as 28. When she died her age was given as 60. I wonder if she was actually younger than 19 when she married 39-year-old John Kavanagh, or if she gave a younger age when she married Charles Edwards in 1871. I will probably have to hunt for her birth record in Cork to find out, but again: studying time before writing this week!

The only J.A. Kavanagh listed in the 1862-63 Hutchinson’s Hamilton City Directory, at the time of John Kavanagh’s death there is a teacher, with his own school listed at his home on Gore north of James. Given that John Kavanagh’s brother, my ancestor James William Kavanagh, was an educator in Ireland, this does seem to be a likely link. But John did not live to see the school year begin in 1862, so his venture into private education may not have even gotten off the ground. I have not found any children born to Eliza and John Kavanagh.

Eliza and Charles’ marriage was much longer lived. The couple and their four Canadian-born children moved back to his hometown of Ledbury, England by 1881, where Charles is listed in the Census of England as a malt-vinegar manufacturer. This may have been a family business — it is listed in the web transcription of the Trades Directory – Littlebury’s Directory and Gazetteer of Herefordshire, 1876-7 as Edwards & Son on Bye Street. The couple were well-off enough to afford an Irish governess for their children.

The Edwards family at 23 Withers, Ledbury, Herefordshire, in the 1881 Census of England.

However, the Edwards family was back in Canada for the 1891 Census and seem to have remained her after that. In 1891, Charles’ business was manufacturing mucilege and blacking. A listing in the 1889 Polk’s Directory shows Charles Edwards manufacturing mucilage, blacking and essential oils at 303 Gladstone Avenue, where the family also lived. According to the directory’s street listings, this was near Dundas Street.

Today, we don’t live that far away from Gladstone and Dundas, and I find it interesting and surprising to have a distant family link to a place that really is so close to home.

* Update: Jane MacNamara, https://wherethestorytakesme.ca, writing on Twitter, pointed out the marriage date could be confirmed by the County registers that started in Ontario in 1858. Thank you Jane! The register confirmed the marriage date was May 31, 1858.

Longline

Kay McGinnisLeave a comment

Sometimes I question how Nova Scotian I am, really, but then something like this happens. The prompt for #52Ancestors Week 3 is Long Line. You say: ‘Long Line’; I say: ‘Commercial Fishery.’ So, I went looking for my nearest fishing ancestor.

My paternal grandmother has family from an Irish fishing village in Kerry, but it’s my great-great-grandfather on my maternal grandfather’s side who wins the fishing derby. James Alfred Cook is the fisherman I am most closely related to.

James Cook was born on the territory of the Mi’kmaq, on June 21, 1841, at a place called Indian Path by the English. His family name was Koch, and he was descended from one of the “Foreign Protestants” recruited in the early 1750s from the German Palatinate, to occupy land in what is now Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. The land the Kochs received in 1753 had been taken by force, by English soldiers under their violent governor Edward Cornwallis and his successor Peregrine Hopson.

The Mi’kmaw Place Names Digital Atlas taught me Lunenburg is called E’se’katik (place of clams). The French, who had arrived around 1620, called it Mirligueche. It is a beautiful place, with a sheltered harbour surrounded by sweeping hills. However, the land the English allotted them was mostly rocky forest and not very fertile, a a challenge for the German and Swiss peasant settlers. The policies and actions of the colonial English also made them the enemies of the Mi’kmaq and the French.

A detail from the 1745 English map, “A New Chart of the Coast of New England, Nova Scotia, New France or Canada” published by Thomas Jefferys. The map was drawn by a French cartographer named Bellin in 1744 and features many Mi’kmaw and French names like Mirligueche, which was the future site of Lunenburg after the English takeover of the colony. The cove at the mouth of the Lahave River (Port d’l’Heve) provided a sheltered harbour near the fishing banks located off the coast. (Nova Scotia Archives Map Collection: 200-1745: loc.3.5.2)

Fishing has been a big part of life in Mi’kma’ki for at least 10,000 years. It’s part of what drew Europeans in the first place – Vikings, Irish, Portuguese, Spanish, Basques, French, English. The fishing banks were rich and the seafood abundant.

