Category: family history

Welcome Back to Writing Up the Ancestors

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Welcome to the new look of Writing Up the Ancestors. The content is the same — 169 articles so far, dating back to 2013 – but the blog looks cleaner and more colourful, and it should be easier to navigate and search for names and places. Thank you so much to web designer Glenn Maruska for doing such a fine job.

The URL has changed to https://writinguptheancestors.ca. If you bookmarked the old address, please update it, however, if you use the old blogspot.com address, you should automatically be redirected to the new site.

There is no more public comment section (half the comments that came in were spam) but if you have a question or comment, or better yet, if you think we share an ancestor, I would love to hear from you. There is a contact form in the header section.

I have not posted frequently in about two years, only doing so when it was my turn to post on the collaborative blog Genealogy Ensemble (https://genealogyensemble.com). Writing Reinventing Themselves: A History of the Hamilton and Forrester Families took all my time and energy. The blog post announcing the book launch — https://www.writinguptheancestors.ca/2021/06/reinventing-themselves-has-been-launched.html — includes a link to a slideshow/interview with me put together by retired CBC music producer Frank Opolko, and a link to order the book.

On the topic of the Hamiltons, there is some very good news. An article about T.G. Hamilton, my grandfather who was a Winnipeg physician and psychical researcher, has finally been published online in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. The article, a labour of love and persistence, was written by Walter Meyer zu Erpen of the Survival Research Institute of Canada. See http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/hamilton_thomas_glendenning_16E.html

I am now ready to start posting more frequently to Writing Up the Ancestors. There will be an article about my great-great-great grandmother Fanny McGregor – at least I think it is my Fanny McGregor – on February 2. Then, for the next little while, the focus will be on the Mitcheson family of County Durham, England during the 18th century. After that, I’ll be exploring my Montreal ancestors again. The Montreal Star has finally been digitized and made available on Newspapers.com, so that will keep me and many other genealogists busy for a long time.

Notes

Pictured in the header, left to right: Catherine Mitcheson Bagg (1822-1914); Dr. T.G. Hamilton (1873-1935); Mary Frances (McGregor) Mitcheson (1792-1862); Samantha (Rixon) Forrester (1856-1929) with Lillian and Arthur; Stanley Bagg (1788-1853); Clara Smithers (1860-1946); Jim Hamilton (1915-1980) with Janice.

Six Years and Shifting Gears

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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.