Notes on genealogy #1
Over the years I had made sporadic notes on my family tree, starting in my teens by taking down some information from my mother and from my godmother, May Ryan. This turned out to be a good but limited start on the family history. My mother told great stories about her childhood in Point St. Charles, but her stories rarely went back before her parents for reasons I only understood later. Other things said in passing by both women are vague memories I wish I could go back and verify with them, but I missed the chance. Now that so much data is available on the internet, the people I could ask about it are gone.
Incidentally, my mother, Milly Ryan, and May Ryan, my dad's cousin and foster sister - more or less - are not related. I have people called Ryan on both sides of my family tree, which is one reason I'm glad to have a decent piece of software, Heredis 2015, keeping track of them. I have four Catherine Ryans, nine people called Mary {Middlename} Ryan, some Ellens and Helens, three Margarets and multiple people called Michael, John, James, William and Theresa Ryan, distributed lavishly around both sides of the tree.
I had done a little digging in the Drouin archive and had worked out that my mother's father's father's father was one William Ryan, blacksmith, who came here from Ireland around the time of the famine (one site said 1847) with his wife Catherine Cummins and their first two kids, but that was all I knew. (Drouin is a great archive if you come from a Catholic family in Quebec, and I am a little irked that it's been handed to ancestry.com so that we have to pay to use it, unless we take a laptop to the BAnQ.)
Then within the last year, three different people sent me chunks of the family tree, unasked, and all of a sudden I know about a lot more people I'm related to. To make sense of it I needed to slot everyone into Heredis, which inevitably involved doing more research to figure out who everyone is, tie family lines together, exclude inaccurate research in a couple of spots, and make sure people aren't being duplicated or that people with the same name aren't being confused with each other. My lot were not the only Ryans in Griffintown and the Point at the time.
I have a recurring dream theme which involves being in a house or flat that I know, and suddenly understanding there's a whole other flat, or suite of rooms, that I hadn't realized was there, waiting for me to do something with it. Discovering that William Ryan had had four other children who'd all married and had kids has had a similar feel. I had only known about the descendants of his son John, but now I know my grandfather James Joseph Ryan had aunts, uncles and cousins I'd never heard of, or whose names I have only faint long-ago memories of hearing mentioned. Some I've found out have living descendants, in or around the city.
I have no siblings now, none of my eight first cousins live here any more, but I now know of third cousins living in town, although I don't know them and they undoubtedly have never heard of me.
My mother was born in Montreal, the youngest of five of whom only three grew up, her father an Irish Canadian and her mother an Englishwoman. My father was born in England, in a northern town where many Irish immigrants had been living for several generations. Genetically I'm 3/4 Irish, 1/4 English, but I had a strong English influence as a child from my dad and from May Ryan, who immigrated to Canada in her twenties and never lost her Lancashire accent. The general tone of my upbringing was moderately severe Irish Catholic with English inflections including my mother's British style of cooking learned from her mother (short version: she could cook a roast like a master, but the veg were sad).
In my mother's case, her mother had come over from England as a lady's-maid to a wealthy woman making an extended trip to Canada. It was 1910, and it was the year of the Eucharistic Congress, the biggest public party held in Montreal before Expo 67. Catholic activities were felt to be a general civic action in Quebec till the end of the 1950s, and this thing was massive. I've seen photos and engravings of the huge floral and decorative arches built over streets in different neighbourhoods, the pomp and pageantry and processions. On a day off, Anna Macey went to have a look at some event on Fletcher's Field, and started chatting with James Ryan, and the rest is history, at least for me. Anna wasn't a Roman Catholic, she was C of E like the rest of her family, but she converted to marry the handsome Irish-Canadian dude and didn't return to England with her employer.