The Mi’kmaq developed expertise in river, lake and ocean fishing over millennia. The present-day Mersey River, not too far from my home as a teenager, is just one important waterway in the history and culture of Mi’kma’ki. One recent archaeological study at Eel Weir Bridge found thousands of artifacts related to fishing in Kejimkujik National Park and Heritage Site.

While learning this week, I was grateful to be able to watch videos from UINR — the Unama’ki Institute of Natural Resources — which today serves as “Cape Breton’s Mi’kmaw voice on natural resources and environmental concerns.” On the UINR site, I started to learn about netukulimk. This is “the use of the natural bounty provided by the Creator for the self-support and well-being of the individual and the community. Netukulimk is achieving adequate standards of community nutrition and economic well-being without jeopardizing the integrity, diversity, or productivity of our environment.”

However, a few days of study has pointed out that I don’t even have basic understanding or knowledge about the Mi’kmaq. Fortunately, there are resources online prepared by teachers from First Nations and Indigenous communities. I am working my way through Kekina’muek (learning): Learning about the Mi’kmaq of Nova Scotia published by The Confederacy of Mainland Mi’kmaq. Next time I am in Lunenburg, I will visit the Fisheries Museum of the Atlantic, where an exhibit, First Fishers, has opened since I last visited. One of the resources on this museum page is a silent educational film from the 1930s showing the traditional porpoise hunt. I’ve been thinking quite a bit about this film, the lives it briefly shows, its messages, and its context. There is a lot to be seen; and there was a lot that was seen. Why have I not seen anything? I feel frightened by this.

I know very little about the Mi’kmaq, and also hardly anything about my South Shore Nova Scotia ancestors. When I went to high school there after moving to the province, I was vaguely aware that my grandfather was from there, but I wasn’t curious about it. I considered my Nova Scotian roots to be in the Annapolis Valley and Bay of Fundy shore, not Lunenburg, Riverport and Bridgewater.

I regularly passed by the Georgian-era Koch House in Lunenburg on the way to church without ever knowing Henry Koch was my five-times great-grandfather. He and his father Anton were among the first group of settlers recruited by agent John Dick to sail from Rotterdam on the ship Ann in 1750. After several years of unexpected residence in the military camp that was Halifax, the “Foreign Protestants” were moved in 1753 to Lunenburg, re-named in honour of King George III’s German connection. The Kochs set up the first sawmill and apparently became rather wealthy citizens from cutting down the oak forest the Mi’kmaq stewarded.

Eventually, “Peace and Friendship” treaties called the Covenant Chain of Treaties (Kekina’muek, Chapter 10) were negotiated between the Mi’kmaq and the English and life became easier for the Foreign Protestants. More settlers came, and as the colony spread out, the Mi’kmaq were pushed into smaller areas.

This family snapshot shows my teenage grandfather Milton Barkhouse and his older brother Eddy goofing around with their mother, Lorenda Barkhouse (nee Cook) in Bridgewater, NS, in 1929. Lorenda and her husband Josiah Barkhouse had both grown up in the country but moved to town, where Josiah worked in manufacturing at Acadia Engines.

James Cook (their surname was anglicized at a certain point) was the father of my great-grandmother Lorenda Cook. I know only a little bit about her. Like my grandfather, she died in her 50s, she was adored by her children, and I have always been given the impression that she was ambitious for them. One detail I know is that she went without food for herself in order to budget money for her daughters’ piano lessons. She was also part of a shift away from the old ways. Was it because of economics and the prevailing demographic change to urbanization, or did she want to get away? In any case, she left the country to live in the town of Bridgewater with her husband Josiah Barkhouse, a factory worker, and her children in turn moved away to cities. My grandfather died in Montreal in 1968, a bank manager in the commercial heart of Canada. He was very far away from the fields and woods and waters where his grandfather made a living.

A winter view of fishing schooners in Lunenburg Harbour taken around 1890, just after James Cook stopped fishing and turned back to farming. (E.G. Owens Nova Scotia Archives accession no. 1973-88 / negative no. N-916). For more views of Lunenburg see the web exhibit, Lunenburg by the Sea.

My mother told me that her father considered the LaHave the most beautiful river in the world. The river runs through the Town of Bridgewater where he grew up and out to the sea. The book Historic Bridgewater by Tom Sheppard shows a town that I wouldn’t call gorgeous, but certainly (like today) one with some nice spots. However, down the LaHave River, at Ritcey’s Cove where his grandfather James Cook lived as an adult is a very lovely part of Nova Scotia indeed.

