Eckhardt family

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

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 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

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)

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.