baby Wilmot

The Anglican Church has fantastic records. In their list of burials in book 3-B-3 on page 67,  there is the following entry: Wilmot, age 1, died buried 1891 in the Milton Cemetery. Based on the entries above and below this entry, it would make sense that this baby was buried between February and March 1891.

Who is this baby? Was the baby a boy or a girl? Who are his or her parents? There is no mention of this baby in the Milton Cemetery transcriptions by the Pittsburgh Historical Society. The spot where the baby's first name is blank and it does not mention the parents names. There was a census in 1891. Was this child included on the census?

Based on the families that I know were having children about this time, I can only guess who the baby might have belonged too.

The baby could have belonged to Peter Graham Wilmot and Susanna Maud Whitney. Their child, Henry Graham was born in May 1889, and then the next child, Benjamin Earl was born in Jun 1892. A baby born in mid to late 1890 would fit there.

The baby could be the daughter of John Alexander Wilmot and Annie McVeigh. Their daughter, Emily, was born 12 Sep 1891 and died on 3 October 1891. The birth date isn't consistent with the burial record birth date but I don't know my sources for those dates so maybe my dates are wrong and this is their baby Emily. The child just older than Emily was Margaret Edna who was born in July 1889. It's also possible that there could have been a child born in late 1890 between Margaret and Emily.

Henry Fredrick Wilmot and his wife Annie Gillespie had a baby in May 1891. Because of that I think that this baby is not their baby. But if this baby been born in early 1890, it could be their child.

Based on the other relatives marriage dates, I think this is all the possibilities. I feel so sad for the parents of this baby. Nothing makes me wonder more about members of my family tree than the death of their children. While I do feel sympathy for them, I hope I never have empathy for what they may have felt like by the premature passing of one of my own children. It makes me so grateful for my babies that I can have them with me everyday.

I'm trying to keep these blog entries by family, but this baby is special since his or her family is unknown. Until his or her family is found, I hope this is good enough.

Solving the Marriage Mystery

I love the internet. How did anyone do genealogy before the internet?

After my last post, I did email the Frontenac mailing list. Today I got a response from someone named Joanna. I have never met her, nor will I probably ever. But Joanna took the time to find out the following:

Hi Jill, 

A.B Johnston was a Methodist minister. See his own marriage details:

3945-89 (Frontenac Co):

groom: Alexander B. JOHNSTON, 32, Methodist Minister, Hawkesbury, Elginburgh, s/o Alexander & Martha

bride: Millie M. PURDY, 21, Collinsby, same, d/o John & Mary

witness: Hedley V. WRIGHT of Portsmouth and Daniel McDONALD & Emma CLARK, both of Collinsby, 15 Aug 1889 at Collinsby (should be Collins Bay?)

This minister was in Sudbury, Nipissing in 1901 census with his family and several children. Just looking at the births of his children, this family was in Elginburg(h) Kingston Twp, Frontenac in 1892; Westmeath Renfrew County in 1894; and Sudbury, Nippissing District in 1894 and 1900.

Perhaps the minister was good friends with the Graves family, or a relative of the Graves family and returned to Frontenac just for this marriage?  

The marriage registration says the marriage occurred  in the township of Pittsburgh. The registration doesn't give the exact place in Pittsburgh. It was also by license  and not banns so an actual church affiliation would not have been necessary or  the record may be in the Methodist church register where the Graves family attended.  It could have been done at the bride's home.

So now at least I know who the minister was. A big THANK YOU to Joanna who figured that out. Yes, genealogy is the best thing that ever happens on the internet.

JOHN WILMOT & ANN ROSS DUNLOP

Next on the Roy Wilmot four generation chart comes his paternal grandfather, JOHN WILMOT and paternal grandmother ANN ROSS DUNLOP.

 John & Annie were married about 1857. To date, I have not found a date for their marriage. They were not listed in the Presbyterian Records (her religion; on LDS  film #1307512) nor did I find a date for their marriage in the Anglican Diocese records (his religion). In 2005 a friend of the Wilmot family did research of this family. In her notes, their marriage date is 8 Sep 1857 at Springfield Farm, which is the name of the original Wilmot farm in Pittsburgh Township. Unfortunately, that date and place were not sourced so I can't confirm it.

John and Annie had five children that we knew about previous to going to Kingston, two sons and  three daughters. In Kingston we found a sixth child, another son. He was born and died in between censuses and that's why we didn't know about him before now.

