George goes to see the King

When George and Louisa Smith moved to Grand Coulee in 1907, there were still two sons and four daughters with them, all of whom were old enough to take on a good portion of house and farm work.  And from at least 1911 on, George also had three hired hands living at the farm.  So perhaps he started to take things a little easier himself.   In 1911 when he was 60 years old, he took the first long holiday that I know of.  It was the year of King George V's coronation, and George apparently felt a hankering to go back to England for this event.  Louisa, however, wasn't a keen traveller, and didn't want to go - so he went alone (1).

Tracing this journey is a little tricky, but I believe I've found him on the 'Lake Champlain' travelling from Montreal to Liverpool in May that year.  By that time, his parents and at least four of his siblings had passed away (perhaps five - his brother Richard dropped off the radar in 1871).  Two brothers, Alfred and Frederick, were in Australia, so the only siblings who I'm sure were still in England were Lucy, in Somerset, Mary Ann in Devon, and John and Clara in London.  I have no evidence that he got in touch with any or all of them, but I feel sure that he did.  He seems to have stayed in England for a few months, so it's likely that he spent a good part of that time with Cockram family members (and no doubt he told them why he changed his name!).

George may have been among the crowds of people who lined the streets of London on the 22nd of June to see the new king and queen go to and from Westminster Abbey.  And he certainly visited the Festival of Empire, a grand exhibition which ran for months at the Crystal Palace to celebrate the coronation.  The festival's souvenir brochure declared the aim of the event:  it was ‘a Social Gathering of the British Family’ to encourage the ‘firmer welding of those invisible bonds which hold together the greatest empire the world has ever known’. (2)

It was a huge affair covering a vast expanse of grounds, with an elaborate pageant, sporting events and exhibitions of products and inventions from the countries of the British empire, displayed in three-quarter size models of their parliament buildings erected in the grounds.

 

As far as I can tell, George came back to Canada in November, at which time the Quebec ports would have been closed due to ice, so the ship docked at Halifax, and George travelled from there to Grand Coulee by train.

One memento he brought back with him, which is still in the family, was a pocket watch - a Waltham, made in the United States in 1907. Its open face (i.e. there's no cover over it) is in Roman Numerals with 24 hour markings, with a second hand is in a circle at the bottom. It's a lovely timepiece as it was manufactured, but George enhanced it significantly - and at what expense, I wonder - by having the back engraved with an elaborate arrangement of his (assumed) initials - GTS.  I've doctored one photo to make it easier to see the intertwined letters.  Some years after George bought the watch, he added a coin to the chain - a 1925 King George V two pence piece.  Perhaps this was to forever associate the watch with the occasion on which he bought it.

It's nice to think that he used this watch for the rest of his life, but I don't know if he did or not.  When he died in 1943, the watch came into the possession of his youngest daughter Audrey, and in 1958, she gave it to one of George's great grandsons, my cousin Dick, who was six years old at the time.  Dick still has the watch, and he tells me that 109 years after it was manufactured,  it still keeps perfect time.

1) As told by Prue Wanamaker to my cousin Donna.
2) 'Souvenir of the Pageant of London', with several pictures and great detail of the events that took place. Online here

The Smiths at Grand Coulee 1907-1919

Grand Coulee, October 1913
Photo courtesy of http://www.anitamaedraper.com/author-memories/1913-grand-coulee-sask

Section map showing George's farm in green, Grand Coulee just north,
and part of Regina to the east.  Click the map to read it.

The location of the farm today, photographed from its SE corner.
George's house and other buildings no longer stand. 

Grand Coulee is a very small town about 100 miles west of Summerberry and 10 miles west of Regina.  The 640 acres George purchased there were on the NW corner of where the Trans-Canada Highway now meets Range Road just south of the town.  The family lived there until about 1919.

The Smith house at Grand Coulee

These were eventful years, in which George spent some time in England and in California, four more of his children got married, several grandchildren were born, his eldest daughter passed away and a tornado devastated Regina.  I'll say more about some of these things in the next few posts.

