The Gnarled Tree

In my last post I eluded to a more painful déjà vu that I experience while digging around the family tree.  What I am referring to is a tad bit taboo. The marrying of cousins. I know, the first reaction is like sucking on a lemon or smelling sour milk. Let's just be happy that it occurs less now than it did in the past.

I use an online application that makes a wonderful graphic of my family tree for me as you we have all come to expect it to look.  It's handy.  It gives you a master view at the bottom...so you can see just HOW BIG it is...

The bottom row represents the family of one of my 4 grandparents. ONE. The second row are my great grandparents and my great grandfather's cousins. So ... many ... people. 

Sometimes this program glitches out on me and shows crossed lines and double people where their shouldn't be, which causes me to groan. The issue isn't so much the program as it is my family tree. Let's talk about the Pugh family.

Hugh Pugh and his wife Elizabeth Williams came to Canada in the range of 1835-1840. They came with some of their 15 adult children whom also had children. The number of Pugh's that landed in Pickering township must have been terrifying. Okay I kid a little. The child of theirs that happens to be my 3rd great grandmother Elizabeth Pugh married James T White, the son of some English settlers who had come to the area at the beginning of the 1830's. James White was one of 7 children born to his parents.  Apparently one of the other White children, William White, took a liking to Elizabeth Pugh's sister, Mary Pugh - as they got married sometime around 1850 and had 5 children.  This makes Elizabeth and James White's 8 children and Mary and William White's 5 children: double first cousins. This is part of the reason my tree glitches out when I try to view the Pugh people.   There are other reasons too, though and then this comes to mind:

from meiphoto.com

The number of descendants that come from Hugh Pugh and Elizabeth Williams, at this moment to me, is an  unknown number. What is known to me however, are the instances when some of them would marry each other.  Pickering township wasn't a particularly small place - it had several hamlets, towns, villages - all which had a few Pugh descendant families. So it isn't terribly surprising there was some distantly generational mixing going on, right? I try to tell myself it isn't weird. A rudimentary illustration of what a computer program can't handle...paper to the rescue!!  This is an example of what happens when two families have some intermingling....

C'est Déjà Vu

I used to have frequent bouts of déjà vu - French, for the feeling that you have already experienced something.  If you are interested in some of the theories about what déjà vu might be, a wonderful page on a corner of the internet has some thoughts about the subject. What does this have to do with family history?

Some days doing research I have the feeling. I've seen these names before - this seems familiar. So down that rabbit research hole I go.  A little while ago I got excited at doing some family searching for someone new.  With a little bit of information and a little bit of using a search engine that sounds like Boogle, I was able to establish a tree.  I began to plug away at records and adding people, their marriages, their children and so on. 

One thing I have noticed in the various trees I have put together is that generally families remained in the same regions for many many years. When a member of the family is found to have moved far away I begin to a) check that my information is correct and b) wonder what forces pushed and pulled them so far away from their families.  While working on one branch of this family tree (I'll call M) I found a marriage that took place where the groom's last name was recorded as O'Dougherty and he was listed as having been from Mayo, Quebec.

This was big, to me.  The M tree I was working on wasn't any 'ordinary' tree.  It is for my coworker...okay, my Manager. The branch I had rabbit holed into was on her husbands side and the reason it had become interesting was because a member had moved out of this area to about 350km away at a time when it would not have been a very pleasant trip.  The other half of the big part of this discovery is that my partner happens to be a Doherty, also from Mayo, Quebec. 

I blinked a few times and thought, well maybe this O'Dougherty is some other family in Mayo. My hair isn't blond but I'm beginning to feel a bit like Alice and off I go to figure out who the identity of this O'Dougherty.  I didn't find much except he had various spellings of his last name and later in life dropped the O' (being Irish hasn't always been something to brag about unfortunately).  There were not necessarily any O'Dougherty families in Mayo and the church records have various spellings: O'Dougherty, Dougherty, Dockerty, Doherty. I'm guessing how it was spelled was dependent upon the competency of the writer as well as the thickness of the accent of the speaker who claimed the name. So, relation status: unconfirmed but likely.

But wait, there is more!!

"Small world" occurrences tend to fascinate me so I continued to branch out this particular arm of the tree.  The online application I use allows other users to share pictures and information and crowd source together - this is most helpful when approaching years where records are not available (in Canada that is basically anything newer than 1920's).  I began to come across pictures of these distance cousins in the M tree...when I had the déjà vu.  There was a user name that seemed very familiar.  So I clicked on the name to find out more information as I am want to do.

The user has pictures of my great-great grandparents.Whaaa? Ok, I now need to find out a) how this person is related to me and b) how this person is related to the M tree.