This 1890 “Bird’s Eye View of Lunenburg, Mahone Bay and Ritcey’s Cove” shows the small community of Ritcey’s Cove, Nova Scotia on the lower right. By visiting the Nova Scotia Archives link above, it is possible to magnify the image and view the buildings and landscape in more detail. Published by D.D. Currie, of Moncton and photographed by E.A. Bollinger (Nova Scotia Archives Photo 52221#1)

What I know about James Alfred Cook is limited to a few statistics. In the 1901 Census of Canada, which collected birth dates, his is given as June 13, 1843. However, Find a Grave has a picture of his tombstone, which gives his date of birth as July 21, 1841. So that will be something to explore, maybe when I get back to Nova Scotia, where the South Shore Genealogical Society has an amazing resource library. Certainly our Lunenburg ancestors don’t seem to have bothered much with registering with the Nova Scotia government, so Nova Scotia Historical Vital Statistics are pretty spotty.

By the 1901 Census, at age 57, James was listed as a farmer. He was married to Ellen Cook (nee Myra) who was 52, with a birth date of January 6, 1848. Their 23-year-old son Henry was now the fisherman in the household. This is just as it was the generation before, when farmer David Cook and Annie Cook (nee Parks) had two sons in their household who were fishing, according to the 1871 Census: James Cook, age 27, and not yet married, and Benjamin Cook, age 20.

James was fishing in the 1881 Census of Canada as well. Ellen had married him by then and they had three children listed with them: Edwin, age 9, Amanda, age 7, and 4-year-old Henry. I know that Henry was always called “Henny” by the family. I wonder if that nickname dates back to these early childhood days.

The fishing stories and statistics from this time are staggering. Anyway I slice it, my ancestors were part of a massive cull of resources from land and sea. It’s hard to imagine waters around Nova Scotia teeming with fish the way they did then. To bring back their catches, they took on hard and dangerous work, and their wives had anxious and laborious lives especially while their husbands were out to sea. But on their return, the Lunenburg fishermen would also share in the profits from the catch and were able to make a living to support their families.

It was a life that seems to have been considered more suitable for the young men. In the 1891 Census of Canada, James had returned to farming. He was listed as age 49, and Ellen as age 44. Another item of note is that the two older children are now listed as Abraham, age 19, and Lorenda, age 17. The younger ones are Henry Cook, 15, Ella, 10, Naomi, 7, and Minnie, 3. There are many stories of the Lunenburg settlers holding on to their German dialect and accent for many generations before the language died. Perhaps the census-taker in 1881 just misunderstood Abraham and Lorenda’s names. I think it could be the same in 1891, since “Ella” was named Ellen Cook in real life.

I should be able to find James and Ellen Cook in the 1911 and 1921 Census records, too, as he died January 24, 1924 and Lucy Ellen (as her name is shown on their tombstone) died in 1930. But I haven’t yet. Henry, who never married, is buried with his parents in First South Cemetery, Lunenburg County. He passed away in 1958. There is a ton to learn, and I’m only just starting.

Favourite Photo

Kay McGinnis1 Comment

This post focuses on members of the Webster family, who have a direct line back to the fifth governor of Connecticut, John Webster. Webster had a strong commitment to public service and was willing to make grand personal sacrifices to uphold what he felt was right, particularly in his rigid interpretation of religion. He was in the group of signatories for a forerunner of the American Constitution, the “Fundamental Orders of 1639.”

John Webster was also on the committee that declared war on the Pequot Tribe in Connecticut, after disputes broke out over lands that Webster and other English colonists had taken in Hartford. The war with the Pequot resulted in the annihilation of the tribe. An ally of the English colonists in the war was the Mohegan Tribe, which ultimately also suffered under colonial rule.

In writing this post and learning for the first time about the Mohegan and Pequot peoples, I had the opportunity to read about Dr. Gladys Iola Tantaquidgeon, Mohegan Medicine Woman. Dr. Tantaquidgeon is descended from Mohegan Sachem Uncas, who was allied with the English at the time of the Pequot War.

