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

Jim Hamilton: A Life

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My father, James Drummond Hamilton, was born 100 years ago this week, on Sept. 27,1915. The son of Winnipeg physician Thomas Glendenning (T.G.) Hamilton and of Lillian (Forrester) Hamilton, Jim had an identical twin, Arthur. In photos, the twins were always together, usually dressed similarly. 

In February, 1919, the influenza epidemic that was sweeping the world hit the Hamilton household. Jim lost his right eardrum as a result of the flu and was deaf in that ear for the rest of his life. He also lost his twin brother.

Twins Jimmy and Arthur at the cottage, summer, 1918.

Dad didn’t talk about his childhood often, but he told me that his happiest childhood memories were of summers spent at the family cottage on Lake Winnipeg. Undoubtedly, the most unusual aspect of his childhood was the fact that his parents spent many evenings attending séances in the family’s home. Meeting with a medium and a small group of friends, they watched tables rise into the air on their own and they tried to communicate with deceased individuals. This didn’t frighten Jim, but perhaps his school friends teased him about it. 

Jim was a very good student, and he graduated from the University of Manitoba in 1937 with a degree in physics. In 1938, he received an M.A. in physics, mathematics and chemistry from the University of Toronto. 

When World War II broke out, he wanted to enlist but, despite strong character references, he was rejected several times because of his perforated ear drum and poor eyesight. Finally the military changed its medical requirements and he became eligible for service, but by that time he was making documentaries for the National Film Board of Canada, including a public health film on the transmission and treatment of venereal disease.  

He met my mother, Joan Murray Smith, in Ottawa and they were married in 1946. They then moved to London, Ontario, where my father did cancer research at the University of Western Ontario and obtained a PhD in Medical Research. About the time I started kindergarten, Dad made another career move and enrolled in medical school. Eventually our family moved to Montreal and my father opened his own office in the Westmount Medical Building.    

He enjoyed being a family doctor, partly because he liked people. Many of his patients were elderly and they appreciated the fact that he would make house calls. But his real passion was for the theory he called triads. He thought about it and talked about it constantly.

On holiday in Florida, 1976

  He said that the theory he developed in collaboration with John Q. Stewart, a retired astrophysicist from Princeton University, explained problem solving by humans — and all animals — as a two-step process: first, P, the path to the goal, and second, F, the exchange of material, such as food or waste. He created the term merge, M, to describe mental ideas and images, which are formed by the interaction between P and F. He spent months with his slide-rule, working out a mathematical equation of his theory, then many more years at the typewriter, describing his ideas and their applications. 

His biggest disappointment in life was probably that most people could not understand this theory (especially the math), nor could he convince many people of its significance. On April 15, 1980, he wrote to a friend that he had been reading philosophy and was planning to rewrite his triads paper from a different perspective. Two days later, he suffered a fatal heart attack.  

His ashes are buried in Winnpeg, beside his twin’s grave.