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....

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  

 

To blink or not to blink

As you might expect "Don't Blink" is a cheesy name for a possibly equally cheesy horror movie. IMBD information right here!

It is also apparently something you will read in a university bathroom stall:

Don't Blink

Is it a warning? A suggestion? One of the reasons I think people write on stall walls is to get a reaction.  This scrawl is howling to have other things written in response to it...such as "why" or "because the boogie man is waiting for you".  Maybe someone was just feeling festive about the upcoming Halloween season.  On that note here is an interesting story I came across today about a "murder house" in Los Angeles, CA.  Enjoy!