Of course the most far-reaching event of the time was the first world war.  All three of George and Louisa's sons, and their sons-in-law, were of an age to go to war, but none of them volunteered, and when conscription came to Canada in 1917, farmers, their sons and their hired labourers were exempt, due to the need for an adequate agricultural workforce to be maintained.

Before the war, Saskatchewan farmers were in an economic slump.  Grain prices had dropped, and three years of drought and crop failures had taken their toll.  But soon after the war began, the Allies' demand for Canadian wheat was high, and production expanded dramatically.  The 1915 harvest, for example, was the largest in Saskatchewan's history.  And the price of wheat rose too.  By 1917, the price was fixed at $2.21 a bushel, three times the pre-war price, and one acre of land could produce anywhere from 40 to 60 bushels.  If George had just half of his land at Grand Coulee producing wheat at 50 bushels an acre, he would have made more than $35,000 a year, not to mention the land he still owned at Summerberry.  But the cost of production rose too - farm machinery prices soared, and wages for farm labourers more than doubled. (1)

While the war didn't take the lives of anyone in George's family, there were many friends who weren't so lucky.  One such family, who also lived at Grand Coulee at the time, less than 2 miles from the Smiths, were the Wanamakers.  A strong friendship grew between these two families, and eventually a relationship or two, too.   Both families were faithful Methodist churchgoers, and active participants in the life of the church - they've been described as the mainstays of the church, and of the church choir - and no doubt that's where they met.  When the Wanamakers' son Frederick was killed in France in 1917, the loss was a blow to both families. (2)

I'll discuss the Wanamakers in more detail in later posts, when I finally stop rabbiting on about George and Louisa!

One of my favourite photos from the Grand Coulee years is this one of George and Louisa's daughter Prue, taken around 1910.  Prue had many talents, including needlework, cooking and baking, singing, playing the piano, bringing in the harvest and shooting hawks. (2)

Prue Smith at about age 17, with a hawk and a gun.

George and Louisa somewhere between 1912 and 1917.  I believe this photo was taken outside their home. Louisa is wearing a 'duster' coat, which was designed for travelling in open cars without getting one's clothes dirty.  Does this mean they owned a car at that time? I don't know.

1) 'The Impact of the First World War on Saskatchewan's Farm Families', Joan Champ, 2002
2) As told by my grandmother Myrtle Wanamaker to my cousin Donna

The Smiths in Summerberry 1905-1907

Main street of Summerberry, early 1900s

Summerberry Post Office, which opened in 1882.  Date of the photo is unknown.

While living at Indian Head, George started purchasing some land about 40 miles east, near Summerberry.  I'm finding contradictory clues about exactly where some of this land was and when he bought it, and until I can get hold of some original documents I won't know the truth.  But it seems that between 1899 and 1906, he bought a total of eleven quarter sections (three of which he sold  soon after buying them), north of the town of Summerberry. While the family were still living at Indian Head, George and his sons might have been farming some of this land, but I don't know.  In any case, in 1905, the family moved there, and lived on the western half of section 33. (see map below)
 

At that time, the eight children who were still at home ranged in age from 6 to 24.  The younger children - Audrey, Ethel, Prue and Ryley - attended Weldon School, which was just north of their home and closer than the school in Summerberry.  And no doubt like most farmers' kids, they each had their share of chores to do on the farm.

At Weldon School in 1906 -  In the back row are Ryley, age 15, 2nd from left and Prue, 13, far right.
In the front row, Ethel, 9, far left and Audrey, 7, 3rd from left.

This section map shows what I think I know about what land George bought, and when.  The CPR Land Sales records (1) show that he bought 3 quarters of section 17 in 1898, and sold them 18 months later.  My cousin Donna apparently had documents showing that he bought five quarters in 1899 - the NE quarter of section 32 (I tend to think she was wrong about that, but I'm still waiting to find out), and the NW and SW quarters of both section 33 and section 29.  A map in a local history book, 'Grit and Growth: The Story of Grenfell' (2) shows that he bought the SE quarter of section 29 in 1903.  Donna said he bought the NW and SW quarters of section 32 in 1906.

