DEEP DIVE INTO MY NORTH AMERICAN FAMILY HISTORY

ByLee Ann

Seeding a New Country

I recently investigated the whereabouts of my ancestors in 1867 – the year that Canada officially became a country. But the seeds for my country’s formation were actually sown over a hundred years prior to that, when the “Seven Years War” between England and France and their allies came to an end. Key battles in that war were fought in North America, including at Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island, in Montreal and at Quebec City. These brought about a major turning point for North America and set up the circumstances that would lead to the creation of Canada. They also led to dramatic changes in some of my ancestors’ lives.

Here’s what North America looked like in 1763, at the end of the Seven Years War:

Here’s why that war was a turning point for North America:

  1. Control switched from France to Britain. After 150 years, France surrendered all its territories to Britain and North America became English. Explains why I don’t speak French!
  2. French was protected in Quebec. “New France” was gone, and with it the French (Catholic) religion, the French language and French common law – except in Quebec, where Britain made allowances for the French settlers who decided to stay. Canada still struggles with this today.
  3. First Nations land rights were recognized. The red line shown on the map is where Britain declared the western boundary of its settlements to extend; land to the west of that was acknowledged as “Indian Territory.” This was the first recognition of First Nations’ rights to land and titles. The proclamation did not last; some historians say that what happened to the natives once the Europeans arrived was in fact genocide. And the fallout from ignored and/or disrespected native land treaties established in 1763 is still in the news in Canada today.

And here’s why the Seven Years War is important to my family history:

  1. I had ancestors living in North America at the time. The “British Colonies” noted on the map were the first settlements of what would become the United States. Thirteen colonies stretching from Georgia to Maine, they had first been established in 1607 and were already British from that time. I had many ancestors, all from my father’s line, living in the 13 Colonies in 1763.
  2. I had at least one ancestor who fought in the Seven Years War.

My Soldier in the Seven Years War

78th Fraser Highlanders wore Highland dress into battle, however the tartan style is unknown.

I know of only one ancestor who was directly involved in fighting in the Seven Years War: my 5-times-great-grandfather Daniel McIntyre. Daniel signed up with the 78th Regiment Frasers Highlanders in Inverness Scotland in 1757, at the age of 21; he was likely a farmer before that. He fought for Britain – in his kilt – at Louisbourg, at Montreal, and at the decisive battle on Quebec’s Plains of Abraham. When the war ended, his regiment consisted of 887 men. Of these, almost half chose to be deployed to other regiments in North America, while others boarded ships back to Scotland. Some settled in Quebec (as many of them spoke French) and some, Daniel included, decided to set up homes in upstate New York or Vermont. Daniel received a land grant of 200 acres in Vermont for his service to Britain.

My Family’s Presence in the 13 Colonies

When Daniel McIntyre settled in Vermont after the war, he unknowingly joined other family members from my father’s line who were already living in the 13 Colonies. Although there were battles fought during the Seven Years War in what would become New York State and Pennsylvania, I have no information that indicates any of these family members from the Colonies were involved:

  • By 1763, the Wilcox family had been in North America for 130 years! My 10-times-great-grandfather Edward was the first immigrant, from South Elkington, England. He settled in Rhode Island in 1638. At the end of The Seven Years War, his descendant, Benjamin Wilcox, my 5-times-great-grandfather, plus his wife Elsie and daughter Hannah, were living either in Massachusetts where Benjamin was born, or New Jersey, where they moved to at some point.
Fretz homestead in Pennsylvania. From Fretz Family History by Rev. A. J. Fretz, pub. 1890
  • “Weaver John” Fretz – so called because he was a weaver as well as a farmer – was head of a large Mennonite family living in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. They farmed together on 230 acres. “Weaver John” had emigrated from Manheim, Germany as a child, somewhere between 1710 and 1720. By 1763 the family consisted of John, his second wife Maria, their eight children and many grandchildren. “Weaver John” was my 7-times-great-grandfather.
  • The Boughner family were newcomers to the  13 Colonies, originally from Unnau, Germany. Johann Martin Buchner and Elsa Zehrung had arrived in September 1753, just three years before the war began. They settled with their seven children in New Jersey. Martin was a school master; he and Elsa were my 5-times great-grandparents.

