Author: Janice H.

A Mediterranean Cruise in 1910

In 1910, my mother’s great-aunt Katharine Sophia (Bagg) Mills (1850-1938) and her husband, Reverend William Lennox Mills, the Anglican Bishop of Ontario, visited Europe and the Holy Land. They had been to Europe before, but this was a long awaited trip to visit the places they had read about in the Bible. After returning home to Kingston, Katharine published an account of her trip, Reminiscences of a Cruise in the Mediterranean and a Visit to the Holy Land and Egyptby Mrs. W. Lennox Mills.

This trip took place 110 years ago, when travel was slower and there was greater diversity in the dress and customs of different countries than there is today, nevertheless, their adventures would probably sound quite familiar to cruise passengers of today. Katharine left out the names of her fellow travellers and details of many personal incidents (though I wish she hadn’t), but she did share her impressions of the sights they saw.

The couple set sail from New York on January 20, 1910 aboard the S.S. Arabic, making an eight-day crossing of the Atlantic to the Portuguese island of Madeira. Katharine described her first view of the island: “Mountains, rising one above another, formed a fine background, and there were three high hills, shaped just like bee-hives with rounded domes, quite unique in appearance. The colouring of the picture was superb: blue sea, blue sky, with downy white clouds, green hills, purple shadows, red and grey rocks, white houses with red roofs, and a picturesque old grey fort, crowning the summit of one of the hills.”

Later in the day, after wandering around the town of Funchal, they joined a small group of fellow visitors and hired a motor car. “We dashed through some neighbouring villages and brought the inhabitants rushing to their doors; some in admiration of our rapid flight, and others looking greatly amazed and alarmed.” She noted the clothes worn by the locals: the men in cone-shaped knitted caps, the women with gaily coloured kerchiefs on their heads. The following day, they took a funicular railway to the top of a nearby mountain. “Then came a most exciting experience in descending from the lofty height. We got into a sort of basket carriage on runners, guided by two men holding ropes, and rushed down, with incredible swiftness, over the hard cobble stones.”

After leaving Madeira, they visited Cadiz and took a special train to Seville, returning the following day to the S.S. Arabic.

Their next stops included Gibraltar, Algiers, Malta and Athens. Katharine described a thrilling moment in Athens: “We climbed by very steep and natural steps in the solid rock, to the top of the Areopagus and ‘stood on Mars Hill,’ where the great Apostle St. Paul also stood in 54 A.D., and preached to the ‘Men of Athens,’ declaring unto them the ‘unknown God.’”

They steamed on through the Straights of the Dardanelles to Constantinople (now Istanbul.) “Seen from the ship, the great City of Constantine is bewilderingly beautiful, with its white palaces, many domes and graceful minarets,” she wrote, but, as they crossed a bridge, she described seeing “a motley crowd” of Arabs in hooded robes, Jews with long beards and Turks wearing loose trousers and red fez caps, as well as donkeys with heavily laden baskets and men carrying large boxes of fruit and vegetables on their backs.

The next port of call was Smyrna where, Katharine noted, Christianity laid down deep roots at an early time. From there, they travelled to Ephesus, a great ancient city that was home for a time to both St. John and St. Paul.

They decided to go to see the ruins of the Agora, the Theatre and the Library, which were four miles away and, since there were no carriage roads, they had to ride. The Bishop, as Katharine referred to her husband, was given a white horse, which proved to be “quite a terror,” although William eventually managed to control his mount. Katharine, who had probably learned to ride as a child, was on a donkey. “He seemed to take complete command of the situation, and I had no alternative but to let him have his own way.… Sometimes we would go down an almost perpendicular hill … at other times we would push our way through brier and thorn, or sink for several inches in muddy fields.” She claimed she was not the least bit nervous.

In Lebanon, they were joined by their dragoman, or guide, a Syrian who spoke English well and had been educated at a Quaker school near “Beyrout.” They took a train through the snow-capped mountains of Lebanon and arrived in Damascus, where they stayed at the clean and comfortable Victoria Hotel. (There always seemed to be an English-run hotel in these cities.)