However, looked at novelistically, this meant that Anna had no relatives in Canada, and she was joining a big clan of Irish Catholics, mostly ironworkers of one kind or another. Anna's parents had both died before she emigrated, and while I recall my mother mentioning letters going to and fro - Anna had two sisters and three brothers back home - my mother never met any of them. I know I must have relatives called Macey and Newman in England - or, for all I know, elsewhere by now - but I don't know them and they don't know me.
As for my grandfather James Ryan - well, part of this is a story I don't know, and nobody does now. James's father John, William Ryan's oldest son, was born in Ireland, came to Canada as a boy, then became a blacksmith like his dad. John married Catherine Bennett, born in Beauharnois to a couple who'd emigrated from County Meath. There were eight kids in that family, of whom six were daughters. James started out as a blacksmith and his brother, another William, became a homeless itinerant. I know a little bit about the sisters and who they married, although I don't know of any second cousins living now, there may well be some.
But around the time John married Catherine Bennett, he also fathered a daughter called Margaret. The record I was sent says that she was from an unknown mother, which is bizarre in itself. Her death record from Drouin says simply "servante célibataire", no relatives mentioned - which is unusual - but she is buried in the same grave as her father John, not in the family grave where Catherine Bennett and many other members of that family are buried. Some kind of break happened there, although undoubtedly not a divorce, not among Catholics at that time. But this may partly explain why, after a time, a coolness fell between the descendants of William Ryan, although the evidence of godparents' names on birth records and witnesses' on marriage records shows that at one time, the Ryans, Brophys, O'Donnells, Reillys and Archers were close, and relied on each other. My aunt Rita, who died at six in 1924, is not buried in the Bennett-Ryan family grave, but in the Brophys'. She died in February; maybe the grave owned by my grandfather was too frozen up, maybe the section including the Brophy grave was accessible and his was not. I can't say for sure, but there she is.
My mother could not have met her grandfather John, who predeceased her, and her grandmother died two years after she was born. So she had no stories at all about her grandparents, and I only recall a faint sense from my mother that her father's parents had not been a happy couple, despite the seven siblings. Mom did know her grandmother's unmarried siblings, three sisters and a brother who all lived together somewhere in Griffintown or the Point, eventually dying off one by one until, faced with disposing of the household, James told my mother she could keep the money if she could make arrangements to sell the furniture, all heavy old dark Victorian wood and horsehair sofas. Mom was just 17, it was the first real money she got her hands on, and it made an impression.
(The following section was supposed to fold under an lj-cut, but that's not working. Consider this a text break and you can skip to the next one if you don't want more detail.)
Catherine Ryan, my grandfather's oldest sister, married Owen Reilly, a fireman, and although they had 3 kids, I don't know of anyone descended from them now. Infant and child mortality is a theme in my family tree, as in most people's. Their son James died at 31, apparently unmarried, and I don't know what happened to William John, born 1901.
Since posting this, I figured out via someone else's tree that William John got married and had at least one daughter.
Catherine's daughter Jenny and her baby daughter Monica died at the same time in 1925 and are buried together. Interestingly, Jenny's husband, Thomas Fagan Matthews, who died decades later, is buried in a separate grave which contains one other person, an unrelated man called Percy Holdaway. Their older two kids, Margaret and Thomas Matthews, I have not traced.
Percy Holdaway was married to Margaret Matthews and was known as Jack. He and Margaret had a daughter called Joy, and he died in 1968. Joy is on Facebook. We haven't connected.
Owen Reilly outlived his wife, at least two of his three children and his twin brother Joseph. Plain facts suggest the thread of a story.
Louisa Ryan married a man named Leduc and left town. I've found uncertain mentions in public trees of a woman of that name marrying a Henry Leduc or Leduke, although not in Drouin: one tree said they had no kids and another that they had several. I'm unable to tell whether any of these actually refer to my grandfather's sister. Temptations of doing genealogy include jumping to conclusions and adopting whole family lines by mistake - not that it has concrete consequences, because this isn't about inheritances, but one does at least want to make an attempt at accuracy.