The 1906 census tells us that George owned fifteen horses, two cows, three other horned animals and ten hogs.  Fifteen horses sounds like a lot to me, but most of his neighbours had around the same number.  Farmers at that time needed a lot of 'horsepower' to work the land. If the above map is correct, George would have owned 1280 acres - so the horses would have been busy. 

Having bought that much land, one would think George was planning to stay at Summerberry permanently, but in fact he only stayed for about a year and a half.  In November 1907, daughter Bessie Jane married John Stewart Fleming, who she had met in Indian Head, where he was the local blacksmith.  They made their home in Indian Head. Only a month later, on Christmas day 1907, there was another wedding - second son Will married John Fleming's sister Janet (Aggie) Fleming.  Will purchased the western half of section 33 from his father, and then, with six children still in tow, George and Louisa moved to Grand Coulee, where George had purchased an entire section of land (640 acres).

John Stewart Fleming and
Bessie Jane Smith, 1907

Old Summerberry Church, 1906,
which burned down in 1949.

All of these land, livestock and other purchases (to be mentioned in later posts), leave me wondering how George made enough money for it all.  I've been told he was a 'prosperous farmer' - that seems like a bit of an understatement!  His daughters Prue and Audrey said that he had a really good head for business.  And good timing - he rented until he could afford to buy without borrowing, he only bought land that had already been cleared and broken by previous owners, and all but one of his purchases already had houses on them.  He and Louisa were rather frugal, at least in the early years, and taught their children how to get value for money.(3)

1) Online at the Glenbow Museum, here. Search the CPR database for 17 17 8 W2. I didn't know how to interpret this information, but was advised by email from the Museum's Libray & Archives Director, that it means George bought the land, then sold it to James Geddes.
2) Online at Our Roots, here
    Unfortunately the above two sources contradict each other about section 17.
3)  As told by Prue and Audrey to my cousin Donna.
Summerberry photos courtesy of Prairie Towns

The Smiths at Indian Head 1894-1905

I'm guessing that this studio shot of George
and Louisa was taken in 1900 when they
lived at Indian Head, on the occasion
of their 25th wedding anniversary.

When they arrived on the prairies, George and his family first settled at Indian Head, about 50 miles east of Regina, Saskatchewan's capital city.  Some of what I know about their time there comes from one of George's daughters, Bessie Jane.  In 1984 she wrote a short article for a local history book about Indian Head.  Here is most of that article:

“I came to Indian Head from Ontario with my parents, G. Thomas Smith, his wife and eight children. Thomas was originally from England where he was born on May 31, 1851. We arrived at Indian Head on March 1, 1894. We lived on a farm in the Rose Valley District* which my father had rented. We had left a large house and ten of us lived for two years in a two-room house. The upstairs was unfinished and in winter nailheads were covered with frost, but after two years the owner added three more rooms. 
The Rose Valley School which I attended was the center for social life of the community. An addition had been added to accommodate the congregation for church services and for concerts. We had four miles to drive to this. An interesting fact regarding church at Rose Valley was that we really had a church union, as a Methodist minister and a Presbyterian minister took alternate Sundays. Everyone attended every Sunday, whatever faith they belonged to. (1) 
* The Rose Valley District is about five miles north of the town of Indian Head

Rose Valley School (and church), about 1897

It's not surprising that Bessie felt the cold at Indian Head. Average high temperatures are below
freezing for 5 months of the year.  Note the grain elevators in the background.

In October 1897, George and Louisa had another daughter, Beatrice Ethel.  And a few months later, in May 1898, they acquired their first son-in-law, when their second daughter, 20 year old Maud, married William George Bennett.

The town of Indian Head would have looked something like this when the family arrived.