The birth dates, names and christening dates of their children are:

11 Dec 1858 Mary Elizabeth Wilmot baptism  6 Mar 1859 M at St. James Church in Kingston

7 Jun 1862 John James Wilmot baptism 24 Aug 1862 at St. Mark's Church in Barriefield

16 May 1865 Albert Edward Wilmot baptism 9 July 1865 at St. Mark's Church in Barriefield

13 Mar 1868 Sarah Agnes Wilmot baptism 2 Jun 1867 at St. Mark's Church in Barriefield

1 Nov 1869 Alfred (Albert) Bower Wilmot baptism  7 Jan 1870 at St. Mark's Church

abt Aug 1873 Annie Isabel Wilmot

St James Church and St. Mark's Church are both part of the Church of England/Anglican Church. I am missing the date for Annie Isabel's christening. Most likely is it's in the Diocese data base and I just didn't write it down or perhaps she wasn't baptized as an Anglican.

One other thing of note is on the civil birth registration for Albert Bower, his name is very clearly ALFRED BOWER. On the Anglican church christening records, his name is spelled ALBERT BOYER. As best as anyone knows he was always called Bower but his name is Albert on the 1901 and 1911 census. His father also completed a civil registration for him twice: once without a name on 13 Nov 1869 and then with his name on 25 Apr 1870.

Other known events in this family's history are:

Before 1871: The death of son, Albert Edward. He would not yet have been 6 years old when he died. We could not find his death exactly in the Anglican Diocese records by his name because there was no one of that name. There was a death for Albert John Wilmot and the death age matches Albert Edward's birth date, but it's not confirmed that it is the same child. The church death record for Albert John states that he was buried in the Milton Cemetery, but there is not a marker for him in the cemetery.

 26 Jan 1887: Mary Elizabeth married JOHN GILLESPIE. They had five daughters and two sons.

• 11 Dec 1887 Harold Wilmot Gillespie
  
• 23 May 1889 Ada Victoria Gillespie
  
• 31 Dec 1891  Mabel Agnes Gillespie
  
•  8 Jan 1894  Annie Elizabeth Gillespie
  
•  5 Mar 1896 John Herbert Gillespie
  
•  7 Sep 1898 Isabel M Gillespie
  
• 31 Aug 1902 Ruth Gillespie

 

Oct 1890: Father John Wilmot died. He is buried in the Milton Cemetery. These are pictures of his tombstone from that cemetery which is along the St. Lawrence River. According to his death registration he died of a heart condition that lasted 5 months.

24 Apr 1892: Annie Isabel Wilmot never married and she died when she was only 18 years old. According to the death registration she died of heart failure and her brother, J. J. Wilmot was the informant for her death.

24 Nov 1897: Albert Bower Wilmot married Mary Agnes Graves. For details of their life, please see the post from May 8. 

15 Mar 1899: Sarah Agnes Wilmot married CHRISTOPHER LANGWITH. They had two daughters.

• June 1903 Annie Langwith
• 25 Sep 1906 Hilda Langwith

27 Dec 1899: John James Wilmot married LILLIAN MORELAND. They had one daughter and three sons. When we were in Kingston some of the people we talked to knew descendants of John James, but we didn't meet any of them. I believe this is the Wilmot family who owned and operated Wilmot's Dairy in the 1950's. Some of the people on the Frontenac mailing list have said that they remember going to Wilmot's Dairy as children for ice cream and licorice pipes.

• 22 Sep 1900 John Moreland Wilmot
• 10 Jun 1902 William Leslie Wilmot
• 13 Aug 1904 Helen Margaret Wilmot
•  4 Nov 1908 Kenneth Reid Wilmot

18 Mar 1911: Ann Ross Dunlop Wilmot died when she was 76 years old. She is in the picture on the right, but I do not know the year the picture was taken. Her name and death date are on LDS fiche #6050546 as being buried in the Cataraqui Cemetery but when we went to the Cataraqui Cemetery, they did not know where she was buried and did not have her name in their filing box. As I am not familiar with medical terms and I can't tell what she died of but the writing looks like "Chronic Infinities" for 8 years.

29 Oct 1927: Mary Wilmot Gillespie died. She was 68 years old.

 

1955: John James Wilmot died. He was 93 years old and is buried in the Cataraqui Cemetery. This is a picture of the tombstone that looks over his family plot. His wife and a few of his children are buried there with him. 

I don't know the death date for Sarah Agnes Wilmot Langwith, but according to the Ontario Cemetery Finding Aid, there is a Sarah Agnes Langwith buried in the Sandhill Battersea Cemetery in Frontenac County. It could be the same person.

