Beads in a Necklace

By Lucy Anglin, Barb Angus, Marian Bulford and 4 more

The nine women who write the family history blog Genealogy Ensemble have fleshed out the dashes between the dates on their family trees, chosen their favourite stories about their ancestors and published them in a new book called "In Beads in a Necklace: Family Stories from Genealogy Ensemble."

Inspired by family myths, heirlooms, letters, and vintage photographs, these are historically accurate stories with a huge heart. They describe the lives of merchants and military men, society ladies and filles du roi, reverends, rogues, medical men, restless women, cooks and farmers, each of whom was somehow related to one of the book's authors.

These ancestors lived between 1650 and 1970 and hail from Montreal, rural Quebec, Ontario, New Brunswick, the United States and other places around the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tracey Arial
• Release date: Nov 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9780981235233

Book preview

BEADS IN A NECKLACE, FAMILY STORIES FROM

GENEALOGY ENSEMBLE

Copyright © 2017 by Lucy Anglin, Barb Angus, Tracey Arial, Marian Bulford, Janice Hamilton, Claire Lindell, Sandra McHugh, Dorothy Nixon and Mary Sutherland.

First Edition November 2017, Second edition April 2018

All rights reserved. Printed in Canada. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

Edited by Janice Hamilton and Tracey Arial

Cover design by Leslie Wagner

Cover photograph Gagen and Fraser, Toronto, courtesy of Mary Sutherland

Book design by Claire Lindell and Sandra McHugh

ISBN: 978-0-9812352-2-6 (trade 1); 978-1-7753354-0-5 (trade 2); 978-0-9812352-3-3 (ebook); 978-0-9812352-4-0 (pdf)

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication information:

Published by Notable Nonfiction Ltd., Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

256-page, 6x9 trade soft-cover paperback.

Genealogy family history nonfiction stories by Canadian women living in Montreal.

Table of Contents

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Preface

Like Beads in a Necklace: The Genealogy Ensemble Journey

Barb Angus

At some point in life, people get the urge to learn more about their ancestors and enter a wonderful journey of self-discovery. If they’re lucky, they begin seeking out their family history stories while young. Studies indicate that children who see themselves as the latest in a long history of worthwhile people have more confidence and are better at taking responsibility for their actions. Often, though, the passion begins later in life, perhaps as a way of somehow cheating mortality. For me, one of the nine co-authors of this unique compilation of family-history stories, it began with an old filing cabinet.

Inside lay wonderful family stories waiting to be written, a rich seedbed of possibilities.

The documents in the cabinet were critical to writing my stories, but they were insufficient. I needed to flesh them out through additional research on Internet sites such as Ancestry.com, in newspaper archives, census records, military service files, passenger lists and the like, and through interviews with family members.

A crucial second step for me was to learn how to go about genealogy research. For this, I joined my local family-history society. A four-hour genealogy course got me started, but I continued to learn—and am learning still—through much trial and error and in many conversations, online and in person, with fellow researchers. Through Ancestry and the posts of various genealogy bloggers, I have met distant cousins from as far away as Australia and as close to home as Toronto, all researching shared family trees and historical events, and all willing to share information.

It was some time before I was ready to begin writing my family history. My inspiration was Dr. Mildred Burns, a retired McGill professor and the author of The Wolfe Pack: stories of a mid-western family 1850-1950, the story of her family in Iowa and Nebraska. She made it look so easy—historical facts interwoven with reflections and personal memoir. I could do that.

Easier said than written.

My initial writing was more like the and then style of an elementary child. I soon learned that a chronological approach was pretty boring and that the transitions between characters and events were the key to a successful family narrative of any length. Clearly, I was out of my depth as a writer.

I was about to give up on my hopes for authorship when I was introduced to a family-history writing group. The third step. Here was a group of women who met once a month to share the family stories they had written and to critique each other’s work as fellow genealogists and writers.

Initially, for the sake of manageability, we each wrote a 500-word narrative focusing on an issue or event in the life of a single ancestor. We emailed our narratives to the group two or three days before we met, thus allowing ourselves time to read the stories and to come prepared with specific praise and constructive criticism.

Each text was meant to stand alone as a story and had to embody the craft of good writing: a lead to hook the reader, a logical sequence not necessarily chronological, a satisfying conclusion, rich detail and dialogue. Family history stories must be based on documented fact, but the author uses artistic license to get inside the character and to weave the dry facts into a story of what might have happened given the social history of the period. Evidence had to be cited in footnotes. The 500-word limit forced us to be succinct, to not waste a word on what was unnecessary to the story.

The women in the group, although all Montrealers, were from different communities and walks of life, unlikely to have met but for their shared passion for family history. There's a vulnerability to exposing yourself through your writing that requires a level of trust. Story by story, that trust grew and we became friends. We opened to each other more of our family history, not just the parts of which we were proud of, but the embarrassing bits, the prickly parts and the grey areas. Our conversations about our concerns supported us through the process.