Theresa Ryan married Joseph Archer, a widower, and they lived around the corner from James Ryan and his family in the Point. Here's an example of how you can go down a rabbit hole doing family history. I ended up finding out quite a lot about the Archer family (they're from Wednesbury in Staffordshire) even before discovering that someone else had done an ancestry.com tree, but after all, my only connection to them is the tangential point that one of them married my mother's cousin.
My mother knew her Archer cousins Grace and Lillian pretty well although I got the impression they weren't intimate. Grace was the same age as Mom's older sister Ruth, and Lillian the same age as herself, so there must have been some sense of a parallel there. Also, both James and Theresa had married people from England, a slight departure for an extended family that mostly stuck to marrying other Irish Catholics. Like my grandmother Anna, it seems the Archers, who once listed themselves as C of E, proceeded to become Catholic once they were settled in the Point. At least they're all buried in Notre-Dame-des-Neiges now.
Grace married a man called Woods and they had kids, but except for a faint memory of my mother paying someone she called Woodsy, who was probably Grace's husband, to do some repairs in our basement, I don't think I ever met any of them. Lillian married someone called Gus Bailey who's totally invisible to the census or any other document, but his existence is attested to in her sister's obituary. Grace had children but I never met them and don't know who or where they are. I don't know whether Lillian did.
Since posting this, I found out that Lillian and Gus went to P.E.I., where he may have come from originally, which meshes with memories of my mother mentioning a cousin there. Lillian died there only 2 years ago. I found her obituary and know they had kids, all still farmers in P.E.I., but I know nothing about them.
I don't think James's sister Elizabeth ever got married, and I don't even remember her being mentioned. William the panhandler does not appear to have ever married either. Mary Ellen married a man called Hathaway, something I puzzled out only recently, but I doubt I'm related to any living Hathaways. Mary Ellen was still at home with her parents for the 1911 census, and she died in 1915, so she wasn't married for long.
Since posting this, realized it was a mistake about Hathaway. His wife was an entirely unrelated Ryan, but Hathaway's daughter married Mary Ellen's cousin William Brophy. I have no evidence Mary Ellen ever married but she may be the mystery "Mary Ryan" in my family grave in 1963.
(End of text break.)
My main sources: the Drouin archive, which includes many Catholic baptisms, marriages and deaths in Quebec, most ending around 1941 but some up till 1968. It includes all the parishes of my local ancestors and their side branches. Lots of data there in dense scrawly writing: marriage records usually include the parents' names, which is very helpful, and sometimes their origins, and I've started taking note of who the godparents and marriage witnesses were as well, because it weaves a story about these cousins and how they must have known and trusted each other.
The Notre Dame des Neiges cemetery website is fascinating, because you can call up the files for everyone in any grave, but frustrating because although it usually shows who people were married to, sometimes only a surname, it doesn't say how old anyone was when they died or how they're related to the family line. So you won't know whether a given William Ryan is the old man, or his son, or a grandson who died in infancy. You just know he was buried in 1864. Also it has ridiculous trouble parsing names with Mc and O in front of them, and my family tree has lots of those.
And then there's the obituaries in the Gazette Google newspaper archive, which is hit or miss. For most of this era, many of these people were either too poor to run an obit, or else they would've put it in the Montreal Star or the Herald, which are not online. And the Gazette archive has lots of gaps in it. Still, I've found a few informative obits there.
The Grande Bibliothèque holds the Lovell street directories for decades. They only list the "head of the household" and not everyone else like the census forms, but they can be useful for cross-referencing.
The Canadian government has census stuff up till 1911 and they've allowed ancestry.com to have 1921, for free. After this apparently 1931 and onward had more guarantees of privacy and won't be so openly released, more's the pity.
Modern obits since the late 1990s, online, have clued me in to the existence of living people to whom I'm related. More of them live in Montreal than I expected. All eight of my first cousins long ago fled Quebec, but some of the extended clan are still here. In some ways I suspect I'm pleased to be doing this research because it does make me feel more like I have a right to be here, something that history has been doing its best to convince me cannot possibly be true.
