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?
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.
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.
Root and Blade 