Toronto – Root and Blade

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 19^th 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 5^th 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.

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 20^th 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.