Category: Montreal

Lucie Bagg’s Mother, Ruth Langworthy

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Researching the story of Lucie Bagg, the daughter of my four-times great-grandfather Phineas Bagg, was complicated, but writing about Lucie’s mother has been even more challenging. I was even confused about her mother’s name: I knew that her last name was Langworthy, but was her first name Ruth or Lucy?

I eventually concluded that it was Ruth for reasons I’ll explain later. Meanwhile, I am pretty sure that Ruth grew up in Pittsfield, MA, and that she moved with Phineas from Pittsfield to La Prairie, Lower Canada, around 1795. 

Phineas’ first wife, Pamela Stanley, had probably died between 1792 and 1794, years when there was so much sickness and death in Pittsfield that the minister gave up recording the names of the deceased.1 Phineas was left to bring up four children between the ages of about two and 13.

He soon got into debt and lost his farm to repay his creditors. With nothing left, he must have decided to leave Pittsfield with his children and Ruth, traveling up the Hudson River toward Lake Champlain and Canada.

Houses in the old part of La Prairie

They settled in La Prairie, on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River near Montreal, where Phineas became an innkeeper. There, Ruth’s name appears in the baptismal records of their two children. These records are the only times her name appears in any official documents, but they are also the source of the confusion about her first name.

When baby Lucie Bagg was baptized on 12 January, 1798, the priest wrote the mother’s name as Luce Langworthy. When son Louis Bagg was baptized on 17 March, 1800, and when he was buried several days later, his mother’s name appeared as Ruth Langworthy.2

Here’s my theory: both children were baptized at Notre-Dame-de-La Prairie-de-la-Madeleine church in La Prairie, a Catholic church in a town where most of the population, including the priest, spoke French. The “th” sound is not used in French. Perhaps when the priest asked the mother’s name, he misunderstood the reply and wrote Luce instead of Ruth. That is one reason why I have concluded that her name was Ruth.

There is evidence for the existence of a Ruth Langworthy around that time and place,3  with several references to Ruth Langworthy of Pittsfield, MA in the genealogies section of www.familysearch.org. These genealogies, submitted by users, identify her parents as Andrew Langworthy and Ruth Brown. One submission says she was born in 1771. Several others say she was born in 1768 and married James Rathbone (or Rathbun) in 1787. One says she died in 1788. 

The Langworthy Family; some descendants of Andrew and Rachel (Hubbard) Langworthy who were married at Newport, Rhode Island, November 3, 1658, compiled byWilliam Franklin Langworthy and found in the New England Historic Genealogical Society library in Boston, notes that Andrew Langworthy was in Pittsfield in the 1790s. It says Andrew was born in 1741 in Stonington, CT and died 1808 in Pittsfield, MA and his wife, Ruth Brown, was born in 1743 in Plainfield, CT and died in 1825, Utica, NY. The book says the family must have been in Pittsfield by 1790 because Andrew, a Baptist, refused to pay a tax levied on all inhabitants to build a Congregational church there. It lists 11 children, including Ruth and another child named Ruey (could this be Lucy?), with no birth dates for either of them.4

I explored the possibility that the mother’s name could have been Lucy for two reasons: because her daughter was named Lucie (with the French spelling), and because a well-sourced family tree calls her Lucy. The Adams Family Tree, a public member tree on Ancestry.ca,5 has several sources for Lucie Bagg, including her baptism record, but I suspect the compiler did not see the baptism and death records of Lucie’s little brother. 

Phineas Bagg

There is one thing I am sure of. Phineas Bagg and Ruth Langworthy were not married. In her 1856 will,6 Phineas’ daughter Sophia Bagg, widow of Gabriel Roy, left a bequest to Lucie Bagg, identifying her as “fille naturelle du feu M. Phinehas Bagg, mon père,” (natural daughter of gentleman Phinehas Bagg, my father). The term “natural” invariably referred to an illegitimate child.7

Perhaps Phineas and Ruth did not have time to arrange a wedding. Or maybe their relationship was more about convenience than love. Phineas must have needed a partner to help establish the family in a new place, and perhaps Ruth was keen to start a new life.  The other possibility – and this is pure speculation since I do not know the death dates of Pamela Stanley or of James Rathbone — is that either Ruth or Phineas was still married. I have been unable to discover the time and place of Ruth’s death.

