Reverend Klaas Peters

(Week 6 of 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks).

Week 6 of breaking down my writer’s block with a year-long family history challenge. This post is very late, as I’ve returned to work full-time and even though I started this three weeks ago, I’ve been having trouble finishing it. Welcome to my sixth post of 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks where I decided to share my Ukrainian immigrant ancestor before having any idea what would happen this week.

February Theme: Branching Out / Week 6: Maps

My immediate family is prone to a keen sense of wanderlust which I’ve always ascribed to my paternal grandfather. Klaas was his father, and my most recent immigrant ancestor. He arrived in Canada in 1875 from the Crimean peninsula at the age of 19 with his twice-widowed mother and younger siblings, landing in Quebec via Scotland before travelling again to the East River Mennonite reserve outside of Winnipeg.

The farming community that he and his family left behind was itself a colonial outpost from a settlement in Prussia going back to the 1600s. Before that, their ancestors had mostly lived in Holland. In the late 1700s, Catherine the Great coaxed a colony of Mennonites from her Prussian homeland into Ukraine by offering them land grants in exchange for respecting their pacifism (as in, she promised they would not have to fight in the Russian army). The Bergthaler Colony that Klaas was born into was a daughter colony of the two original Ukraine colonies. By the time he reached adulthood, the political tides of Europe had shifted again and the Mennonites of both colonies began looking to the Americas (North and South) for land to farm. The instincts to move rang true, as within two generations any Mennonites left in Ukraine had been wiped out—first by the Red and White army clashes and later by Stalin.

Map showing Mennonite settlements of South Russia. The Bergthaler is one of the blobs in Crimea.

To be honest, Klaas Peters does not seem to have been very well liked. He is described as self-interested and authoritarian. Citizens of the town he built burnt him in effigy after WWI (due to a mix of anti-German sentiment coupled with debate of the legitimacy of his pacifism as he was no longer a member of the Mennonite Church at that point). His treatment of his own family seems to reflect the same qualities. The biography of Klaas Peters in the second half of his book The Bergthaler Mennonites, written as an addendum by Leonard Doell, describes an autocratic man who left his pregnant wife and young children to fend for themselves in a sod hut while he travelled the world as an immigration agent for the fledgling Canadian government. Later, on deciding he and his family should leave Manitoba to settle in Alberta, he pulled his sixteen year old son out of school and sent him to raise cattle on a bare plot of land he’d purchased there. Two years later, Klaas pulled the same son off the ranch and told him he was to be the butcher in a shop he’d built in town. My grandfather, the youngest of Klaas’s several sons, had enough of his father by the age of fourteen and ran away to live with a brother. When Klaas died, none of his children bothered buying a gravestone.

Back to young Klaas on the Eastern Reserve of Manitoba—he didn’t stay for long, shifting over to the West reserve and the tiny farming town of Gretna where he met and married his wife Katarina Loewen, also a Mennonite from the Ukraine. They had ten children altogether, including my grandfather, though not all lived to adulthood.

(Map from Government of Manitoba Mennonite Archives) Gretna is the black spot between 2W and 1W on the edge of the U.S. border.

Klaas, seeking the greener grass, uprooted the family soon after to yet another newer Mennonite settlement in Didsbury Alberta, halfway between Calgary and Red Deer. I found a photo of Didsbury in 1905, looking spectacular. The entire main street with its wooden buildings burnt down in 1914, including the butcher shop. But by then, Klaas had moved on to Waldek, Saskatchewan and another (failed) attempt at becoming a town founder.

Didsbury, Alberta circa 1905

He settled with his wife in Waldek to teach. He built a tavern. My grandfather and his brothers played in a brass band together. One of the brothers, Jacob, actually moved to California and played on the vaudeville circuit before tragically contracting Tuberculosis and coming back home to die. (When we cleaned out my grandparents’ house after my grandfather died, I came across a trumpet, still in its case. I was very sorry that I never knew he played.) If this tavern-owning and brass-playing does not sound very Mennonite-like, that is correct—Klaas and family had left the Mennonite Church for the Swedenborgian Church, similar in many ways but less strict.