It turns out my cousins (of some variety) married the cousins of my managers husband. This is crazy! Her children's cousins are married to my cousins! If the Doherty connection is to be believed my cousins may also be married to my partner's cousins...I thoroughly worked it out however - in no way are we actually related. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if everyone lived in the same geographical area but this isn't the case. Myself and my family are from 350km west of this city, the cousins that moved away and eventually married into my branches are from 350km west of here as well...but the two are 200km north-south from each other.  In a city of 900 000 people what are the odds I would be working with someone with such a tangible connection?

Stay tuned for my next installment of the case of slightly more painful déjà vu!

The Murder, the Lepards and the Black Sheep

The Lepards and the black sheep are not literal animals, but they still make for a great story.  The family Lepard, sometimes spelled Leppard or in German Lipphard/Lipphart etc., were black sheep (maybe).

When starting my family research I had some help from scraps of paper and some oral accounts but there seemed to have been some discrepancy about whether we were related to some folks named Lepard.  Thanks to the digitization of records I proved that we are descended from Lepards. My grandmother once asked her mother about the Lepards and her response was some vulgar adage to the effect that we were "no more related than two dogs [visiting] the same fence post". This however was untrue, so why would my great grandmother say such a thing?  Reason number one was that she may not have known that  her maternal grandmother was a Lepard. My great grandmother's mother, Annie Morris, died when my gg was only 3, so there may have been a disconnect from that branch of the family despite Annie's mother - Lavinia Lepard having lived until 1922 when my gg was about 21. The real reason I think for the comment was a distancing from the Lepards.

Why?
Murder.
That's why.

Tree for character reference:

Victim: Roseann Lepard/Leppard. 

Age: 23

Location: mother's house somewhere in Artemesia Township of Grey County (Ontario).

Cause: poison (strychnine)

Accused, tried and executed: Husband, Cook Teets, 52

Purported confessor to Crime: Mother, Roseanne O'Malley Lepard 

My discovery of this information was quite by accident.  When I find someone who has died "youngish", I've taken up the habit of looking at the cause of death.  This is when I came across:

When I discovered the "executed for murder" I went down the research rabbit hole trying to find all the information I could.  While I couldn't find much in the way of digitized newspapers I was able to find an interesting article in a magazine, Canada's History. It was with great delight my employer's library had the physical copy of this magazine and I was able to make a copy and read about the details of this family tragedy.

The cobbled together version I've read is that, Roseann ran away with Cook Teets to be married in Toronto. Her mother, an Irish - Catholic woman was not impressed at the age difference between the two nor impressed with the fact they were not married in a Catholic ceremony. Just 6 weeks after their return Roseann fell ill and died in her mother's house. Mr. Teets had left his bride at his mother's house the evening prior (after dinner) and she was well.  The story goes that he must have poisoned her since he was in possession of strychnine - a poison commonly used by farmers to poison rats. His motive was the life insurance that had been taken out on her shortly after the time of their marriage. Cook claimed the insurance purchase was at the behest of Roseann (she may have been pregnant and may have wanted to insure some money in the event of her death). Despite Cook being an "old" man who was blind in one eye - he was unable to convince the judge of his innocence and he became the first man hanged in Grey County on December 5th, 1884. He was the 9th and last man hanged that year in Canada.

To complicate the story further the media reported many years later that Roseann's mother later confessed to the crime. It would seem that her mother was a troubled woman.  She was once arrested in the 1890's for attempting (or succeeding) in burning down a neighbour's barn.  The consequence was a sentencing to an insane asylum (historical term, not mine). In 1901 she is reported as an inmate in Toronto and in 1911 she is in a facility in Coburg.  She 1918 she dies at the facility in Orillia (the now infamous Huronia Regional Centre than ran from 1859 until it was closed in 2004).  She was buried in the institution cemetery.

It is a sad end to a sad story. A proud person may not want to share this story and would possibly deny any relation to those involved in such nefarious circumstances. To me it feels like my own personal episode of "who do you think you are".




Sources:
Argyle, Ron. "Reasonable Doubts". Canada's History December 2010 - January 2011, pg 35-39

COOK TEETS HANGED. (1884, Dec 06). The Globe (1844-1936) Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/1532182620?accountid=9894  

 

Paper Trail Existance

In contrast to the story about the secrets of great grandmother Gertrude - there is the paper trail of great grandmother Mary Francis Hutton.  My mom remembers her as a stern and unloving figure. I know her for the trail of records that illustrate the adventures of a woman living in a pre-enfranchisement era.

Mary Francis was born into the middle class of the 1880's in northern England.  Her father was a baker, her maternal grandfather a confectioner rumored to have had his own candy factory. A more fanciful rumor about this branch of the family is that they descend from the same family as the Scottish Poet Robert Burns. I've yet to substantiate this but Robert Burns did have several siblings - so maybe someday I will solve this particular mystery.

