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Hello there and happy new year! It’s time once again to spend a moment somewhere beautiful.
I’m continuing with my Tree Series, where I post a poem inspired by a remarkable tree in my neighbourhood. This month’s tree can be found in my Muskoka neighbourhood, on top of Huckleberry Rock, a magnificent lookout and a favourite hike for my family and friends when visiting the cottage.
Click here for “True to You.”
Please pause and enjoy!
Lee Ann
Hello there! It’s time to spend a moment somewhere beautiful. This month I’m introducing the first in my new Tree Series: poems inspired by remarkable trees in my neighbourhood.
Click here for “Old Woman”.
Please pause and enjoy!
Lee Ann
There are few enough documents that can allow us a glimpse into the personality of an ancestor. A will is certainly one, and even without reading too much into the data, I feel that I know my great-great grandfather much better for having read his.
Frederick Eckhardt died on November 11, 1901, aged 82, at his farm property near Campden in the Niagara District. He had prepared his will seven years earlier. In it, he laid out twelve clear and specific directives. The first four give instructions to:
Here I start to get a measure of the man. I can see someone for whom it is important to be remembered in a tangible way (the “suitable” monument or tombstone.) He is someone who values – even treasures – family and family records. (Note the importance for Frederick is not the Bible per se, but the “verities” contained in it.)
The Bell organ is the only piece of household goods that he highlighted for inheritance. Possibly a status item for him, the organ was clearly important to his unmarried daughter Sarah, who lived with him until her death in 1896. It is also probably safe to assume he had a close relationship to his granddaughters Edna and Edith, and that they valued the organ and/or playing music as much as he seemed to.
The Pragmatic Provider
The remaining directives in the will are all about providing for his children. Frederick and his wife Magdalena (who had died back in 1869) had eleven children in total, only seven of whom survived him. First, he expressly excluded two of his sons, William and Christian, and the heirs of his late son Jacob, from receiving any portion of his estate, “as they are already in comfortable circumstances.”
So: a pragmatist and realist. Clear eyed, or at least firm in his judgements of those close to him and willing to act on what he decided was fair.
Frederick also specified a caveat in providing for his son Solomon (my great-grandfather). Frederick had provided $280 (about $10,000 today) as security for promissory notes taken out by Solomon. Frederick did this “in order to assist him.” He instructed that if the notes had not been repaid by Solomon at the time of Frederick’s death, the sum was to be deducted from the monies payable to Solomon from the estate.
So: a willingness to help out, tempered with tight control on his money, and a strong respect for money owed.
Beneath the Directives: Clues
The probate papers assess Frederick’s estate as $5,083.17, which is about $184,000 today. About half of that was the value of his 51 acres of farmland, atop the Niagara escarpment near Vineland. Frederick willed to his son Byron “and his heirs and assigns forever, all my real estate.” But he also directed that Byron had to pay a total of $2,500 for the property (about $90,000 in today’s dollars) to the executors in yearly payments. The executors would then divide that money into equal shares and pay each of the inheriting children, including Frederick’s late daughter Elizabeth’s children and Byron himself.
A bit of a complicated way to allow Byron to stay on the farm without handing over half of the estate to this one son, plus a way for Frederick to provide financial support using the whole of his estate, to his children who needed it.
So clearly, Frederick considered himself a provider for his family, and acted accordingly in life and in death.
While I think it can be dangerous to assume too much from data, I also think it’s possible to get a glimpse into the nature of a person from the records they leave behind. For this reason, wills and probate records are fabulous sources for genealogists. Beneath the legal language beats the heart of a person who, in addition to directives, leaves clues about their personality and their values.
Hello there! Today I’m inviting you to pause and spend a moment with me as I share a new photograph of a place in my world that is beautiful and that inspired its accompanying poem.
Click here for this month’s poem and picture, “Fall Colours.”
Breathe! Enjoy…
Lee Ann
The War of 1812 took up a lot of time in my history classes during middle school. After all, I grew up in Niagara Falls, and much of that war was fought in our neighbourhoods. So every year, my classmates and I were herded into yellow buses and taken down the Niagara Parkway to Fort George and Queenston Heights, the sites of two major battles.