The limited text length began as a way to address a management issue. It turned out to be a boon for those of us who were novice writers: 500 words was doable. More importantly, we soon realized that the nuggets we created each month could be strung together, like beads in a necklace, into our own personal and full-bodied family histories. As our collections grow, we can proudly wear our necklaces, stroking each individual ancestry bead and knowing it is a link to the women we are today.

Introduction

Beads in a Necklace

Family Stories from

Genealogy Ensemble

Tracey Arial

Within these pages, you’ll discover our favourite short stories that nine family-history enthusiasts have compiled from piles of papers, or dusty old boxes, as Lucy Anglin relates in her story of the same name:

Just then, it dawned on me that someone had already sorted the family memorabilia into those three separate boxes, leaving me to find three dusty old boxes of pure joy.

We are the kind of people who search out intriguing or unusual details wherever we can to craft compelling narratives about our ancestors. Early on, we decided that 500 words was the perfect length to ensure that everyone could easily read all the stories and comment on them in a two-hour period. We try to please those who share our enthusiasm for genealogy as well as those who might like to learn a bit more without being engulfed by names and dates.

Our experiment combining fiction, research and communication techniques to please ourselves led us to create a resource for the general public, our blog: Genealogy Ensemble.

We still gather most months to explore how to best tell family histories and we still publish our blog, but this year we thought it would be meaningful to compile some of our best efforts together into a commemoration to celebrate two landmark years: Canada’s 150th and Montreal’s 375th birthdays. This book is the result of that effort.

We are all genealogists and amateur historians and so were inspired and intrigued by historian Edgar Andrew Collard’s series of newspaper columns called All Our Yesterdays. His columns ran weekly in the Montreal Gazette daily newspaper for fifty-six years, from 1944 to 2000. The order of our book pays homage to him. We’ve divided our stories into the traditional who, what, when, how and why questions he used to answer. In our case, the what is further divided into home, work, play and war.

The who is wide-ranging. Many of our stories feature immigrants who became famous Montrealers like the filles du roi, landowner Sébastien Cholet, merchant Stanley Bagg and gospel singer Edward MacHugh.

Others came to Canada as part of specific government programs like the Empire Settlement Act and the Harvester Scheme.

Not all of the stories are about Montreal inhabitants. We also wrote about: the first English-speaking settler in Shediac, New Brunswick; a nun who acted as a matchmaker in rural New France; a family from the Gaspé; a traveling minister; Hudson Bay Company traders; a voyageur who traveled up the Nile River; and Mormon pioneers.

We feature a woman who was kidnapped and brought to Montreal during the ongoing wars of the early 1700s, men who served in the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War II and British families who mastered post-war food rationing.

Our stories talk about farming, religious conversions, racism, turkey dinners, women’s suffrage, household chores and our genealogical journeys. We describe beloved items our ancestors passed down to us. We feature entrepreneurs who created successful businesses and built city infrastructure. One of our stories features a man who was shot because someone mistook him for a bear. Another outlines the life of a con artist who abandoned his wife and children. There are stories of illegitimate births and the deaths of children. We’ve even included a poem inspired by family keepsakes.

We hope you enjoy reading our stories as much as we enjoyed writing them.

If you’d like to read further, check out our blog at www.genealogyensemble.com

Who we are

William Hanington Comes to Canada

Lucy Anglin

According to a family story, the property was described as a commodious estate upon the outskirts of the thriving town of Halifax, in the Colony of Nova Scotia.¹ Imagine William’s surprise then when he arrived in Halifax and discovered that outskirts meant a 200-mile hike north through thick forest and deep snow!

My great-great-great grandfather William Hanington was born in London, England, in 1759 and worked with his father, who was a member of the Fishmongers’ Company, the incorporated guild of sellers of fish and seafood in London. In 1784, this adventurous young man purchased land in Nova Scotia from a British army officer, Joseph Williams, who had been given a 5,000-acre grant as a reward for his service. He paid 500 pounds sterling.²

After the initial shock upon arrival, he and a friend, Mr. Roberts, found an Aboriginal guide, loaded all their worldly belongings onto a hand sled, trudged through the snow, slept in the open and finally arrived in bitterly cold Shediac, New Brunswick, in March 1785. Mr. Roberts was so discouraged that he immediately returned to Halifax and sailed back to England on the first available ship.  

William was made of sturdier stuff and was delighted with it all. There was a good-size stream flowing into the ocean, and he had never seen such giant trees! He was astute enough to see the lucrative possibilities for trade in lumber, fish and furs. William spent his first year living amongst the Acadian settlers he found on his land. ³

Seven years after his arrival, at the age of thirty-three, William hired a couple of aboriginal guides to paddle a canoe over to Île St. Jean (now known as Prince Edward Island) where he had been told there were other English settlers. According to a family story, he was riding in an oxcart through St. Eleanor (now known as Summerside, P.E.I.) when he spotted a young lady named Mary Darby. It was love at first sight: he proposed to her on the spot, and she accepted.⁴ They married and paddled back to Shediac, where they eventually raised thirteen children.

Three years later, missing the companionship of other English-speaking women, Mary persuaded her sister Elizabeth and brother-in-law John Welling to