The peace negotiated in 1763 would not last long. Within 12 years a new war would erupt, caused in part by the terms of that 1763 treaty. As a result of the new war, the map of North America would be redrawn again. Daniel McIntyre’s fighting days were not over yet. And many more of my ancestors’ lives would change dramatically.

I’ll continue this story in another post. Meanwhile: what world events have had a direct impact on your family? I’d love to know!

WHAT GOT ME INTO GENEALOGY – AND WHY I STAY

ByLee Ann

One day when I was about 12 years old, my Uncle Bob came to the house with a leather-bound, yellowed passport. While he talked excitedly about how his Aunt Lucille probably didn’t realize the value of this when she sent it to him, I paged through it slowly, along with a sheet of paper which translated the words from Hungarian. The passport, issued in 1905, recorded my great-grandparents, Jozsef and Julianna Gerencser and their two sons immigrating to Buffalo, New York from a small village in central Hungary.

Cover page of passport for Gerencser family, 1905

This was the first time I heard that my grandfather had changed his name from Istvan Gerencser to Stephen Granger. The first time I understood from my mother and uncle that their dad, Stephen, had denied his Hungarian heritage his whole life.

Being twelve years old, I was much more fascinated at the time with the fact that the passport described my ancestors as having “regular” noses. But over many years, as my Uncle Bob continued with his research – a slow process in the 1970s! – I started to ask more questions when he arrived with new stories about the people in my Granger-Gerencser family. Like Christmas in Buffalo, where Stephen and his brother would receive – in “a good year” – an orange and a nickel. How Stephen’s sister, Julie, nearly froze when being taken to church for her baptism in a traditional, but flimsy, dress during a frigid Buffalo winter. Uncle Bob also had plenty of tales about growing up with my mom St. Catharines, Ontario: the piano that fell through the floor at Mr. Zabut’s; my mother wearing her mouse costume on backwards during a skating program. And the story that began one day with his question to my mother, “So, Sis, what is the word for people whose parents were never legally married?”

Granger family, circa 1942. Clockwise from top: Mary-Jane, Stephen, Bob, Mary

It was the stories that hooked me. When my mother passed away, I decided I wanted to record what I’d come to think of as “the Uncle Bob stories.” So I arranged to meet him in St. Catharines, in the neighbourhood where he and my mother grew up. We walked the neighbourhood; he talked and I recorded. This afternoon of reminiscing became the genesis of my book, “Strength Within: The Granger Chronicles,” published in 2005 to celebrate the 100 year anniversary of the Gerencser immigration.

By the time I wrote that book I had learned to ask much more often, the question, “why?” Why did they immigrate? Why did they “skip town” to get married? Why did he deny his heritage? This question, of course, leads to the stories. But it also led me to much more. I learned about historical events and their direct impact on my family members. I learned how to counsel other family historians about what the options might be to dealing compassionately with family secrets. I learned how to take genealogical data and turn it into stories that people might read and enjoy.

I got started in genealogy thanks to my Uncle Bob, one of the best storytellers I know. I stay in the game because I’ve discovered I love to tell stories too. For me, genealogy is not about building a huge database of records, but about reaching beyond those records and turning data into story.

How about you? Who are the storytellers in your family? Can you think of ways to tap into those stories before they are lost?

MY FAMILY AT CONFEDERATION

ByLee Ann

Have you ever thought about where your family members were, and what was happening to them in the year Canada became a nation? As part of my “Canada 150” celebration, I did just that. And although I know a lot about my family history, this was a different point of view, and it brought me some surprises.

At first glance, several families on either side of my lineage seemed to be quite stable in 1867. They were employed, whole, living in established communities. But I soon realized this was not to last. In Canada’s Confederation year, two branches of my family stood at the brink of heart-wrenching catastrophe, and another would see a significant birth. These ancestors’ lives were about to be forever changed, and I can’t help but think of the irony of a bright, new Canada in the face of their stories.

The McSorleys

Richard McSorley, circa 1920

In 1867, my maternal great-grandfather, Richard McSorley, was three years old. He was living in Buffalo, New York with his Irish-born parents Hugh McSorley and Jane Byron, and his four older siblings. Hugh was working as a horseshoe nailer/blacksmith and also serving in the Navy as a labourer.