In 1919, Gladys Tantaquidgeon pursued higher education at the University of Pennsylvania at a time when women were still in the minority at universities, let alone women and men from indigenous tribes. Dr. Tantaqidgeon’s lifelong work as a medicine woman, anthropologist, curator, and public servant was committed to collecting and teaching Mohegan traditions and language, as well as working for the federal government on programs for other tribes. She is incredible. Among many, many achievements, her family history research contributed to a successful claim for U.S. Federal recognition of the Mohegan Tribe in 1994. A book by historian Melissa Jayne Fawcett, Medicine Trail: The Life and Lessons of Gladys Tantaquidgeon, is available from University of Arizona Press.

Webster Family
This week’s #52Ancestors prompt is “Favourite Photo.” I have a few, but particularly love this family group of Samuel and Louise (Robinson) Webster with their four daughters: Winnifred (Winnie), Eugenie (Gene), Ora, and the youngest, Abigail (Abbie). I’ve always known them as the Brainy Websters (Photo in possession of the family).

Our grandmother, Joyce Barkhouse, was a wonderful storyteller. As a Canadian children’s author, it is what she did professionally, but there was nothing more fun than sitting down with Nana for a cup of tea and a chat. One story I loved was how Nana’s father, Dr. Harold Edwin Killam, was congratulated by his former teacher for marrying “one of the brainy Webster girls.” It’s a pretty simple story, really, but it was often repeated and the teaching was unmistakable: Girls can be brainy, they have been brainy in the past, and the people whose opinions matter to us approve of intelligent women.

I grew up hero-worshipping the Brainy Websters but I actually only know snippets of information about them. So I treasure this studio photograph of them with their parents. I love how much my great-grandmother Ora’s serious expression looks just like one that my Barkhouse cousins and their kids sometimes make.

Based on the children’s ages, I’m guessing the 1891 Census of Canada was taken a year or two after this group portrait was made. Samuel Webster appears on the previous page of this census – he’s a 39 year old a Baptist farmer in Brooklyn Street, Kings County, Nova Scotia.

The 1891 Census shows the Webster family on their farm in the community Brooklyn Street, Kings County, Nova Scotia. Samuel Webster appears on the previous page of this Census, age 39. Louise Webster (nee Robinson) was a Methodist, while her husband Samuel was a committed Baptist. From what I understand, they agreed to disagree and worshipped separately all their lives. I don’t know who their lodger Dollie Pineo is. Source: Library and Archives Canada, 1891 Census of Canada, Image No.: 30953_148119-00412

I find the Websters, in general, to be fascinating. Samuel Webster was the eldest child of his father’s “second family” following a remarriage. His father Asael Webster had first married Hepzibah Pearson, who died May 26, 1850 at age 42, according to her grave marker in the Cambridge Station Cemetery (her stone is spelled Hephzibah).

Asael and Hepzibah had four sons. They were all educated, particularly Dr. David Webster, who graduated from New York’s Bellevue Hospital Medical College in 1868 and became a very well-known New York City eye specialist. After Hepzibah’s death, Asael Webster, who was a carpenter, married 20-year-old Wealthy Lavinia Tupper on March 25, 1851 (Sprague database). The couple had seven children together and Samuel Wesley Webster was the eldest of them, born in 1852.

As a boy, Samuel had expected to be able to pursue educational opportunities like his older half brothers had, but his father’s death on September 28, 1868 left the family in reduced circumstances, according to family lore, and Samuel gave up any plans he had for school. Nana always said that was why he insisted on education for his daughters. However, it also seems true that the Websters were fairly egalitarian when it came to educating women. For example, Samuel’s brother Albert Asael Webster had seven children, all daughters and educated. (One, Alberta, became a nurse and had an ill-fated marriage to a Gatsbyesque New Yorker and they were parents to three more remarkable daughters, but that is a whole other story.)

Winnifred May Webster’s 1903 Graduation Portrait from the Dalhousie Archives, Dalhousie University Photograph Collection “Photograph of Winnifred May Webster” PC1, Box 1, Folder 27, File 1903. Photo by Gauvin and Gentzel studio.

Samuel and Louise Webster’s eldest daughter Winnifred (misspelled with one “n” in her university graduation lists) was among the most brilliant of the Brainy Websters. Nana, who lived with her for a time, greatly admired her intellect and her achievements as a teacher and high school vice-principal at Kings County Academy, Kentville, Nova Scotia.