In Damascus, they visited a mosque that housed a sarcophagus containing what was said to be the head of St. John the Baptist, and they saw the tomb of Saladin, who fought the Crusaders. The following day, they travelled by train to Tiberias, on the Sea of Galilee, their first stop in the Holy Land.

Notes

Reminiscences of a Cruise in the Mediterranean and a Visit to the Holy Land and Egypt by Mrs. W. Lennox Mills can be found in several Canadian university libraries, and online.

According the Bagg family Bible, which is in the archives of the McCord Museum, Montreal, Katharine Sophia Bagg was born July 4, 1850 at Fairmount Villa, Montreal. The eldest daughter of Catharine Mitcheson and Stanley Clark Bagg, she grew up with her older brother and three younger sisters. On Oct. 12, 1886, she married Canon William Lennox Mills at Christ Church, Montreal. Their only child, Arthur Lennox Stanley Mills, was born in Montreal on June 27, 1890. At one time rector of Anglican Trinity Memorial Chapel in Montreal, William was Bishop of Ontario from 1901 until his death in 1917, and the couple lived in Kingston for many years. Katharine died at her apartment in Montreal on January 31, 1938.

Shirley C. Spragge, “MILLS, WILLIAM LENNOX,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 14, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003– (accessed October 16,  2019), www.biographi.ca/en/bio/mills_william_lennox_14E.html.

Six Years and Shifting Gears

It is hard to believe that it is six years since I started this family history blog. My first post, Help from the Grave, was dated mid-October, 2013. Since then, I have tried to post an article every two weeks (except during the summers) about my ancestors. This is post number 148.

Over these six years, I made a lot of progress with my research. I broke through several brick walls facing the Shearman family, who immigrated to North America from Waterford, Ireland (Breaking Down My Shearman Brick Wall); I tracked down the elusive Lucie Bagg, half-sister to Stanley Bagg (Lucie Bagg: Her Story); and I unraveled some of the mysteries surrounding my great-grandmother Samantha Rixon’s family (The Ancestor Who Did Not Exist). Writing the blog has helped me to focus on important questions about these people, explain my conclusions and back them up with notes and footnotes.

Samantha (Rixon) Forrester

I knew nothing about my great-grandmother Samantha (Rixon) Forrester until a few years ago, and my research revealed that some of the family stories about her were untrue.

This research has given my husband and me a great excuse to travel to Scotland, Ireland, northern England and London. We’ve also been to Winnipeg, Toronto, rural Ontario, New York State, Brooklyn and Philadelphia. In Montreal, we have become familiar with people and places in Mile End, a neighbourhood that is far from our house but was familiar territory to my ancestors.

I have been very lucky to be a member of a family history writing group. Calling ourselves Genealogy Ensemble, nine ladies meet monthly to share our discoveries and improve our writing skills. Every few months, I simultaneously publish my stories to both Writing Up the Ancestors and to that group’s collaborative blog, https://genealogyensemble.com. Two years ago, we collected our favourite articles and published them in a book we called Beads in a Necklace: Family Stories from Genealogy Ensemble.

I’ve also become involved with a similar blogging project in the small community on the coast of Maine where I spend my summers, encouraging people to write about their own families and summer memories.

Now it is time to shift gears. The new posts will continue, but at a slightly slower pace as I am starting to pull together the articles from my blog, revise and update them where necessary, and collect them into a self-published book. Actually, two books, one for my father’s side of the family in Upper Canada and the western provinces, the other for my mother’s Montreal ancestors and their colonial New England ancestors. These two families’ stories are very different, so two separate books will make everything more manageable. Still, it will involve a lot of work.

As for Writing Up the Ancestors, in the coming year, I will focus again on my Montreal roots, especially the Bagg family. They were well known in Montreal’s 19th-century English-language community and, believe it or not, there is still a lot to learn about them.