See also: 

Janice Hamilton, “An Economic Emigrant,” Writing Up the Ancestors, Oct. 16, 2013, https://www.writinguptheancestors.ca/2013/10/an-economic-emigrant.html

Janice Hamilton, “Lucie Bagg: Her Story,” Writing Up the Ancestors, March 30, 2016, https://www.writinguptheancestors.ca/2016/03/lucie-bagg-her-story.html

Janice Hamilton, “Who Was Phineas Bagg?” Writing Up the Ancestors, Oct. 11, 2014, https://www.writinguptheancestors.ca/2014/10/who-was-phineas-bagg.html

Photo credit: Janice Hamilton

portrait of Phineas Bagg, artist and date unknown; Bagg family collection

Notes and Footnotes: 

  1. Rollin Hillyer Cooke, “Records of the First Church, Pittsfield, Mass” Rollin H. Cooke Collection, Berkshire County, MA, [microfilm, reel 2, vols 26 and 27], Salt Lake City, Utah: Genealogical Society, 1961. I went through this manuscript at the archives of the New England Historic Genealogical Society. For many years, the minister of the First Church, Pittsfield carefully recorded the deaths in the community, noting the cause of death for many individuals. But in 1792, he simply wrote, “lost about 30 persons.” Similarly, 26 persons died in 1793 with no names or details recorded, and in 1794, he wrote, “lost 36 persons, 14 being grown up.”
  2. “Quebec, Canada, Vital and Church Records (Drouin Collection), 1621-1968” [database on-line].  Ancestry.com, www.ancestry.ca (accessed 8 April, 2016), Gabriel Drouin, comp. Drouin Collection. Montreal, Quebec, Canada: Institut Généalogique Drouin.  La Prairie did not have a Protestant church at the time, so the children were baptized at the local Catholic church.
  3. I searched for both Ruth Langworthy and Lucy Langworthy on www.ancestry.ca, www.findmypast.com, wwwamericanancestors.org (the website of the New England Historic and Genealogical Society) and www.familysearch.org. I found no results for Lucy at all, and all results for Ruth were in user-submitted collections.
  4. William Franklin Langworthy, compiler. The Langworthy Family; some descendants of Andrew and Rachel (Hubbard) Langworthy who were married at Newport, Rhode Island, November 3, 1658. Hamilton, N.Y.: W.F. and O.S. Langworthy, publishers, 1940. p. 249-250.
  5. “Public Member Trees,” [database] www.Ancestry.ca,Adams Family Tree, Stuart Lauters compiler http://person.ancestry.ca/tree/16093254/person/1077026843/facts (accessed 28 Feb. 2016).
  6. Labadie, Joseph-Augustin, # 14278, 18 Mai 1856. Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec.
  7. Two articles that explain the use of the term “natural” child are: Judy G. Russell, “The Natural Son,” The Legal Genealogist(blog), March 28, 2012, http://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog/2012/03/28/the-natural-son/ (accessed April 12, 2016) and Donna Przecha, “Illegitimate Children and Missing Fathers. Working Around Illegitimacy,” Genealogy.com (blog), http://www.genealogy.com/articles/research/52_donna.html (accessed April 12, 2916).

Henry Mulholland, Montreal Hardware Merchant

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With one of the largest St. Patrick’s Day parades in the world, Montreal has long celebrated its Irish heritage. Waves of Irish immigrants came to Canada in the 19th century, peaking in 1815 and 1831, and a surge of immigrants arrived during the famine in Ireland, between 1847 and 1849.

Many Irish Catholic immigrants settled in Montreal, while the majority of Protestants moved on to the United States or Upper Canada, but my great-great-grandfather Henry Mulholland (1809-1887), an Irish-born Protestant, put down deep roots in Montreal. 

Henry Mulholland

I do not know where he was born or who his parents were, but the name Mulholland is most common in Ulster (now Northern Ireland). Nor do I know when, why or with whom, if anyone, he came to Canada. The first record I have found is his 1834 marriage to Ann Workman at Montreal’s Anglican Christ Church. 

Mulholland may have known the Workman family in Ireland. They immigrated from Ballymacash, near Belfast, in the 1820s. Ann Workman’s six brothers established themselves in Montreal, Toronto and Ottawa in the fields of publishing, business, medicine and politics. Her brothers William and Thomas were partners in Frothingham and Workman, the largest hardware importing, wholesale and manufacturing company in Canada. 

Mulholland also went into the hardware business. Perhaps he started his career with his brother-in-law’s company, or perhaps he worked his way up in Benjamin Brewster’s hardware firm. In 1842, the first year Lovell published its annual Montreal city directory, there was a listing for “Brewster, B. and Company (H. Mulholland and John Evans), wholesale and retail hardware.” Lovell’s 1851 directory of Canadian businesses listed “Brewster & Mulholland, importers of shelf and heavy hardware of every description, 177 and 179 Saint Paul Street.”

In 1859, Mulholland joined with a new partner, Joel C. Baker, to form Mulholland and Baker, hardware merchants and ironmongers. A lawyer, Baker was married to Louise Workman, daughter of William Workman. 