In the early 1900s, Winnifred attended Dalhousie University and in 1903 was one of four women to graduate with a BA. Not only did she graduate with Distinction, she led the entire class and was awarded the Avery Prize. She was then accepted for graduate work at Columbia University’s Teachers College in New York, where Dean James Earl Russell was making a name for the college as a centre of liberal education theory and training. At the time Winifred arrived in New York City, Dean Russell’s Speyer School was only just starting work as a remarkable education experiment for the children and adults living in the Lower East Side tenements.

Winnifred had the benefit of being able to stay with her uncle, Dr. David Webster at his Madison Avenue residence while she was studying at Columbia. The 1905 New York State Census lists her there, along with Dr. Webster’s sister-in-law and three servants: a “houseman,” a maid, and a cook (via FamilySearch.org). Dr. Webster’s wife Genevieve, who struggled with mental illness, had died December 7, 1902. The couple had no children and Dr. Webster provided opportunities over the years for several of his talented nieces to live with him and pursue their studies in New York.

The Columbia Teachers College Class of 1906 included Winnifred May Webster. The photo is taken from the 1906 yearbook on archive.org and so its hard to make out individual faces. However, I wonder if the tall woman with very straight posture in the upper left corner might be Winifred.

Winnifred was the only one of the four Webster sisters who did not marry. She returned to Nova Scotia and devoted herself to educating generations of Annapolis Valley students at Kings County Academy in Kentville, NS, which was for many years the only high school serving Kings County. In the biography, Frank Manning Covert: Fifty Years in the Practice of Law edited by Barry Cahill (McGill-Queen’s Press, 2004), Covert described with gratitude how “Miss Webster” helped him cram for his Provincial Exams. Like many students at the Academy, he had been educated in a one-room school house and found himself needing to quickly obtain four years of French and Latin in order to pass his high school exams. Winnifred volunteered to spend every recess with him, teaching French, while the principal of the Academy took on the necessary Latin review with a small group during the lunch break. Covert described what happened when he got his exam results in the mail in 1924:

“I passed and had just got through the door to tell mother when the phone rang. It was Winnie Webster asking, “Did you grade?”

“Yes.”

“How did you do in French?”

“76.”

“Not bad.”

“Having taught me algebra, geometry, and trigonometry, she asked me about these; I received 100 per cent in each of them so she was happy.” Covert said he later got a call from the principal to hear the results, “He was pleased, but not overjoyed like Miss Webster.” (p. 16)

Half a decade after Covert “graded,” Nana also moved to Kentville, where she boarded with her Aunt Winnifred, to complete Grade 12 at the Academy and prepare for Provincial Exams. Nana’s goal was to apply for teacher training at the Provincial Normal College. Aunt Winnie also gave her extra academic coaching, especially helping Nana to in her struggles with math. It was the Depression, so there were no other education options for my grandmother and failure was never an option. Like her grandfather Samuel Webster, not going to university was something that Nana always regretted, especially since her two older sisters had the opportunity.

When Nana graduated from Normal College in Truro, NS in 1932, Aunt Winnie was there to cheer her on, too. A treasured book Nana gave to me exactly 60 years after she received it, when I had started to “make something of myself,” was the graduation present from her revered aunt. It is Songs of the Maritimes, a 1931 poetry anthology edited by Eliza Ritchie, a Dalhousie graduate who is thought to be the first Canadian woman to earn a PhD. Ritchie’s entry in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography is awesome. I think it might also suggest a thing or two about what Aunt Winnifred Webster wanted her young niece to think about, when it came to the Maritime provinces, women, and what they could contribute and achieve. Nana — Joyce C. Barkhouse — who became a teacher, children’s author, mentor and advocate, definitely lived up to the challenge.

Fresh Start

Kay McGinnis1 Comment

“Fresh Start” is the first writing prompt for the 2020 #52Ancestors challenge. Now that I’m trying to actually write, this does feel like a challenge! But I think it will be a productive and interesting year.

I hope to use this blog to write about individual ancestors and share some things I have collected and learned about them, but I can only think of one thing when I think of “fresh start”. As a person with North American colonizer roots, everyone I am descended from made a fresh start by coming here from Europe and the British Isles. In so doing, they, as a matter of course, displaced and devastated the people who already lived here, laying waste to their communities and taking their lands. In some cases in my family’s history, this was direct and immediate. Then it was ongoing. I have only recently become aware of the extent to which I am still involved in this today in Canada.