Bessie Jane's article continues:

Father bought a farm two miles south of Indian Head.  I then came to the first school in town which is now a duplex house.  The present public school was then built and I attended there."  (1)

This is the second school Bessie mentioned, which opened in 1901.

The family left Rose Valley in 1898 or 99.  I haven't yet found the exact size or location of the land George bought south of Indian Head, but I've been told it was near the government's Experimental Farm, which was established in 1887.  Its intent was to meet the needs of new settlers for reliable information on the best farming methods and practices for local conditions. Long-term studies with field crops, animal husbandry and horticulture were undertaken, and no doubt George, among many other farmers, benefited from them.

In April 1899, George and Louisa's final child, Audrey May, was born.  And just four months later, when George was 47 and Louisa not yet 44, their first grandchild, James Bennett, was born.  In April 1900, George and Louisa celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary.

Reaping the wheat at Indian Head, early 1900s

Indian Head grain elevators and train station, around 1905.

The family stayed on their farm for about six years, at a good time for growing wheat. According to the Department of Agriculture, the Indian Head district ranked highest for wheat production in Saskatchewan in 1903, 1904 and 1905. A Board of Trade pamphlet from 1905 proclaimed it as the best wheat producing district on earth. For a town with a population of 1,800 in 1905, it boasted twelve grain elevators which were erected along the Canadian Pacific Railway, with each elevator having the capacity to hold approximately 350,000 bushels. This location handled a higher quantity of grain in 1902 in the initial shipment stage than any other inland port in the world.(2)  Hopefully, lots of that grain came from George's farm!  He had another wedding to pay for during this time - In 1902, 27 year old Clara married Archie Adair.  Archie and his father, John, had lived near George's family in Ontario, and it's quite likely that Archie and Clara met there.  They soon started their own family - Murray Adair was born in 1903 (but died only 8 months later), and his brother James in 1905.

And also in 1905, George was on the move again.

1) Indian Head: a History of Indian Head and District, 1984, p.678.  Online here
2) Indian Head Board of Trade pamphlet, 'Indian Head, Saskatchewan', 1905. Online here
Indian Head photos courtesy of Prairie Towns

George Goes West

Canada. Department of the Interior.
Facts relating to western Canada.
London: Department of the Interior, 1902

In 1894 George and Louisa packed their family onto a train  headed west to Saskatchewan   Why they decided to do that, I can only guess, but it seems likely that farming in Glen Huron, Ontario wasn't up to much - the land there wasn't really suited to it.  Saskatchewan, on the other hand was considered the best place in the country to grow wheat.  And the Canadian government, through its homesteading act, was encouraging people to go there, with offers of free land. New settlers could pay $10 to apply for 160 acres, and if they started clearing it, built a house and got some crops growing within a few years, the land would be theirs.

As far as I can tell, George didn't take advantage of this opportunity when he first settled in Saskatchewan.  Homesteading records are easy to find online, but there's only one mention of George among them, as George T Smith, relating to a property he acquired some years later.  But then again, I don't know the exact location of the first property he owned, so there might be a land grant record pertaining to it that I haven't found.

It’s not known if Louisa’s mother, Jane Murphy, travelled to Saskatchewan with the family, but she appears in this family photo, which daughter Prue believed was taken there in 1896, when she was three years old.

The Smiths in 1896 - Back: Clara, George Jr, Maud
Middle: Bessie, Jane Murphy, George with Ryley on his knee, Louisa, Prue
Front: Grace, Will

George and Louisa made Saskatchewan their permanent home, living in four different areas - Indian Head, Summerberry, Grand Coulee and Regina.  These are all reasonably close to each other, in southeastern Saskatchewan - within about 100 miles of the US border.  Here are two maps, so you can get your bearings.

Canada, with Saskatchewan highlighted.
If you have really good eyes, you can see where the capital, Regina, is.

1906 map of part of southeastern Saskatchewan, highlighting the Smith family locations,
all along the Canadian Pacific Rail line.

