Category: Smith

The Life and Times of Great-Aunt Amelia

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My mother used to tell me that Amelia Norton was her favourite of her four great-aunts on her mother’s side of the family. From what I have learned about Amelia’s life, it appears she was indeed a kind and generous person.

Amelia Josephine Bagg was born in Montreal in 1852. Her father, Stanley Clark Bagg, was a wealthy landowner in Montreal, so Amelia had a privileged upbringing that included a year-long tour of Europe with the whole family in 1868-69, when she was 16.

After her father died in 1873, her brother, Robert Stanley Bagg, took over management of their late father’s real estate, renting out some properties and selling others. Amelia had a strong interest in the Bagg family real estate business, helping to keep the records of sales, and she also owned property in her own name.

Mr. and Mrs. Mulholland, Wm. Notman & Sons, 1891, McCord-Stewart Museum, II-95084 1

Amelia lived with her mother, Catharine Mitcheson Bagg, until she married at age 38. The wedding took place on Dec. 18, 1890 at Christ Church, Montreal’s largest Anglican church. Her husband was Joseph Mulholland, the eldest son of hardware merchant Henry Mulholland and his wife, Ann Workman. Born in Montreal in 1840, Joseph had a twin who died as an infant. Joseph is connected to me in two ways: in addition to being married to Amelia, his sister Jane Mulholland (1847-1938) and her husband, Montreal banker John Murray Smith (1838-1894), were my great-grandparents on my mother’s father’s side.

As a young man, Joseph had worked in the hardware business. Now, as Amelia’s husband, he started a new career in real estate. In 1891, he and his brother-in-law collaborated in a business venture: Joseph and John purchased a vacant piece of land from Robert Stanley Bagg on Saint Charles Borromée Street (now renamed Clark Street) near Pine Avenue and built a row of attached house there.1 The building, designed by architect Eric Mann, survives to this day.

Joseph died, age 57, in 1897. Five years later, Amelia married again, this time to Reverend John George Norton, Archdeacon of Montreal.It was a relatively small wedding with only family members and a few close friends present.2 John was born in Ireland in 1840 and he was educated there. He moved to Montreal in 1884 with his wife and two children. His wife died five years later.

Amelia was recognized as a talented amateur artist. This painting of the Montreal waterfront, dated 1900, now belongs to a descendant of the Bagg family.

As the wife of one of the leading clerics in Montreal’s English-speaking community, Amelia took on a new role, especially in church charities. According to a biography of Archdeacon Norton in The Storied Province of Quebec, “Mrs. Norton is a lady of culture and refinement. Mrs. Norton was a valued ally and helpmate in all the parochial work of the church.”3

At that time, governments gave little funding to health care or social services, so benevolent societies played an essential role in society. As president of the Women’s Auxiliary of Christ Church Cathedral for many years, Amelia was especially interested in its missionary work.4 In addition, her name appeared regularly in lists of donors to various charities published in the local newspapers.

The couple lived in the church rectory for many years and after John retired, they moved into their own house on McTavish Street, near McGill University. When the Venerable John George Norton, Rector Emeritus and Archdeacon of Montreal John died in 1924 at the age of 84, many people attended his funeral service at Christ Church, where he had officiated for 37 years.

A plaque in memory of Amelia hangs in Christ Church Cathedral, Montreal. Genevieve Rosseel, photo.

Meanwhile, Amelia seems to have been the go-to person when family members needed help. After Amelia’s Aunt Fanny (Mitcheson) Hague was widowed in 1915, Fanny came to live with the Nortons and remained there until she died in 1919.

My grandparents also went to Amelia for help. They had built a new house just before the Depression hit and my grandfather lost his job. Amelia helped to support the family until my grandfather found a new job after the Depression.

Amelia died in 1943, at age 91, at home on McTavish Street, following a long illness. She is buried with her first husband in the Mulholland-Workman family plot in Montreal’s Mount Royal Cemetery.5

Sources

  1. Le Prix Courant: le journal de commerce, 10 Avril 1891, p 13, https://numerique.banq.qc.ca, entry for John Murray Smith, https://numerique.banq.qc.ca/patrimoine/details/52327/2746357?docsearchtext=%22John%20Murray%20Smith%22, accessed June 18, 2023.
  • “Marriage at the Cathedral”, The Gazette, 25 June, 1902, p. 6, Newspapers.com, accessed June 18, 2023.
  • William Wood, editor, The Storied Province of Quebec, Past and Present, Dominion Publishing Company, 1931, vol. 3, p. 118.
  •  “Obituary: Mrs. J. Norton, 91, Dies at Home Here,” The Gazette, April 13, 1943, p. 14, Newspapers.com, entry for Amelia Norton, accessed June 20. 2023.