If I have a chance at a fresh start in 2020, it is this: As I learn more about my family history, I will at the same time work to learn more about many things that I am ashamed to be ignorant of. I will not look away from or gloss over the past and what I can find out about my ancestors, if I can help it. So along with #52Ancestors, I have also signed up for the #Next150 challenge.

On the website right now, Senator Murray Sinclair — Mizanay (Mizhana) Gheezhik, meaning “The One Who Speaks of Pictures in the Sky” — of Peguis First Nation, issues the challenge: “My challenge is for you to read the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 94 Calls to Action and to share one of the calls that has significance for you. Whether you’ve read them before or not, take the time to read them now and think about how you can affect change in your own life to make this country stronger.” I will progress to Senator Murray’s challenge, but will start learning more with his call for me personally to change in my mind.

2020 is the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower landing. As one of the estimated 35 million living people descended from that tiny colony, I am hugely grateful to be alive and living in Canada. I am thankful for my gifted genealogy-whiz cousin who made the connection to the Mayflower for us all. I appreciate many of the things that many of Richard and Elizabeth Warren‘s descendants have accomplished — great poetry, famous novels, films, music, some good governance. Some of them have done great good — some fought to end slavery and others have served the poor. I also appreciate that the Pilgrims sought religious freedom in the face of persecution, but deplore that they then felt entitled to harshly visit that same persecution on many, many others.

Literally none of this would be possible without the Wampanoag Nation, who helped the colonizers survive, despite themselves having been almost wiped out by a plague borne by European black rats just before the Mayflower arrived. Despite the fact that one surviving English speaker among the Wampanoag people at the time had been among a group previously kidnapped and enslaved by a British slave trader. This slavery was not an isolated event — today, for example, there are Wampanoag and other Indigenous peoples still living in Bermuda, hundreds of years after their ancestors were relocated by force as slaves. (Some recent stories can be read here.) Their motivations for this at the time are a topic of discussion but it’s impossible not to be humbled that they chose to help the Plymouth colony at all.

According to an article Wamsutta (Frank B.) James’s “Who are the Wampanoag” by Nancy Eldredge — Nauset Wampanoag and Penobscot — there are an estimated four to five thousand Wampanoag people living in New England today. Their language is only now being revived by the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project after being lost for over 150 years. The numbers speak for themselves.

When I was a baby, the 350th Anniversary of the Mayflower landing was celebrated. For the commemoration in 1970, the invited Wampanoag speaker, Wamsutta (Frank B.) James, was censored, and then uninvited from the observances, for telling the truth about what happened when the Pilgrims arrived. This event helped spark the National Day of Mourning held on American Thanksgiving each year for the past 50 years. The full text of Wamsutta (Frank B.) James’s banned speech can be read online. This year it will be spoken out loud and heard as part of the 400th Anniversary, along with the other commemorations. It is essential to listen. Fifty years have already passed since Wamsutta James was silenced in his call for a new beginning:

“We forfeited our country. Our lands have fallen into the hands of the aggressor. We have allowed the white man to keep us on our knees. What has happened cannot be changed, but today we must work towards a more humane America, a more Indian America, where men and nature once again are important; where the Indian values of honor, truth, and brotherhood prevail.

“You the white man are celebrating an anniversary. We the Wampanoags will help you celebrate in the concept of a beginning. It was the beginning of a new life for the Pilgrims. Now, 350 years later it is a beginning of a new determination for the original American: the American Indian.

“There are some factors concerning the Wampanoags and other Indians across this vast nation. We now have 350 years of experience living amongst the white man. We can now speak his language. We can now think as a white man thinks. We can now compete with him for the top jobs. We’re being heard; we are now being listened to. The important point is that along with these necessities of everyday living, we still have the spirit, we still have the unique culture, we still have the will and, most important of all, the determination to remain as Indians. We are determined, and our presence here this evening is living testimony that this is only the beginning of the American Indian, particularly the Wampanoag, to regain the position in this country that is rightfully ours.”

This is the part of being a Mayflower descendent that I intend to pay attention to this year, and beyond. Happy New Year!