I will probably write more about this. There are so many stories implicit in things like birth, death and marriage dates.
Incidentally, my mother, Milly Ryan, and May Ryan, my dad's cousin and foster sister - more or less - are not related. I have people called Ryan on both sides of my family tree, which is one reason I'm glad to have a decent piece of software, Heredis 2015, keeping track of them. I have four Catherine Ryans, nine people called Mary {Middlename} Ryan, some Ellens and Helens, three Margarets and multiple people called Michael, John, James, William and Theresa Ryan, distributed lavishly around both sides of the tree.
I had done a little digging in the Drouin archive and had worked out that my mother's father's father's father was one William Ryan, blacksmith, who came here from Ireland around the time of the famine (one site said 1847) with his wife Catherine Cummins and their first two kids, but that was all I knew. (Drouin is a great archive if you come from a Catholic family in Quebec, and I am a little irked that it's been handed to ancestry.com so that we have to pay to use it, unless we take a laptop to the BAnQ.)
Then within the last year, three different people sent me chunks of the family tree, unasked, and all of a sudden I know about a lot more people I'm related to. To make sense of it I needed to slot everyone into Heredis, which inevitably involved doing more research to figure out who everyone is, tie family lines together, exclude inaccurate research in a couple of spots, and make sure people aren't being duplicated or that people with the same name aren't being confused with each other. My lot were not the only Ryans in Griffintown and the Point at the time.
I have a recurring dream theme which involves being in a house or flat that I know, and suddenly understanding there's a whole other flat, or suite of rooms, that I hadn't realized was there, waiting for me to do something with it. Discovering that William Ryan had had four other children who'd all married and had kids has had a similar feel. I had only known about the descendants of his son John, but now I know my grandfather James Joseph Ryan had aunts, uncles and cousins I'd never heard of, or whose names I have only faint long-ago memories of hearing mentioned. Some I've found out have living descendants, in or around the city.
I have no siblings now, none of my eight first cousins live here any more, but I now know of third cousins living in town, although I don't know them and they undoubtedly have never heard of me.
My mother was born in Montreal, the youngest of five of whom only three grew up, her father an Irish Canadian and her mother an Englishwoman. My father was born in England, in a northern town where many Irish immigrants had been living for several generations. Genetically I'm 3/4 Irish, 1/4 English, but I had a strong English influence as a child from my dad and from May Ryan, who immigrated to Canada in her twenties and never lost her Lancashire accent. The general tone of my upbringing was moderately severe Irish Catholic with English inflections including my mother's British style of cooking learned from her mother (short version: she could cook a roast like a master, but the veg were sad).
In my mother's case, her mother had come over from England as a lady's-maid to a wealthy woman making an extended trip to Canada. It was 1910, and it was the year of the Eucharistic Congress, the biggest public party held in Montreal before Expo 67. Catholic activities were felt to be a general civic action in Quebec till the end of the 1950s, and this thing was massive. I've seen photos and engravings of the huge floral and decorative arches built over streets in different neighbourhoods, the pomp and pageantry and processions. On a day off, Anna Macey went to have a look at some event on Fletcher's Field, and started chatting with James Ryan, and the rest is history, at least for me. Anna wasn't a Roman Catholic, she was C of E like the rest of her family, but she converted to marry the handsome Irish-Canadian dude and didn't return to England with her employer.
However, looked at novelistically, this meant that Anna had no relatives in Canada, and she was joining a big clan of Irish Catholics, mostly ironworkers of one kind or another. Anna's parents had both died before she emigrated, and while I recall my mother mentioning letters going to and fro - Anna had two sisters and three brothers back home - my mother never met any of them. I know I must have relatives called Macey and Newman in England - or, for all I know, elsewhere by now - but I don't know them and they don't know me.