For me, these field trips were beyond boring. I was unimpressed by Fort George’s summer students, the cute, costumed “soldiers” with their pretend rifle drills. From my tween-aged perspective, the statue of General Isaac Brock at Queenston Heights was interesting only because it had once lost its arm and part of its torso in a lightning strike. I stubbornly refused to participate in the annual climb of the narrow, winding staircase inside Brock’s monument. Two hundred and thirty-five steep steps! Plus all the boys said there were bones up there.
Lundy’s Lane in Niagara Falls is the site of what historians agree was the bloodiest battle of the war. This was never a school field trip, since Lundy’s Lane had developed into a strip of fast food outlets and tourist shops, which it still is today. At the Lane’s highest point, Drummond Hill Cemetery holds the remains of soldiers from that battle. My husband remembers finding musket balls there when he was a kid – now, that’s interesting! Too bad I didn’t know about it when I was twelve.
It was only recently I discovered that two of my four-times-great grandfathers fought in the battle of Queenston Heights and also the battle of Lundy’s Lane. And on the opposite side of the spectrum, my Mennonite ancestors refused to fight on religious grounds.
The War of 1812 now feels far more personal than it ever did in history class or on field trips. What I learned opened a window into the life of Benjamin Willcox Jr., who fought alongside his 16-year old son Daniel in the 4th Lincoln Militia. And Martin Boughner, who left a pregnant wife and two-year-old daughter when he walked off the farm and into battle.
The War of 1812 also marked the first test of conscientious objection in Canada. For my Mennonite ancestors – the Honsberger and Fretz families – this test was real, and it was difficult. While exempt from active fighting, Mennonites were conscripted into “non-combatant” roles. This included driving supply wagons to the battlefront, which certainly did not provide exemption from mortal danger. Not to mention the King could “impress” their horses, carriages, and oxen as needed. And Mennonites, like the rest of the Niagara settlers, were not exempt from having army battalions move into their homes and barns and/or steal food from them when the military stores ran low.
One of the things I love most about researching my ancestry is that it transforms history. No longer is the War of 1812 a boring series of field trips, place names and dates. Now it’s a collection of stories alive with real people who belong to me. It’s an event that allows me to reflect on connections and influences that ripple through generations. I’m proud of all my ancestors who played a role in the war of 1812: the men who were called away from farming and families and who possibly had no interest in soldiering; the women and children who had to step up to keep farms operating… and also the men and women who may have stood up against the military, the government and their neighbours, in order to be true to their faith.
**This is an excerpt from my essay, “The War of 1812: It’s Personal,” which was published in Canadian Stories Magazine, Volume 19, Number 111 (October-November 2016.) You can order a copy of it here.
On a stretch of the Old Muskoka Road just north of Utterson, a few pieces of corduroy have heaved their way to the surface. “Corduroy” refers to the logs set cross-ways on a pioneer road, usually in the more boggy sections. Certainly the area between Utterson and Allensville is particularly low, so it makes sense there would have been a need for corduroy here.
I’m always thrilled to step on an actual piece of the road trod by many of the people I wrote about: Harriet King, Florence Kinton and others travelled this section of the road.
Last weekend, I listened with a smile as the people who live on the road today warned visitors that the road is twisty, full of potholes and dangerous cracks and needs to be travelled carefully. In fact, some helpful neighbours have drawn squiggly yellow lines on top of the worst humps and written CAUTION with arrows in several spots to warn drivers. I’m sure if the stagecoach drivers of the 1800s could have scrawled something in the dirt path to warn others of the perils of the road, they would have. As I’ve said many times when summing up the story of this road: “the road was awful; it was always awful; the end.” And so history continues in a modern form!
In Torrence, the Muskoka Conservancy owns a protected tract of land where an old growth pine tree stands. Botanists estimate it’s about 150 years old. So when the Muskoka Road was just being hacked out at its starting point a few kilometers to the southeast in Washago, this tree was the mere sprout of an acorn. It somehow survived the 19th century logging as well as a widespread fire in the 1930s to grow to a girth of 1.2 metres (almost four feet) at its base and a height of easily 15 metres (50 feet.) I gazed up into the canopy and tried to imagine a tree twice that girth and 25 metres – 82 feet – tall. That’s what Muskoka’s original old growth forests held when the first pioneers arrived… with their hand axes for tree chopping.
I love when the past shows glimpses of itself! These log pieces and this massive pine remind me that we are never far from our pasts… as individuals or as districts.