John Clark, of Durham, England

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John Clark

 Although John Clark had a very common name, my four-times great-grandfather also had several secrets, some of which remain mysteries today. 

The first mystery was, where and when he was born? According to family lore, John Clark was a butcher who had come to Canada from County Durham, England, but a search of the baptismal records of Durham for the late 1700s brought up more than a dozen John Clarks. Which one was he?

Fortunately, another descendant did some genealogy research about 100 years ago and he left a note in the family Bible: “John Clark, pork butcher, 9-6-1767.” I checked the parish records again, and there it was: John Clark, of Wingate Grange, was baptized at Kelloe parish church, County Durham, on 9 June, 1767. County Durham was later known for its coal mines, but the region was mostly farmland when John was born, and Wingate Grange was a farm.

John’s parents, Ralph Clark and Margaret Pearson, were married in nearby Kirk Merrington parish in 1746. Why the family moved to Kelloe, and whether Ralph was a small landowner or a tenant farmer, I do not know. John appears to have been the seventh of their nine children.   Several years ago, my husband and I visited the city of Durham, where we walked the steep streets of old town and toured the ancient cathedral. We had to leave the city to find the churches and cemeteries where John Clark and his wife’s family members had been baptized, married and buried, so I arranged for retired genealogist Geoff Nicholson to drive us around. Not only did Geoff take us to all those out-of-the-way places without getting lost, he told us about the area’s history.   

Our first stop was the old church of St. Giles parish, on a hill above the Wear River, where John and Mary Mitchinson (also spelled Mitcheson), of Lanchester, Durham, were married on 10 June, 1794. The Marriage Bonds and Allegations of their union revealed a surprising fact: John was a widower when he married Mary. According to the Bishop’s Transcripts for Kelloe, a John Robson Clerk had married Eleanor House in 1785. If this was my John, he would have been just 18 years old. I have so far been unable to learn anything about Eleanor, including where and when she died.

St Giles parish church, Durham, England

In 1795, Mary Mitchinson gave birth to the couple’s only daughter, Mary Ann Clark. Sometime between then and 1798, the family left for a new life in Canada. 

But here’s the mystery: according to family stories, John Clark owned a freehold estate in Durham that was later sold by his grandson, Stanley Clark Bagg. I wondered whether this was just a myth, but I have found documents in Canada, including John Clark’s 1825 will and other notarial records dating from the 1840s, that prove John did own property in Durham. 

But why did John leave England if he owned property there? And how did he acquire it? Was he a successful businessman who invested his profits in property? That is what he did in Montreal. 

Did he inherit the property from his parents? That seems unlikely since his parents do not appear to have been wealthy, and he had an older brother, Robert, who would probably have inherited whatever there was. Or did John inherit from his first wife? Much more research is needed. 

Photo credits: Portrait of John Clark, private collection. It may have been painted after his death from a miniature. The artist was Sir Martin Archer Shee RA, (1769-1850), a British portrait painter.
Photo of St. Giles parish church, Durham by Janice Hamilton  

Research remarks: I found the record of John’s birth in Kelloe parish in the Northumberland and Durham Baptisms, on Findmypast.com. 

The Bishops Transcripts were copies, made annually, of the original parish records. I found a record of the marriage of John Robson Clerk and Eleanor House in Kelloe parish in the Bishop Transcripts, on familysearch.org. John did not usually use his middle name, but he is remembered as John R. Clark on a plaque in the Bagg family mausoleum in Montreal.

Prior to most marriages in England, banns were read and people could express their opposition to the union. Couples could bypass this step by paying a fee for a marriage license.

A marriage allegation is a sworn statement in connection with the license application, in which the couple state there is no known reason for the marriage not to take place. The Durham Diocese, England, Calendar of Marriage Bonds and Allegations, 1494-1815, can be browsed on Ancestry, while familysearch.org has the records for the years 1692-1900. Both names and places are indexed.

John Clark’s will can be found in the records of notary Henry Griffin, #5989, 29 Aug. 1825, on microfilm at the Bibliotheque et Archives nationales du Quebec in Montreal. 

In the future, I will write about John Clark’s life in Montreal.