What amazes me about MF is the difference in the life she led in comparison to her contemporaries (in my family tree) that were living the rural life in Canada.  1911 I have one great grandmother getting married, having babies (see the post about secrets...) and in England I have another great grandmother living with her sisters, no parents and working as a restaurant waitress.  This may not sound like a big deal but there were four unmarried women holding their own - all working - making their own way in the world.

The family lore that comes with this story is that MF (and likely her sisters) did not like their step-mother.  Their mother Annie had died in 1907 and their father had remarried a few years later in 1909 to a woman much younger than himself.  There was such an age difference in fact, his new bride was only 3 years older than his oldest child. I can see how some young ladies would be annoyed that their step mother is closer to their age than that of their father.  I see this as one reason they may have struck out of their father's home to live their own lives, in a time where women usually went from father's home to husband's home.

These women were also on the adventurous side. On June 29, 1912, just over two months after the sinking of the Titanic, Mary Frances and her sister Margaret set out for Cape Town, South Africa.  Over the next 10 years (all) the girls would travel back and forth from Cape Town to England. They usually traveled two at a time, and sometimes was it one sister accompanied by the eldest child and brother, John Robert Hutton.

The story (I have no facts other than the passenger lists) is that Mary Francis and her sister had a tea room in Cape Town.  The period of time the Huttons were there seems to have been an uneventful one (in terms of the history of South Africa).  The Boer war had been over a decade prior and the Aparthied far off in the future.  In any case, Mary Frances returned to England in the midst the beginning of WWI, arriving in April of 1916 only to ship herself off to Canada in November of the same year. There are no hand me down stories of why she left Cape Town or why she decided to come to Toronto on the verge of winter.

Life in Canada "slowed" her down.  She never traveled back to England or South Africa - unlike her siblings who continued to travel. Within a year of her arrival she was married to a baker who was also English and trying to make his way in the metropolis.  At the time of their marriage in 1917 they were living together - how progressive - but with parents on another continent who is to stop them! By 1920 the children began to arrive, 6 in total over the next 8 years. Maybe her stern and unloving demeanor (at least my mother's perception of it) was a result of some sort of caged bird feeling but I will never know.

Secrets...Part 2

In Part 1, I was writing about my Great Grandmother, Gertrude (Gertie) whom I discovered was an illegitimate child born to Mary Ann Robinson.  Gertie and Mary Ann were raised as sisters, along with 9 other "siblings" (in actuality aunts and uncles).  There is another child (George) in this mix that may belong to Mary Ann or possibly one of the other sisters - but there are no official records to support this - only speculation since Sabina would have been 43 at the time of his birth.

Back to Gertie. Gertie had another secret...which may not have been very well hidden secret.  Gertrude's first child, a daughter came into the world on the 16th of December in 1911. Her new baby daughter was born at her new husband's family farm house...3 months into the marriage.  This may not be shocking to our 21st century social etiquette but it is shocking for 1911!

Gertrude and her new husband were married in September of 1911. Not by their local clergy but away, in Toronto.  While not a particularly far distance from their home town, in 1911, without an automobile, a 45km trip was either by horse or train.  From this record I gleam that Gertrude was up to 6 months pregnant at the time. There is no family lore that this daughter was born early or was premature in any way.  This would have been a tad scandalous if I'm to believe what social historians tell us - okay I mean Downton Abbey.  As if a impending child wasn't reason enough, I have other reasons to believe this was perhaps a marriage not blessed by the presence of close friends and family (ie. parents and siblings):

The witnesses. Witness number 1 for the groom is Charles' cousin Clifford Fawthrop. On the face of it this does not seem strange, many cousins are as close as siblings.  Clifford however is a cousin of Charles who grew up in eastern Ontario, far from the immediate family in the town that bears their name. Clifford, in 1911, was a young man of 19 bearing witness to his elder cousin's wedding.  While 19 is young, the second witness was MUCH younger.

Witness number 2, for Gertrude, was Inez Dalby.  Inez would have been known to Gertrude as her niece since Gertrude was raised as a sister to Inez' mother (although in truth Gertrude and Inez were actually first cousins). With large farming families it wasn't uncommon for the eldest child of a family to marry and begin having children while his/her mother may still be bearing children - resulting in aunts and uncles younger than their own nieces and nephews; these children would have been raised together more like siblings/cousins being of about the same age. So, it may not have been weird for Gertrude and Inez to be good friends - but at the time of Gertrude's wedding, Inez was but 16 years old.

So, we have 16 year old niece/cousin witness, long distance cousin witness, possibly 6 months pregnant bride, and wedding in a far-enough-away city.  Seems scandalous enough to me for a Tuesday in 1911. By all accounts these two lived on to have a happy life with many children, grandchildren and lived to see many great grandchildren. It makes me wonder what the whole story was...