Albert Bower Wilmot & Mary Agnes Graves... a marriage mystery

In a book of Clifford Roy Wilmot's, he wrote that his parents, Albert & Mary, were married in St. Mark's Church in Barriefield. I have a copy of their marriage certificate and both Roy and his brother Ross were baptized as infants in this church. While in Kingston, it surprised my mom and I to find out that Albert & Mary were not listed in any of the the register books for the Anglican Diocese of the Anglican Churches in the area. This past week I emailed the Diocese Archives to ask if perhaps their marriage was not recorded in the book and I included a jpeg image of the scanned photocopy. Genealogy is nothing if not surprises.

The big revelation is that Albert and Mary were in fact not married in St. Mark's Church. The Anglican Diocese confirmed this using two reasons. The name of the "Officiating Minister" is A.B. Johnston. There is no such person who is listed in the Diocesan Clergy Register that has been in existence since 1862. The other reason is that on the certificate, there is nothing to say that they were married in St. Mark's Church. It doesn't say any other church either but it does look like they may have been married at a place called "Erie".

Along the bottom left the last sentence is "No. A247015 Registered at Barriefield" but this does not prove that they were married in Barriefield.

So, since they were both a couple kids from Pittsburgh Township born and raised, why did they not get married at the closet church? It's the church that the Wilmot's have been going to for generations and Mary's father was also one of the first confirmed members of the parish. In the book Courage, Faith and Love The History of St. Mark's Church by William J. Patterson, Albert and Mary are confirmed members.

The romantic in me wonders, "Did they elope"? The witnesses are William John Calvert (I've never heard of him) and S Agnes Wilmot. S Agnes is Albert's sister so if they eloped she knew about it and went with them.

I googled ERIE ONTARIO. There is a place called Fort Erie, Ontario, very close to the Niagra River. It's on the opposite end of Lake Ontario over 420 km's away from Kingston. Fort Erie was built in 1857 so it would have been in existence in 1897. It does, however, seem too far away to go and get married there.

I also googled ERIE NEW YORK since it would have been closer to cross the St. Lawrence River into New York and perhaps there is a place in New York called Erie, but the only Erie that came up there is south of Fort Erie, Ontario; no where near the St. Lawrence River.

My last google search was for A.B. Johnston. Apparently there was an A.B. Johnston on the ship the Titanic, but it's not really clear if he was able to perform marriages.... maybe the story is they eloped and were married by a man who later died in the sinking of the Titanic. Who was it that said, "Never spoil a story for the sake of the truth."

So now I suppose I will put a note out there on the Frontenac County mailing list from the rootsweb.ancestry.com website and see if anyone else out there can maybe point me in the direction of their marriage place.

My mom and I visited St. Mark's Church in Barriefield. It's a beautiful church, and we imagined what it must have been like on their wedding day... where they would have stood... who would have been in attendance... and we were wrong.

ALBERT BOWER WILMOT & MARY AGNES GRAVES

My great-grandfather, Clifford Roy Wilmot was born in Pittsburgh Township, Frontenac County, Ontario in 1898. His father was ALBERT BOWER WILMOT (Bower) and his mother was MARY AGNES GRAVES (Minnie). In 1911 Albert and Mary moved west by rail toLethbridge, Alberta with her brother, HENRY ALFRED GRAVES, his wife and five children. In the 1911 census of Lethbridge, Alberta, Albert & Mary live next door to two of her brothers and one of her sisters.

1911 Census of Canada page 13, #75 Lethbridge, Medicine Hat, Alberta

One thing I wonder about this family is why did they go west? I know they came for land but could there also be other reasons? Albert and Mary would have had a lot of people they could have considered immediate family and therefore a support group in Kingston. On the 1901 Census, they are living with or next door to Albert Bower's brother, JOHN JAMES WILMOT and his family, and cousin, JOHN ALEXANDER WILMOT and family, and cousin PETER GRAHAM WILMOT and family. John James and Albert's mother ANN ROSS DUNLOP WILMOT was living with John James.

1901 Census of Canada page 1, Pittsburgh, D-1, Frontenac #61, Ontario

Mary's family was living close by as well in 1901. Her mother, CITNEY ANN VANHORN GRAVES was still alive and lived with her brother, GEORGE GRAVES and his family.

1901 Census of Canada page 2, Pittsburgh, D-1, Frontenac #61, Ontario

As best as I can tell, Albert and Mary's grandparents came to Canada from England and Ireland in the early 1800's. A few of their great-grandparents settled in Pittsburgh County possibly in the late 1700's. On every census I have looked at for these people, they are always farmers and they stayed there for 100 years. No one started leaving until after the 1901 census, and then there seemed to be a mass exodus around 1911. I found out while in Kingston that the railroad west was completed about that time. Up until then, it would have been difficult for anyone to move to the west. Today by car, it would take 35 hours of driving from Kingston to Lethbridge... I don't want to imagine what that would have been like before the railroad was built! Unfortunately the CPR doesn't maintain passenger records.