Lovell’s 1876 edition advertised Mullholland and Baker as “Importers of hardware, iron, steel, tin, Canada plates, window glass; manufacturers of cut nails, and also of the new chisel pointed cut nail.”  Their customers included small shopkeepers, merchants and blacksmiths in southern and central Quebec. The company opened a branch in Guelph, Ontario and began importing raw materials and manufacturing nails.   

During this period of Montreal’s history, industries and railways were being built, utilities developed and banks established. Like many of his business colleagues, Mulholland was involved with several of these enterprises. Many of these men also knew each other through their memberships in the Mechanics’ Institute of Montreal, an organization founded to provide education to working men and youth for a modest fee. 

Mulholland was a director of the New City Gas Company, founded in 1847 to compete with the Montreal Gas Light Company. New City Gas burned coal to produce gas that was used to light the homes and streets of Montreal. Some years later, when the Sun Mutual Life Insurance Company of Montreal was founded in 1871, Henry Mulholland was a member of its first board of directors.

Henry Mulholland’s house was near the corner of Sherbrooke Street and Drummond. This photo appeared in a book called The Saga of Sherbrooke Street, Yesterday and Today, by Arthur Kittson

He was also one of 15 managing directors of the Montreal City and District Savings Bank. Most of Montreal’s banks were set up to serve commercial interests, but the City and District was founded in 1846 by the Bishop of Montreal and a group of businessmen to help ordinary workers save their money. In 1866, the year Mulholland was serving as president of the City and District, a group of Irish-Americans known as the Fenians raided the Canadian border.

Many customers were afraid the crisis would cause the bank to fail and demanded their deposits back, but Mulholland and two other bank directors formed a committee to deal with the situation and prevented the bank’s failure.  

Mulholland did not succeed, however, in preventing the bankruptcy of his own hardware company. It went out of business in 1879, a situation that appears to have been fallout from the bankruptcy of an individual whose mortgage Mulholland had guaranteed. 

Mulholland had to sell his family’s home to cover his debts, and he and his wife moved to a smaller house nearby. For the next few years, court battles and appeals took up much of his time. After his wife died in 1882, he moved in with his daughter Ann, her husband, Dr. George Wilkins, and their children. Henry Mulholland died in 1887.   

Photo Credit:

“H. Mulholland, Montreal, QC, 1886”, II-79921.1, Wm. Notman & Son, McCord Museum, http://www.musee-mccord.qc.ca/en/collection/artifacts/II-79921.1?Lang=1&accessnumber=II-79921.1

Notes:

Several of the organizations Mulholland helped establish are still in operation today. The Montreal City and District Bank is now the Laurentian Bank and the Sun Life evolved into Sun Life Financial. The Mechanics’ Institute of Montreal is now known as the Atwater Library and Computer Centre.

Several years ago, archaeologists from the Pointe-à-Callière museum explored the site of Mulholland and Baker’s tool sharpening service. See “Pointe-à-Callière Archaeological Field School: The Mulholland and Baker Years”, http://www.ecoledefouilles.org/default.asp?id=60.  

“Old Montreal, Mulholland and Baker in 1873”, http://www.vieux.montreal.qc.ca/inventaire/fiches/eng/mulholland.htm briefly describes the history of Mulholland and Baker.

The Dictionary of Canadian Biography, http://www.biographi.ca/en/index.php, has biographies of many of Mulholland’s business associates, including William Workman, Thomas Workman and John Fotheringham. Mulholland also knew entrepreneur and politician Luther Holton. See Henry C. Klassen. Luther H. Holton, A Founding Canadian Entrepreneur. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2001.

For an account of the City and District’s early days, see the “Origins and Early History of the Montreal City and District Savings Bank 1846-1871” by John Irwin Cooper, http://www.cchahistory.ca/journal/CCHA1945-46/Cooper.html

“New City Gas and Mechanic’s Institute” http://montrealhistory.org/2010/01/new-city-gas-mechanics-institute/, outlines the early history of gas lighting in Montreal. The site montrealhistory.org publishes articles focused on people and events associated with the Mechanics’ Institute.

Highlights of the history of the Sun Life Assurance Company of Canada can be found on the website La Mémoire du Québec (in French only.) http://www.memoireduquebec.com/wiki/index.php?title=Sun_Life_Assurance_Company_of_Canada_%28compagnie_d%27assurance-vie%29  

To search issues of the Lovell Directories for Montreal from 1842 to 2010, go to http://bibnum2.banq.qc.ca/bna/lovell/

Henry and Ann Mulholland had seven children, five of whom grew to adulthood: Benjamin, Joseph, Ann, Jane and Henry. I will write about the family in another post.