Near the end of his life, Klaas moved once more, relocating to Florida with his wife where he wrote and published his book about the resettlement of his Bergthaler Colony to the Manitoba prairies. In Florida, he survived a bout of Spanish flu. After a short time in Florida, Klaas and Katrina returned to Canada to live out their last few years. Klaas left behind a complicated legacy as a “folk historian,” an orator, a pacifist, a book salesman, a teacher, a reverend, a land agent, a town founder and, apparently, a bit of a jerk—but a legacy nonetheless.

Jean Fessier Savigny (Jr.)

(Week 5 of 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks).

On to week 5 of side-swiping my writer’s block with a year-long family history challenge. Another phase of grief paying a surprise visit this past week so I’m relieved to have this distraction, albeit posting later than scheduled. Welcome to my fifth post of 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks where I move on to a new monthly theme and travel back, way back, to my father’s 18th Century Soho roots.

February Theme: Branching Out / Week 5: Branching Out

John (or Jean) Fessier Savigny, born in 1730 in the heart of London in modern-day Soho to the previous John Fessier Savigny and his third wife, Francoise Coleman, was third in a line of well-respected Huguenot silversmiths, beginning with his grandfather Olivier Savigny Fessier, cutler to the King (George I). Their protestant French family had escaped from Normandy when the revocation of the Edict of Nantes made it impossible to practice Protestantism in France. There is no concrete evidence (or oral history) for the reason Olivier swapped his middle name “Savigny” with his surname before it was dropped altogether a few generations later, but with Fessier roughly translating to “buttocks” it is easy to see how a name-change might have been considered wise. At the time of John Savigny Jr.’s birth, contemporary descriptions of the Huguenots around St. James and St. Martin’s in the Fields suggest strong maintenance of their French culture, including the language.

William Hogarth’s Noon from his “Four Times a Day” oil painting series of 1736, depicts Soho at the time, specifically the Huguenot Church known as “Les Grecs” where John Savigny’s grandfather Olivier married his first wife Marie Sautel, and shows the Huguenot parishioners leaving their morning service.

John Savigny’s father, also a razor-maker for the King (George II), was a man who had married five times and in his will left a single shilling each to his son John and to his fifth wife Ann. Instead, he left his entire fortune to his unmarried daughter Frances Fessier Savigny (John’s sister by their shared mother Frances—wife number three). Perhaps not coincidentally, John Savigny got married to his wife, also named Ann, in January of that year, and they had their first child four months later in April.

Despite this indication of family tensions, John Fessier Savigny the younger carried on the family business of making razors for the king (George II and George III).

But making royal razors was not the only footprint that John Savigny left behind in the public sphere. I chose John Savigny for this week’s theme of “Branching Out” because in his forties, he got on stage and tried his hand at professional acting.

The National Galleries of Scotland online contains a handful of etchings illustrating John Savigny’s Covent Garden performances. While he is credited and referenced in reviews as “John Savigny,” he is labelled in at least one of the etchings as “John Horatio Savigny,” the name he gave his first son. The acting bug has been typically associated therefore with his son—but looking at the dates, it is unlikely a 13 yr-old John Horatio was up on stage. Digging through some of the contemporary reviews that can be found online, one refers to a forty-year old man going back to his surgical instrument business. Is it possible that John Savigny the father gave himself a stage name after his first-born son?

John Savigny performs as Oroonoko – OR – How I learned my G⁶ Grandfather wore blackface.

According to accounts, John Savigny ended up on stage after accepting a dare from colleagues. The novelty of this clever amateur brought him attention, and he followed it up with more roles until alas, the critics wrote what they really thought and poor John was unable to land himself an agent. His acting career fizzled out. This dabbling in the arts did not last long, but it did immortalize him in the memoirs of Queen Charlotte (the wife of mad George III, currently immortalized by Golda Rosheuvel in the Bridgeton series).