Polly Bagg Bush: a Surprise Sister

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Until I started doing genealogy research a few years ago, I knew that my three-times great-grandfather Stanley Bagg had a brother Abner. Both were well known Montreal merchants in the first half of the 19thcentury. But I had no idea that Stanley and Abner had two sisters, Polly and Sophia, and a half-sister, Lucie. 

I discovered Sophia Bagg when I ran across the record of her 1811 marriage to Gabriel Roy, a landowner and politician in the Montreal-area parish of St. Laurent. When Roy died in 1848, aged 77, Sophia became a rich woman. 

Sophia made out two wills.  She wrote the first in 1818, a document to ensure that her sister Polly Bagg, wife of William Bush, and Polly’s daughter, Sophia, would have some financial security. 

Sophia’s sister Polly? Who was she?

I discovered that Polly lived in West Haven. At first, I thought it was in Connecticut, but eventually it became clear that that she and her husband were farmers in West Haven, Vermont, a rural area not far from the southern tip of Lake Champlain. 

In 1856, Sophia made a second and more detailed will in which she split the bulk of her estate between the Catholic church, her brother Abner’s widow and children, and Polly’s children: Phineas Bagg Bush, William Bush and Ann Bush. 

This second will did not mention Polly or Sophia Bush, so I assumed that both Polly and her oldest daughter had died. I have since discovered that Sophia and Gabriel Roy, who had no children of their own, adopted the girl and brought her to St. Laurent. The sad story of Mary Sophia Roy Bush, her marriage to the seigneur of Milles-Îles (around Saint-Eustache, north of Montreal), and of her daughter, Marguerite Virginie Lambert Dumont, is for another time. 

Dame Sophia Bagg veuve (widow) Gabriel Roy died in 1860. Present at the inventory of her estate the following year were Phineas Bagg Bush, farmer, of Patoka, Illinois, representing himself and his sister Pamilla Ann Bush, wife of John W. York, of Cornwallis, Oregon, Methodist preacher. Also present was William Stanley Bush, of Johnsburgh New York, Baptist minister. (Johnsburgh appears to be on the western side of Lake Champlain.)

More than a year ago, I did a quick search for Phineas Bagg Bush. He was named after his grandfather, Phineas Bagg, a farmer from Pittsfield, Massachusetts who had brought his children  Polly, Stanley, Sophia and Abner Bagg to Canada around 1795. I found an 1850 U.S. census record for Phineas Bush, farmer, 28, living with Mary Bush, 52 (Polly is a nickname for Mary) and William Bush, 53, farmer, in Clinton County, Illinois. It is not surprising they had moved to Illinois; this was a time when the midwest was welcoming many new settlers, including New Englanders.

Recently I went back to that record on Ancestry and found something new: a link to findagrave.com. I clicked on it, and up came a photo of the gravestone of Phineas B. Bush, 1820-1867. Two more clicks away, there was Polly Bush’s grave. According to date of birth calculated from age, Polly Bagg Bush was born April 22, 1785 and died Jan 9, 1856. She is buried near her son in a rural graveyard in southern Illinois.

Research notes: I still have research to do on all these people. For example, there should be notarized adoption documents for Sophia Roy Bush, and I have yet to find church or census records for the family in Vermont. Without Sophia’s will, I would not have a clue about their existence.

In Quebec, most wills were made by notaries and can be found in the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec. The three documents I used here are in the files of L.H. Latour, 15 aout 1818, #1456; J.A. Labadie, 18 mai, 1856, #14278; and Leo Labadie, 28 January, 1861, #6248. According to findagrave.com, Phineas B. Bush was born Dec. 20, 1820 and died Jan. 4, 1867. He is buried in Harrison Cemetery, Marion County, Illinois. I followed up on his wife Louise in city directories and discovered that she was still alive in Chattanooga, Tennessee in 1910.

For the story of how the Bagg family came to Canada from Massachusetts, see https://www.writinguptheancestors.ca/2013/10/an-economic-emigrant.html

When Sophia Bagg married Gabriel Roy on Nov. 25, 1811, the parish priest made a mistake in the record: he gave her mother’s name as Emily. Actually, the mother of Sophia, Polly, Stanley and Abner Bagg was Pamela Stanley, originally of Litchfield, Connecticut.