5.    Mount Royal Cemetery, section F200-c

See also

Frank Dawson Adams, A History of Christ Church Cathedral, Montreal, Montreal: Burton’s Limited, 1941, https://numerique.banq.qc.ca/patrimoine/details/52327/2561503

Janice Hamilton, “Continental Notes for Public Circulation”, April 8, 2020, Writing Up the Ancestors, https://www.writinguptheancestors.ca/2020/04/continental-notes-for-public-circulation.html

Janice Hamilton, “Aunt Amelia’s Ledger”, April 26, 2023, Writing Up the Ancestors,          https://www.writinguptheancestors.ca/2023/04/aunt-amelias-ledger.html

Janice Hamilton, “Henry Mulholland, Montreal Hardware Merchant”, March 17, 2016, Writing Up the Ancestors, https://www.writinguptheancestors.ca/2016/03/henry-mulholland-montreal-hardware.html

Janice Hamilton, “The World of Mrs. Murray Smith”, Feb.24, 2016, Writing Up the Ancestors, https://www.writinguptheancestors.ca/2016/02/the-small-world-of-mrs-murray-smith.html

Janice Hamilton, “Never Too Late for Love,” April 4, 2014.  Writing Up the Ancestors, https://www.writinguptheancestors.ca/2014/04/never-too-late-for-love.html

This article is also posted on https://genealogyensemble.com

The Man of the Family

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Grampy (Fred Murray Smith) and me

I was just eight years old when Grampy, my mother’s father, died, so I have few memories of him, only photos. There’s one of him holding me on his lap when I was about a year old, and another that shows him playing a toy musical instrument. A shot of him demonstrating his stone-skipping skills on a Maine beach was probably taken in 1956, during the last summer of his life.

At that time, children were to be seen and not heard; not all grandparents were as involved as he was, and that makes these photos all the more special. In fact, he was close to all the women in his family, young and old, as he provided moral support and financial guidance to his mother and his three unmarried sisters, as well as to his wife and his daughter.

Frederic Edmund Murray Smith was born in Montreal in 1879 to Jane Mulholland and her husband, John Murray Smith, a bank manager. Fred was the third of their six children. His was a life of privilege, as the family lived in a grey-stone house on McGregor Avenue (now Dr. Penfield Avenue), on the slope of Mount Royal. They also had a summer cottage on the shores of Lake St. Louis, in what is now one of Montreal’s West Island suburbs.

But in 1891, Fred’s seventeen-year-old brother, Henry, died of appendicitis. Three years later, when Fred was just 15, his father succumbed to a heart attack, and Fred became the man of the family.

Women supposedly did not understand money matters, so his mother and sisters looked to him for advice. For example, many years later, when his sisters finally sold the house on McGregor, the task of handling the sale and helping them move to an apartment fell on Grampy’s shoulders.

Fred decided not to attend university, but started his career as a messenger. It did not take long for him to move up the corporate ladder. In 1918, he was a manager with the Royal Bank of Canada, and in the late 1920s, he was with Verret Stewart Co., a firm that was an agent for Windsor Salt.  Between 1930 and 1936, there was no profession listed beside his name in the Montreal Lovell’s street directory, but he went to work as treasurer of Champlain Oil after the depression and stayed there until he retired.

Fred, Joan, Janice, Gwen around 1950

He lived at home with his mother and sisters and remained an eligible bachelor until age 37, when he married Gwendolyn Bagg. Their only daughter, Joan, was born two years later, in 1918.

Fred and Gwen were both quiet people, more interested in spending time with family than in enjoying Montreal’s night life. In fact, Fred was a strict Presbyterian who never appeared at the dining table without a jacket and tie, and would not allow my mother to play cards on Sundays. But my cousin who is 10 years older than I am remembers him as kind and having a good sense of humour.

In a 1946 letter to my father, Fred described his view of marriage: “We … hope that you both may have as happy a life together as your future father-in-law had in his married life, keeping in mind that it is a partnership, which means both of you have to give and take, and that in the home, it is the woman’s department.”

For the first dozen years of their lives together, the Murray Smiths lived on tiny Selkirk Avenue, near the corner of Cote des Neiges and Sherbrooke streets, two short blocks away from Gwen’s mother’s house and several long blocks from Fred’s mother’s house.

skipping stones, around 1956

In the late 1920s, my grandparents decided to build a larger house. According to my mother, when they looked at the architectural plans, they did not realize how big it would be. Not only was the house more than they needed, but their timing was bad since Fred lost his job during the depression. Fortunately, Gwen’s Aunt Amelia Norton helped out financially, but this must have been hard for Fred. He was accustomed to helping others. My grandparents lived in that house for the rest of their lives, and he died there, of a heart attack, at age 77.

Grampy is buried in the Murray Smith family plot at Mount Royal Cemetery with his father, mother, brother, three sisters and wife. My mother is buried with them.

This article is also posted on the collaborative blog https://genealogyensemble.com 

Notes:

Legally, the family name was Smith, however, because Smith was such a common name, the family used Murray Smith as if it were a hyphenated last name.

The row house on Selkirk Ave. is still there, the Murray Smith family home on McGregor was demolished to make way for a high-rise apartment building, and my grandparents’ house on Saint-Sulpice became the Iraqi consulate.