As for my grandfather James Ryan - well, part of this is a story I don't know, and nobody does now. James's father John, William Ryan's oldest son, was born in Ireland, came to Canada as a boy, then became a blacksmith like his dad. John married Catherine Bennett, born in Beauharnois to a couple who'd emigrated from County Meath. There were eight kids in that family, of whom six were daughters. James started out as a blacksmith and his brother, another William, became a homeless itinerant. I know a little bit about the sisters and who they married, although I don't know of any second cousins living now, there may well be some.
But around the time John married Catherine Bennett, he also fathered a daughter called Margaret. The record I was sent says that she was from an unknown mother, which is bizarre in itself. Her death record from Drouin says simply "servante célibataire", no relatives mentioned - which is unusual - but she is buried in the same grave as her father John, not in the family grave where Catherine Bennett and many other members of that family are buried. Some kind of break happened there, although undoubtedly not a divorce, not among Catholics at that time. But this may partly explain why, after a time, a coolness fell between the descendants of William Ryan, although the evidence of godparents' names on birth records and witnesses' on marriage records shows that at one time, the Ryans, Brophys, O'Donnells, Reillys and Archers were close, and relied on each other. My aunt Rita, who died at six in 1924, is not buried in the Bennett-Ryan family grave, but in the Brophys'. She died in February; maybe the grave owned by my grandfather was too frozen up, maybe the section including the Brophy grave was accessible and his was not. I can't say for sure, but there she is.
My mother could not have met her grandfather John, who predeceased her, and her grandmother died two years after she was born. So she had no stories at all about her grandparents, and I only recall a faint sense from my mother that her father's parents had not been a happy couple, despite the seven siblings. Mom did know her grandmother's unmarried siblings, three sisters and a brother who all lived together somewhere in Griffintown or the Point, eventually dying off one by one until, faced with disposing of the household, James told my mother she could keep the money if she could make arrangements to sell the furniture, all heavy old dark Victorian wood and horsehair sofas. Mom was just 17, it was the first real money she got her hands on, and it made an impression.
(The following section was supposed to fold under an lj-cut, but that's not working. Consider this a text break and you can skip to the next one if you don't want more detail.)
Catherine Ryan, my grandfather's oldest sister, married Owen Reilly, a fireman, and although they had 3 kids, I don't know of anyone descended from them now. Infant and child mortality is a theme in my family tree, as in most people's. Their son James died at 31, apparently unmarried, and I don't know what happened to William John, born 1901.
Since posting this, I figured out via someone else's tree that William John got married and had at least one daughter.
Catherine's daughter Jenny and her baby daughter Monica died at the same time in 1925 and are buried together. Interestingly, Jenny's husband, Thomas Fagan Matthews, who died decades later, is buried in a separate grave which contains one other person, an unrelated man called Percy Holdaway. Their older two kids, Margaret and Thomas Matthews, I have not traced.
Percy Holdaway was married to Margaret Matthews and was known as Jack. He and Margaret had a daughter called Joy, and he died in 1968. Joy is on Facebook. We haven't connected.
Owen Reilly outlived his wife, at least two of his three children and his twin brother Joseph. Plain facts suggest the thread of a story.
Louisa Ryan married a man named Leduc and left town. I've found uncertain mentions in public trees of a woman of that name marrying a Henry Leduc or Leduke, although not in Drouin: one tree said they had no kids and another that they had several. I'm unable to tell whether any of these actually refer to my grandfather's sister. Temptations of doing genealogy include jumping to conclusions and adopting whole family lines by mistake - not that it has concrete consequences, because this isn't about inheritances, but one does at least want to make an attempt at accuracy.
Theresa Ryan married Joseph Archer, a widower, and they lived around the corner from James Ryan and his family in the Point. Here's an example of how you can go down a rabbit hole doing family history. I ended up finding out quite a lot about the Archer family (they're from Wednesbury in Staffordshire) even before discovering that someone else had done an ancestry.com tree, but after all, my only connection to them is the tangential point that one of them married my mother's cousin.