The next few posts will be about the family's time in each of these locations.

George gets to Canada, at last!

The SS Dominion. Courtesy of Jeff Newman www.greatships.net

When we last saw George Cockram in June 1875, he was boarding the SS Dominion in Liverpool to head for Canada, using the name Thomas Smith - and I'm sorry to say I still can't shed any light on why he did that.  So I'll just pick up his story where I left off.

from http://www.norwayheritage.com

The cost of the journey across the sea would have been out of many people's reach at about £5 to £6 in steerage (it's very difficult to find accurate information about that (1) so I'm estimating, based on what I could find.)  As a labourer, it could take him two months or more to earn that much.  But Canada offered 'assisted passage' to many people who had the skills the country wanted. In this 1883 Allan Line ad, they're listed as mechanics, navvies, agricultural and general labourers, and their families, and female domestic servants.  I don't know if George was able to afford his passage or not - but his marriage record says he was a 'labourer', which certainly suggests that he could have been in a position to get 'assisted passage' to Canada, for which he might have only paid one pound.

George may have been helped in other ways too.  For example, if he knew someone in Canada who could 'take him by the hand' for a short while when he arrived, and help him get work.  Uncle George is a possibility in this regard, but I don't know what part of Ontario he was in when his nephew arrived there, and he might well have already settled in St Thomas, where young George probably never went. But George might well have had a friend who went to Canada before him (or for that matter, with him) about whom I know nothing.

As far as I know (and that's not very far) George spent his first year or so in Canada in Singhampton, Nottawasaga Township, Simcoe County, in southeast Ontario, about 500 miles west of Ottawa, which by the way is listed as his intended destination on the ship's passenger list.  This could mean that he had booked a rail journey from his arrival point in Quebec, to Ottawa - then again, it could mean that when asked where he was headed, he named the only city in Ontario that he knew.

Either way, after he had gone through the rather slack arrival procedures (2) in Quebec, he must have taken a train west. Canadian rail journeys at that time were far from comfortable.  An 1870 emigrant writing home from Hamilton said: "The unpleasant things on a sea-voyage, can well be put up with, but the horrid, dirty, filthy, jolting railway cars, made one say they wished they never had left the Old Country. We got into the cars on Monday afternoon, and got out on Wednesday afternoon---forty-eight hours packed together like a lot of pigs, without a chance to stretch one's legs, unless they laid on the dirty floor, where they stood a good chance of being trampled upon."... (3)

If George did get an 'assisted passage' he would have been required to stay in Canada for at least one year - otherwise, he would have had to pay it back.  He did stay for a year, probably working as an agricultural labourer during the growing season, and at Singhampton's sawmill in the winter.  Whatever he did, he must have earned enough money to pay for his passage back to England, to fetch Louisa and baby Clara.  This sets him apart from many other English emigrants to Canada, who found the living and working conditions there terrible, and felt they had been duped by the Canadian government and the shipping lines that lured them there with tales of plentiful work and high wages.  Some of their letters home were published in British newspapers, such as this one:

from The North Devon Journal, May 6 1875, p.5

But George obviously liked his life in Canada, and once he had brought Louisa and Clara to Ontario in 1876, he settled his small family near Duntroon in Nottawasaga, where he was most likely growing wheat.

In 1877, Louisa's mother Jane left England and joined the family in Canada.  She spent the rest of her life there, apparently living sometimes with George and Louisa and sometimes with her other daughter, who I like to call Jane Jr.  You might recall that Jane Jr has been bothering me for some time, her whereabouts after 1871 unknown.  But according to my cousin Donna, who heard it from one or two of our great-aunts, Jane Jr emigrated to Ontario too.  I can't find her there, mainly because I don't know who she married, but I'm assuming it's true.