Before moving to Alberta, Albert and Mary were married in St. Mark's Anglican Church in the village of Barriefield, across the Rideau Canal from Kingston.

Somehow a picture of Albert & Mary has survived time. According to those who know, this is a picture of them on their wedding day in 1897.

I also have a photocopy of Albert & Mary's marriage certificate.  Interestingly enough, we did not find their registration in the Anglican Diocese records on Johnson Street in Kingston. I wonder why the record keeper did not record Albert & Mary's wedding... did he forget to do it on the actual day and not remember to do it later? I suppose I'll never know.

Roy and his brother, ROSCOE HARVEY WILMOT were baptized as infants in the same church that their parents were married in. I think that Minnie must have loved her boys. They were four years apart in age. Look at how handsome they were in these pictures.

Baby Roy   Baby Ross & big brother, Roy Ross & Roy

As part of our trip to find out more of our ancestors, we wanted to find the house where Roy Wilmot said he was born. In the 1960's, Roy and his wife Rayma drove from Lethbridge to Kingston to see his old friends and relatives and to show his wife where he spent his childhood. Roy and Rayma had their picture taken outside of his birth home. We had a pretty good idea of where the Wilmot land was from an 1878 Atlas, so we thought we could find the house. What a surprise when we got there. The house in the picture was a standard floor plan for the area... a 1 1/2 story stone house with a small pitch in the front roof with a narrow window, a door on the ground floor in the middle, and a window on either side of the door.

 As we studied each house that was similar, we could always find small discrepancies with each of them.  The keystone over the upstairs window was protruding in the picture, but not on the house we were looking at. The distance between the main floor windows and the roof wasn't proportional. The chimney was on the wrong side. The land in front of the door was sloped on the house, but the land in the picture was flat. The window pattern next to the door in the picture is very distinctive, but the houses that we looked at with that same distinctive pattern did not match the other parts of the house in the picture. It was frustrating that we didn't find the right one but it wasn't for lack of trying. It's possible that the house is no longer there, but there are stone houses in the area from the same time period, so we got a pretty good idea of what the house would have been like from the outside.

 After we returned home from Kingston, we found a picture of this house with the following written on the back, "Roy's old home in Kingston where he lived before he came to Lethbridge". Too bad we didn't find this picture before we went to Kingston; we could have looked for this house as well. It's clearly a brick home on a limestone base. The picture was taken before people found it necessary to mow their lawns. There is a woman and a little boy with two dogs sitting in front, but no mention of their names or where in Kingston the house is. Neither my mom or I can remember seeing a house like this along Highway 2. We were told that the Wilmot land used to be along the Abbey Dawn Road, so perhaps this house is along that road, if it's still standing at all.

As for other information about Albert and Mary, we didn't find much out. One thing we didn't know before we went was that Albert had an older brother, also named Albert but his middle name was Edward, who died before Albert Bower was born. I find that it's the death's of the children that always make me wonder the most... what did they die of? What effect did it have on the rest of the family? Would it have turned out differently if they lived today with modern medicine?

Also interesting to me was that we did not find more children for Albert and Mary. Living in the time period they did, I think it was unusual to have only two, and Roy and Ross are four years apart. When I started doing genealogy one thing I was told was to expect a child every two - three years, and if there is a gap larger than that, there was possibly a child who died.

After moving to Alberta, Albert died in 1917 and Mary died in 1950. After Albert's death, only six years after coming to Alberta, Mary stayed in Alberta with her sons. Eventually the three of them were able to purchase land. Roy had to quit school to help his mother build a farm. I imagine it was very hard work in the unforgiving climate that Alberta has.

Minnie Wilmot at her

home near Lethbridge

My grandmother (who married Mary's grandson) told me once that Mary Wilmot (known as the Widow Wilmot) had a beautiful riding habit and when she would ride by on her horse, people would stop and stare. I'm not sure if that means she was very pretty or if it means that she just was a very attractive woman who commanded your attention. In all those years after her husband died, she did not remarry.

Both Roy and Ross married and had children. Roy stayed on the farm near Lethbridge where he settled with his mother and brother.

Rayma (married Roy), Ross, Minnie, Roy & 2 guests

I didn't know my great-grandfather, Roy Wilmot very well; I was a young teenager when he passed away and before that, I remember him only as a very old man. He was in a nursing home for awhile when he passed away, but I don't know how long. The one thing that I remember when I think of him is we called him "Grandpa Great" and I remember my mom giving him a box of chocolates one Christmas with a card that said, "For Grandpa Great, a Great Grandpa".