By the following year, the family would be completely disintegrated. I’ve been unable to find any documents that tell what happened to Hugh and Jane, but on August 18, 1868, Richard and his brothers Charles and Hewitt would be taken to the Buffalo Orphan Asylum by a neighbour. From there, as each of the boys turned 11, they would be indentured – contracted out for labour – to households in New York State, far apart from each other.

Richard and Josephine McSorley in California

Richard would be taken in by a farming family in Hinsdale, New York, where he would live as an “adopted son” with the new name of Henry R. Scott from 1874 to 1880. This suggests that his situation was better than many other orphan placements, yet a handwritten notation against his indenture record in the orphanage ledger may hint at something else. It says, “Ran away.”

Richard would disappear from the official records for the next 14 years. Of course, in the late 1800s, this was entirely possible to do; according to his daughter, my grandmother Mary, Richard was “riding the rails” across America all that time. He wouldn’t reappear again until 22 May 1894, the date of his marriage in Buffalo to my American-born great-grandmother Josephine Robinson.

For the rest of his life, Richard would continue to wander. A housepainter by trade, he would (as remembered by my grandmother) announce to my great-grandmother Josephine, “I’m going to check on a job,” and be gone for up to six months. When he returned, my grandmother and her brother Arthur would be told by Josephine, “he is to be treated with respect; he is your father.”

Richard would die of a heart attack in Los Angeles, 8 May 1935. At that time, he’d have been a resident there without his wife and children for over 10 years, although he did visit Buffalo occasionally, and Josephine and the children travelled at least once to California.

I wonder what Richard’s life would have been like, what choices he might have made, if his parents and siblings had been able to continue on as they had been in the year of Canada’s Confederation.

The Eckhardts

Frederick and Magdalena Eckhardt

Meanwhile, in 1867, my paternal great-great grandparents Frederick Eckhardt and Magdalena Honsberger were living on their 50-acre farm atop the Niagara escarpment just east of the village of Campden (near Vineland.) Magdalena’s father, Christian, had arrived in Niagara in 1799 at the age of 18. He was part of the second group of Mennonite families to walk over 600 kilometres from Buck’s County, Pennsylvania to establish homesteads in Niagara.

Frederick had arrived much later, from Germany. His earliest official record in Canada is when he purchased the Niagara farmland in 1844. On this farm he and Magdalena were raising their 10 children, most of whom were still at home on 1 July 1867. Overall, Confederation year seems to have been a good one for the Eckhardts, including the birth of their first grandchild. But like the McSorleys in 1867, this branch of my family was also about to face a tragic blow. Just two years later, Magdalena would die suddenly at the age of 50, leaving Frederick with six children under the age of 15.

Their son Solomon, my paternal great-grandfather, would be only 12 when he lost his mother. Frederick would never remarry; he would live another 32 years and die of a sudden stroke in his blacksmith shop on the farm, in 1901.

Once again, just after a brand new country came into being, members of my family were struggling to continue on with life as best they could.

The Gerencsers (Grangers)

Joszef Gerencser, circa 1910

In contrast to these stories, 1867 did not bring tragedy for my other maternal great-grandfather, József Gerencsér. He was born on 19 September in that year, in Kispécz (now Kájarpéc) Hungary, which is about 150 kilometres west of Budapest. The Gerencsér family’s long and difficult road to Canada began in the year of Confederation, with József’s birth. He would grow up to be the ancestor I now thank for bringing his branch of my family to America, and from there – not due to death but a different kind of misfortune – to Canada.

Julianna Molnar Gerencser, circa 1910

József came from a long line of landless peasants who toiled in poverty on other people’s land, with no opportunity to improve their lot, in a country where land ownership was everything. Luckily, in József’s time, an option arose to the life of the powerless peasant: America. József would come to Buffalo, New York in 1902 at the age of 34, and work for two years in a factory to earn enough money to be able to return to Hungary to fetch his family. In 1905, he would bring my great-grandmother Julianna Molnár and their two sons József and Istvan to the Port of Baltimore and from there to Pennsylvania and finally, to Buffalo. My grandfather Istvan – whose name would be Americanized by a teacher to Stephen Granger – would be seven years old at the time.

Thirty-two years later, in 1937, Stephen would be thrown out of work by the Depression. He would answer a call from a friend for his experience as an international shipping clerk, and thanks to this opportunity, he would bring my grandmother, Mary McSorley, and my eight-year old mother, Mary-Jane, to St. Catharines.