Anyway, George and Louisa had another daughter, Annie (Maud), in 1877, followed by George Jr in 1881 and Fred (Will) in 1883. The family was still at Duntroon in 1884, when George was listed (as Thomas Smith) in the 1884 Simcoe Gazetteer as a tenant farmer at Con 9 Lot 21 (marked in green on the map below). 

Another daughter, Bessie Jane, was born in 1885, and then the family moved a few miles south to Con 9 Lot 10 near Glen Huron (also known as Smithville - is that significant, I wonder...) where Elizabeth (Grace) was born in September 1886.  On the 1881 map below, their 200 acre farm (marked in red), is shown to belong to Thomas Ovens.  I haven't been able to discover whether George rented or owned this farm.

George's first farm, at Con 9 Lot 21, marked in green. 
His second farm, at Con 9 Lot 10, marked in red.

Southern Ontario, showing the location of Nottawasaga, on Georgian Bay, Lake Huron

At Glen Huron, three more more children were born - Walter in 1889, who died two years later, my grandfather Herman (Ryley) in 1891 and Prudence in 1893.   Then in 1894, the family moved to Saskatchewan - but that's another story.


1)  for instance, see: Dupont B, Keeling D and Weiss T, Passenger Fares for Overseas Travel in the 19th and 20th Centuries, a paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association, Vancouver, BC, Canada, Sept 21-23, 2012
2)  Personal correspondence from the Canadian Immigration Museum.  See my previous post here.
3)  Quoted in  The Ships List, from Canada Sessional Papers No 64 A 1871 Report of the Minister of Agriculture for 1870, p.79-80

That Pesky Old Mayflower

Great-granddaddy George has been neglected lately.  I've been spending my genealogy time on other family lines, and was recently reminded of another family puzzle, which has absolutely nothing to do with George.  This one is from my other maternal great-grandfather, William Henry Wanamaker's branch of the tree.

It seems like it was long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away that I wrote an article about whether or not I'm descended, via my Wanamaker line, from anyone who was on the first voyage of the Mayflower in 1620.  It was an inconclusive article, mainly dealing with the question of whether or not Esther Alden, a descendant of John Alden, the Mayflower's cooper, really married Clark Bates, my 4th great-grandfather.  If so, I'm a Mayflower descendant, but I still haven't found any reliable evidence to either prove or disprove it.  If you're interested, the article is a PDF document, here.

Recently I was reminded that a different Mayflower connection has been staring me in the face for a year or two, but I've been ignoring it, because it too, is inconclusive.  This is a more interesting connection though, partly because there's lots of information about the people involved, and partly because there are several conflicting ideas about the truth of the matter.  I'll try to put it in a nutshell:
Among the crew of the Mayflower was a ship's pilot whose surname was Clark or Clarke.  Some historians and genealogists say he was Thomas Clarke, born in 1599 in England; others say he was John Clarke, Thomas' father, born in 1575 in England.  And still others say that the Thomas Clarke above was actually the son of another Thomas Clarke, who was the Mayflower's pilot.

I've been having a new look at my Clarke/Clark line, and I'm about 98% sure that the Thomas Clarke born in 1599 and his wife Susanna Ring were my 9th great-grandparents, so if any of the above three scenarios is true, then I'm a Mayflower descendant (or at least, 98% of one).  So do I need to bother trying to find out the truth about the Mayflower's pilot?  Maybe not - but it would be satisfying to be able to trace a clear line between me and the Mayflower, rather than a murky one.  Why?  Mainly because my great-grandfather William Henry Wanamaker apparently believed that he was a Mayflower descendant, and I'd like to prove him right or wrong.  And also because it's a challenge!

So after reading several old documents that disagree with each other, I asked for some help from the members of the 'Mayflower Descendants' group on Facebook - and so far the feedback I'm getting strongly suggests that I need to double-check my Clark pedigree again.  It seems that my 98% certainty could be 100% wrong, and Thomas Clarke and Susanna Ring might not have been related to me at all!   And even if they were, nobody can say for sure if Thomas had any connection to the Mayflower Clarke.  Back to the drawing board.