From The Diary of Queen Charlotte – Note that this quip and its retort made the rounds enough to now be attributed to several different people.

John Savigny’s grandson, also named John Horatio Savigny, branched out from razor-making as well, trying his hand at sheep farming in Scotland for a stretch where he met and married his wife Agnes Blair. It likely didn’t pan out in the long run, as he left Scotland for Canada some time around 1832, joined or followed by several of his brothers a and their families. John and Agnes are listed in the Toronto Atlas in 1837.

The widow of another brother, Reverend William Henry Savigny, emigrated to Australia with her son of the same name, and it’s one of his descendants who made the effort to travel to London to dig through all the Huguenot library records and set straight the family history and origins, which he has very kindly shared with all his distant cousins.

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Maud Dracup

(Week 4 of 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks).

This is now week 4 of distracting myself from my bout of writer’s block with a year-long family history challenge. I”m happy to report that the distraction is succeeding. Welcome to my fourth post of 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks where we shift back to my maternal ancestry.

January Theme: Foundation / Week 4: Curious

I never knew my maternal grandfather—he died just prior to my mom getting married. His parents had both died before he had gotten married, and it seems that he didn’t speak much about them to his own family. The name Dracup has been bantied about with an air of the unknown, apart from a tale of one Dracup who was a bit odd and rode his bicycle from Toronto all the way to Belleville. Curious.

Everything I know about my great-grandmother Maud Dracup and her family comes from census information, a marriage certificate, and a couple of death certificates.

Maud was born in May of 1873, probably in the town of Belleville. Two years before her birth, her father Thomas Dracup was living in Belleville and working as a carpenter. He had a wife, Cassandra, and a 6-year-old daughter named after her. Thomas had been born in Nova Scotia, but came to Ontario with his parents and many siblings way back in 1834. His father Robert Dracup came from Yorkshire, and there’s some good research by a distant cousin about the Dracup family here.

Maud’s mother Cassandra Saffery came to Belleville with her parents from England at some point in the mid 1800’s. By 1861 Cassandra’s father was working as a butcher in the town of Belleville, living with his wife, his daughter, and two adult sons. Both of Cassandra’s brothers worked as carpenters in Belleville, which is maybe how she and Thomas met.

By the time Maud was 8, her father had given up the hammer and nails in exchange for farming with his older brother William Dracup just north of Belleville on the 4^th concession of Sidney Township. Maud’s older sister Cassandra is not mentioned in the 1881 census and I’m guessing that she died at some point before the age of sixteen. In 1882, Maud’s parents had one more child, a boy they named William after his uncle (presumably).

In late 1891, before she turned 20, Maud married her 35 year old next-door neighbour Charles. The 1891 census indicates that Charles is deaf, blind, and mentally unsound, but I suspect that is a penmanship error. Regardless, Maud and Charles had two children together—Neita and Carl. When Carl was just a year old, Charles got sick and after 3 years of suffering died from “consumption of the bowels.” At the end of the decade, as the new century arrived, Maud found herself a widow under 30 with two young children. A young man named Albert Spencer had moved in to help run the farm. He remained a close friend of the family for decades. Maud’s parents and brother still lived on the farm next door, but her uncle William died in 1900, capping off the decade.

Down the road from Maud, another widower with a young child a little older than Neita lived with his father on the family farm. In true turn-of-the-century Brady Bunch style, Maud and her neighbour John Tucker blended their families by tying the knot in 1903. The two of them had three more children together. A few years later, in 1910, Maud’s mother Cassandra passed away and her widowed father Thomas moved in with her and John and their blended family. Maud’s brother William remained and took over the Dracup farm himself.

At some point in 1916, Maud took ill with cancer. She died in May of 1918 while her son Carl was overseas with the Canadian Cyclist Corps fighting in WWI. She was only 46 years old.

Thomas Dracup family in the 1871 Canada Census (note daughter Cassandra is on next page and therefore easy to miss without curiosity involved).

Thomas Dracup family in the 1881 Census. Maud and William have arrived but no daughter Cassandra.