Legacies

One hundred and fifty years after Confederation, Canada is widely accepted as being one of the top 10 countries in the world to live, and I’ll be celebrating. I’ll also be thinking about the ripple effects of birth, death and misfortune on these ancestors of mine. I’ve been saddened to discover family tragedies that happened so close to Canada’s Confederation. Yet I’m also grateful for the family members who made their way to Canada, allowing me to enjoy all this country has to offer. And I’m happy that my roots hold people who, whether born into a life of no opportunity, or thrown off course by death or unemployment, made choices and found what they needed to continue on with life. These are strong legacies.

LONG FORGOTTEN, NOW REMEMBERED: The Brief Life of Arthur Lavernon Eckhardt

ByLee Ann

The Question “Why”

 Of all the questions I can ask as a genealogist, my favourite is, “why?” I asked that question recently about Arthur Lavernon Eckhardt: why did Arthur sell the first Eckhardt homestead in Canada? Over fifty acres on top of the Niagara escarpment near Vineland, he inherited this farm property from his father Byron, who had inherited it from his father Frederick, who was the first of my Eckhardt ancestors to come to Canada from Germany.

My investigations led me to much more than the answer to my question. I learned about Canada’s first airport. I learned how a world-wide tragedy affected our family directly. Most intriguingly, I came to know the brief life story of a member of our family who is likely no longer known to anyone else but me.

Arthur Lavernon Eckhardt would never have been on my research radar, since he springs from a different branch of the Eckhardt tree than I do. But I’ve been tracing the history of the Eckhardt homestead property, and that brought me to him.

Arthur’s father Byron was the younger brother of my great-grandfather, Solomon. The Eckhardt homestead had passed down through Byron, and as Byron’s only son, Arthur inherited the property in 1916 when his father died. Arthur promptly sold it to someone outside the family. This in spite of our original settler Frederick Eckhardt’s directive, spelled out in his will, which left to Byron and “his heirs and assigns forever all my real estate.”

Excerpt from Frederick Eckhardt’s will, 1894

Frederick the patriarch was clearly keen that this land remained in the family. Frederick’s son Byron, though, left instructions in his will to sell everything: the house, all its furniture, the land, the farm implements, all of it, including the two cows, three swine and 35 chickens.

Excerpt from Byron Eckhardt’s will, 1916

Byon’s son Arthur was not a farmer. He was a civil engineer, and this was my first hint towards an answer to my question. Arthur had even moved away from the Niagara district some five years before his father Byron died. First he worked in Edmonton. Then in June of 1914, he immigrated to the United States to work in Niagara Falls, New York. In both places he was employed as an engineer.

Byron obviously knew that Arthur’s career was not on the land. We don’t know if he was disappointed about this or not, but he certainly laid out very clearly in his will the instructions for the sale of the farm. As for Arthur’s four sisters, only two of them ever married, and although one sister and her husband farmed near to the Eckhardt land, they did not acquire it. Possibly it was beyond their means, or they were content where they were.

So my why question was answered, but Arthur still held a couple of surprises for me.

 The Gravestone

When searching to see if I could find out any more about him, I found this picture of Arthur’s gravestone: a full-on Royal Air Force monument, commemorating his service in World War I.

Mountainview Cemetery, Campden, Ontario

What? The only Eckhardts on record as soldiers of the Great War were my grandfather Albert and his brother Jessie.

I looked closer at the tombstone: air mechanic, it says.

So I double-checked the military files at Library and Archives Canada. No Arthur. Did that mean he didn’t serve overseas? His death record lists his occupation as ‘soldier.’ But wait – it also shows he died at the Base Hospital in Toronto.

So: a soldier, died in Canada, was an air mechanic, was buried with RAF recognition.

It took some further digging to uncover his War Cemetery Record:

Arthur Eckhardt’s War Cemetery Record

This document gave me the story: Arthur was working as an air mechanic at the Engine Repair Park in Toronto. It’s unclear as to how long he’d been doing this work, but regardless, his service there gave him recognition for being a member of the Royal Air Force, and also the rights to that military monument that sits in the Mountainview Cemetery.

Arthur was part of a team of technicians who maintained the airplanes used to train pilots for the Royal Air Force.

