Category: Bagg

A Wedding in the Family

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When my son Michael and his long-time girlfriend Jennifer get married this weekend, it will be a very traditional ceremony. The wedding will take place at Montreal West United Church, the same church where Jen’s parents were married. Jen will wear a long white dress, a borrowed pair of earrings and blue shoes.  

Here’s their story as they tell it: “This wedding is a love story 13 years in the making! We first met in CEGEP [junior college] when we were just teenagers. At the groom’s insistence, mutual friends organized our first meeting: a competitive game of pool at Sharx on St. Catherine Street. A new friendship was born and, after 10 years of ups and downs, we somehow managed to remain a part of each others’ lives. And it was all meant to be because this October, after almost four years of dating, we’ll be making it legal. It’s till death do us part now, and we couldn’t be happier!”

All this has led me to think about some of the other weddings in my family, and about how much courtship has changed. A huge change came in my parents’ generation. Prior to World War II, many Canadians married within their own social circles. Couples often grew up in the same small towns or went to school together. But during the war, as men joined the military and women joined the workforce,  people met new friends and were exposed to different ideas. My father was from Winnipeg and my mother grew up in Montreal, but they met in Ottawa during the war and were married in 1946.

This is a colourized photo of my grandmother Gwendolyn Bagg on her wedding day in 1916.

My father’s parents, Thomas Glendenning Hamilton and Lillian Forrester, probably met at the Winnipeg hospital where he was a doctor and she a nurse. They were married in 1906 at Lillian’s uncle’s home. Going back another generation, James Hamilton and Isabella Glendenning, who married in 1859, both grew up in a close-knit farming community in what is now Scarborough, Ontario, a suburb of Toronto. They may have met at the church both their families attended, St. Andrews Presbyterian Church.

On my mother’s father’s side, when Jane Mulholland, the daughter of a Montreal hardware merchant, met John Murray Smith, she was smitten. John, however, lived in Ontario at the time, where he worked at a bank. According to a family story, she told her nanny that she admired this young man and the nanny wrote a letter that brought couple together. It would have been difficult for Jane to pursue John long-distance on her own behalf. They married near Montreal in 1871.

A page from Clara Smithers’ autograph book with a poem from RSCB.

Going back another generation on the Smith side, James Avon Smith was an assistant school teacher in MacDuff, Scotland. When he married the schoolmaster’s daughter, Jean Tocher, in 1823, she was already pregnant. 

Most parents tried their best to prevent this situation. It was not considered proper for young couples to spend time alone together and when my future great-grandparents Robert Stanley Bagg and Clara Smithers began courting in 1880, they would have always been surrounded by friends and family members. He wooed her by writing poems in her autograph book. 

The 1844 wedding of Robert Stanley’s Bagg’s parents was a genealogically significant event on my mother’s side of the family because Stanley Clark Bagg and Catharine Mitcheson were first cousins once removed. Marriage between cousins was not uncommon, but I can’t help wondering how they met, since she lived in Philadelphia and he lived in Montreal. They were married in Philadelphia, with Catharine’s brother Rev. Robert McGregor Mitcheson officiating.  

The fact that Mike and Jen are getting married, as opposed to living common-law as many couples do in Quebec today, is a mark of their commitment to each other as much as it is a nod to tradition. I am very happy for them.

Further Reading 

For more on the courtship and marriage customs of our Canadian ancestors see this article prepared by Library and Archives Canada: “I Do:  Love and Marriage in 19thCentury Canada”, http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/love-and-marriage/index-e.html  

Marriages between cousins contribute to a phenomenon called pedigree collapse in which the family trees of these peoples’ descendants are smaller than they would be otherwise. There are many articles about this phenomenon online, including this one by the International Society of Genetic Genealogy, http://www.isogg.org/wiki/Pedigree_collapse

The Abner Bagg House

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Abner Bagg House, Montreal

The grey stone building at the corner of King and William Streets in the Griffintown neighbourhood of Montreal has had many owners and vocations in its 200-year history, but it retains the name of its first owner, merchant Abner Bagg (1790-1852). Born in Massachusetts, Abner came to Canada as a child. When he was in his early twenties, he went into business as a hat importer and manufacturer. His business was successful, and in 1819 he bought a large, empty lot in what was then known as the Ste. Anne suburb of Montreal, just west of the city core.

The house, completed in 1821, was built in a neoclassical style that originated in England and was popular in Montreal until the 1850s. In 1822, Abner attached a three-storey warehouse to the family residence and, although the warehouse has a more utilitarian appearance than the house, the two blended together successfully.

Abner ran into serious financial difficulties in the mid-1820s. He managed to hang onto the house for several years, but sold it around 1835. By 1841, he had sold the rest of the property. The second owner of the house, grocer Orlin Bostwick, added a second warehouse to the complex. He sold the property to brewer William Dow in 1844.  Dow rented it to an innkeeper in 1850 and it was used for officers of the British Army until 1865.

In 1991, the Société immobilière du patrimoine architectural de Montréal (an organization established to preserve the city’s heritage buildings) purchased the property and restored the house. The following year, the city hired archaeologists to study the site. Today the building houses offices.

The Bagg house was typical of the early 19thcentury in that residences were adjacent to workplaces.  Buildings often had stores or workshops on the ground floor while the family lived upstairs, although in Abner’s case, the residence and the warehouse were side by side. Commercial activities were expanding rapidly in that neighbourhood when Abner and his family lived there. The fortifications that had surrounded the city for more than a century had been torn down in 1817, and small businesses, which had previously been concentrated inside those walls, were spreading to the suburbs. Abner was always looking for fresh business and investment opportunities, and the fact that the area was growing was likely one of its attractions for him.

But there was a major drawback to the site: Abner’s house was built in a swampy area that flooded every spring, so the builder had to build up the soil with landfill before starting construction. In addition, the house was very close to the Saint Pierre River, a small waterway that was used as a sewer. Eventually, the river disappeared underground, but not before Abner and his family had left the neighbourhood.

Photo credit: Harold Rosenberg

See also:

Janice Hamilton, “Abner Bagg: Black Sheep of the Family?” Writing up the Ancestors,
https://www.writinguptheancestors.ca/2015/04/abner-bagg-black-sheep-of-family.html

Sources

Ethnotech Inc. La maison Bagg, inventaire archéologique au site BiFj-32, 1992. Québec, Ministère de la Culture et des Communications du Québec, 1994.

“Maison Abner-Bagg – Grand répertoire du patrimoine bâti de Montréal.” Maison Abner-Bagg. Accessed 30 Apr. 2015. http://patrimoine.ville.montreal.qc.ca/inventaire/fiche_bat.php?arrondissement=1&batiment=oui&lignes=2&id_bat=0039-36-1850-01&debut=190