My mother knew her Archer cousins Grace and Lillian pretty well although I got the impression they weren't intimate. Grace was the same age as Mom's older sister Ruth, and Lillian the same age as herself, so there must have been some sense of a parallel there. Also, both James and Theresa had married people from England, a slight departure for an extended family that mostly stuck to marrying other Irish Catholics. Like my grandmother Anna, it seems the Archers, who once listed themselves as C of E, proceeded to become Catholic once they were settled in the Point. At least they're all buried in Notre-Dame-des-Neiges now.
Grace married a man called Woods and they had kids, but except for a faint memory of my mother paying someone she called Woodsy, who was probably Grace's husband, to do some repairs in our basement, I don't think I ever met any of them. Lillian married someone called Gus Bailey who's totally invisible to the census or any other document, but his existence is attested to in her sister's obituary. Grace had children but I never met them and don't know who or where they are. I don't know whether Lillian did.
Since posting this, I found out that Lillian and Gus went to P.E.I., where he may have come from originally, which meshes with memories of my mother mentioning a cousin there. Lillian died there only 2 years ago. I found her obituary and know they had kids, all still farmers in P.E.I., but I know nothing about them.
I don't think James's sister Elizabeth ever got married, and I don't even remember her being mentioned. William the panhandler does not appear to have ever married either. Mary Ellen married a man called Hathaway, something I puzzled out only recently, but I doubt I'm related to any living Hathaways. Mary Ellen was still at home with her parents for the 1911 census, and she died in 1915, so she wasn't married for long.
Since posting this, realized it was a mistake about Hathaway. His wife was an entirely unrelated Ryan, but Hathaway's daughter married Mary Ellen's cousin William Brophy. I have no evidence Mary Ellen ever married but she may be the mystery "Mary Ryan" in my family grave in 1963.
(End of text break.)
My main sources: the Drouin archive, which includes many Catholic baptisms, marriages and deaths in Quebec, most ending around 1941 but some up till 1968. It includes all the parishes of my local ancestors and their side branches. Lots of data there in dense scrawly writing: marriage records usually include the parents' names, which is very helpful, and sometimes their origins, and I've started taking note of who the godparents and marriage witnesses were as well, because it weaves a story about these cousins and how they must have known and trusted each other.
The Notre Dame des Neiges cemetery website is fascinating, because you can call up the files for everyone in any grave, but frustrating because although it usually shows who people were married to, sometimes only a surname, it doesn't say how old anyone was when they died or how they're related to the family line. So you won't know whether a given William Ryan is the old man, or his son, or a grandson who died in infancy. You just know he was buried in 1864. Also it has ridiculous trouble parsing names with Mc and O in front of them, and my family tree has lots of those.
And then there's the obituaries in the Gazette Google newspaper archive, which is hit or miss. For most of this era, many of these people were either too poor to run an obit, or else they would've put it in the Montreal Star or the Herald, which are not online. And the Gazette archive has lots of gaps in it. Still, I've found a few informative obits there.
The Grande Bibliothèque holds the Lovell street directories for decades. They only list the "head of the household" and not everyone else like the census forms, but they can be useful for cross-referencing.
The Canadian government has census stuff up till 1911 and they've allowed ancestry.com to have 1921, for free. After this apparently 1931 and onward had more guarantees of privacy and won't be so openly released, more's the pity.
Modern obits since the late 1990s, online, have clued me in to the existence of living people to whom I'm related. More of them live in Montreal than I expected. All eight of my first cousins long ago fled Quebec, but some of the extended clan are still here. In some ways I suspect I'm pleased to be doing this research because it does make me feel more like I have a right to be here, something that history has been doing its best to convince me cannot possibly be true.
I will probably write more about this. There are so many stories implicit in things like birth, death and marriage dates.