The Dawn of Canadian Aviation

At the beginning of the First World War, any Canadian who wanted to become a pilot had to pay for his own training, then make his way to England and fly for the Royal Flying Corps or the Royal Naval Air Service. (Canada did not have its own air force until the 1920s.) The demand for pilots was not being met through those measures, so eventually England appealed to Canada to establish some training schools. The first of these, founded in 1917, was at Camp Long Branch, located on 100 acres of land along Lakeshore Road, just west of today’s Dixie Road in Toronto. This site was the former location of the Curtiss Aeorplanes and Motors Company, which had established Canada’s first airport (“aerodrome”) there in 1915. By July 1917, the flight school and maintenance facility had grown too big for Long Branch, and it relocated to Camp Armour Heights, on a site where today Yonge Street intersects with Highway 401.

Armour Heights Aerodrome (from Canadian Forces College website)

By 1918, Camp Armour Heights had evolved into the Special Flight School, training flying instructors for the newly-minted Royal Air Force, a merger of Britain’s two former air services. This is where Arthur would have worked.

Poster recruiting mechanics (From Library and Archives Canada)

Air mechanics were part of a loosely grouped collection of tradesmen attracted to this new aeronautics industry. Some were trained at a school run out of the University of Toronto, and some followed pilots to Europe, fixing ripped fabric wings, stopping fuel leaks and repairing broken wheel struts with whatever they could find at the front. At home, air mechanics supported the flight schools by maintaining the machinery and fleets. In Arthur’s time, the trainers used were Canadian-made Curtiss JN-4 (CAN) bi-planes, known as “Curtiss Jenny Canucks,” to distinguish them from an American version of the plane.

Curtiss Jenny Canuck

Tragedy Personal and International

Arthur’s death and cemetery records state that he died of pneumonia from influenza on October 12, 1918. This means he succumbed to the famed Spanish Flu, the epidemic that killed 40 million people world-wide, more people than had died in the war itself. Fifty thousand Canadians died from the flu, most of them between the ages of 20 and 40 – the age group that had already been largely destroyed by the war. Arthur was 31 years old.

Board of Health poster (from Legion Magazine)

Soldiers returning from Europe brought the flu with them, spreading out via trains and wagons from several Canadian ports of entry. By October 3, 1918, roughly the date Arthur was admitted, the Base Hospital in Toronto had 500 cases of influenza. By Oct. 9, undertakers couldn’t keep up with the death toll in the city, and by the end of the month, 1,750 Torontonians were dead from flu. Cemeteries were required to stay open for Sunday burials, and the city ordered theatres, movie halls and other public areas closed.

Long Lost and Now Remembered

Like his father and grandfather before him, Arthur left instructions in his will for a monument to be placed at his grave, “bearing a suitable inscription in memory” of him. Thankfully for the genealogists to follow several generations later, this was done. If it hadn’t been, Arthur might have been lost to history. He never married, nor, as mentioned, did two of his sisters. Of the married sisters, one was wed after Arthur’s death and had no children. The other sister did have children, but even including them, all of the people who would have known Arthur, or known of him from his siblings, had died by 1976. I am not aware of any other family historian who has researched this branch of the Eckhardt family.

So once again, a genealogy quest led me down a surprising road, and taught me far more than what I expected to learn. I’ll continue to ask the question why, and many other questions too. Meanwhile, I’ll remember Arthur.

Royal Air Force Badge

A MEASURE OF THE MAN: The Last Will and Testament of Frederick Eckhardt

ByLee 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:

  1. Pay all outstanding funeral and testamentary expenses.
  2. “Erect a suitable monument or tombstone at my grave.”
  3. “Bequeath my family Bible containing verities of births, marriages and deaths in my family” to his son Byron, with “my wish that he carefully preserve it.”
  4. “Bequeath my Bell organ to my daughter Sarah during her life and at her death it is to go to and become the property of my grand-daughters Edna and Edith, the daughters of my son Byron.”
Example of a Bell pump organ

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.

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THE WAR OF 1812: IT’S PERSONAL

ByLee Ann
Fort George image from friendsoffortgeorge.ca

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.

Brock’s Monument image from friendsoffortgeorge.ca

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.

Drummond Hill Cemetery image from niagarafalls.ca

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.

Muster Roll showing Benjamin Willcox and his son Daniel. Image from ourontario.ca

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.