Thomas Dracup family in 1891, living next to Charles Read. Thomas’s brother Robert is the same person as William (aka “William Robert”) – their brother Charles Albert seems to go by both of his names as well.

Family neighbours in 1901. Widowed Maud is living next to her parents. Thomas has lost his brother. Maud has gained a farm hand and two children but lost her husband.

The Tucker blended family in 1911. A widowed Thomas has also joined the household, and they are well enough off to have a servant. Maud’s brother William is on Thomas’s farm down the road (not shown). Census image from Ancestry.com

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Reading between the lines of the information in the census documents, I get the feeling that the Dracups had strong family bonds. Siblings lived together on more than one occasion, and as described above, Maud’s father moved in with her family in the latter years of his life. Does this information truly satisfy the curiosity about the Dracup family? Not entirely—certainly there is no answer in the census as to who the oddball cyclist might be. This is where the rabbit-hole of archival newspapers come in.

It’s difficult not to get distracted by stories in old newspapers, from the mundane—like who had dinner at who else’s house on Saturday—to the absurd—as in, popcorn is now healthy to eat for breakfast, but it might leave you hungry. The Ontario Weekly abstracts from 1913 to 1921 that I’ve been browsing online give a good picture of the times—several horse vs car accidents; horses falling through the ice where the ice-cutters left a hole (in the days before refrigerators!); other horses escaping to run down the main streets of town. There are hints of what was dangerous, like the number of train accidents, to one week when two kids in separate accidents died after setting themselves on fire.

I’ve only scratched the surface of archival newspaper for Dracup, but I’ll share the gems so far.

The first (and most horrifying) news item I came across years ago was a blurb about an accident in the Belleville train yard in 1897. The Horatio Dracup mentioned in the incident I now know to be the nephew of Thomas Dracup, by his eldest brother John. This means that Maud lost her first cousin to this tragedy the year before she lost her first husband.

from the Belleville Daily Intelligencer of Wed June 23, 1897 (c/o the Internet Archive)

More amusing are the mundane (thankfully) weekly gossip mentions, and these give a richer picture of family connections. I’ll post a few here. My favourite is the note about Thomas Dracup riding on the back of his grandson’s motorcycle (the grandson very likely being my own grandfather Carl).

I always wondered about how the family viewed Thomas after Maud passed away, given that the Belleville House of Refuge is listed as his place of death, but I found a little obituary for him that puts that to rest. The obit speaks fondly of him, and on that week there is at least one mention of someone travelling to town for his funeral.

From The Ontario Weekly, November 28, 1919

And finally, in a later decade, I found an item about Uncle Bill Dracup (Maud’s brother), visiting town from Toronto. Apparently, he was a zither player. I found a record of him in Toronto, working as a painter and living on Cameron St. across from The Cameron House, then later on Portland Ave. This clicks with my mother’s memories and satisfies my curiosity about who this guy named Dracup who rode his bicycle to Belleville might be. Sadly, the connection to his nephew’s family did not seem to have survived their respective moves to Toronto.

Agnes Thornton

(Week 3 of 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks).

On to week 3 of distracting myself from my bout of writer’s block. I’ve jumped onto this year-long family history challenge as a gentle way back in. Welcome to my third post of 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks. This week I flip back to my father’s side of the family.

Week 3: Favourite Photo (Agnes Thornton)

This may be one of my favourite photos of all time, family or otherwise. That’s my grandmother Agnes (Thornton) Peters at the far end, looking proper and a little self-conscious. In the foreground are the knees of my grandfather, who seems to be leaning as far back as he can to get both his new bride and the stunning beauty of Glacier Park in his shot. The year is 1936 and the two of them are on their honeymoon, having been married earlier that month (July).

I asked my grandmother once how they met—he was a Fuller Brush salesman at the time, and she a stagefright-challenged professionally-trained singer still living with her parents in Regina. She told me that he had dropped in on a sales call, and I guess he took a shine to her because he “accidentally” left his scarf behind. He arranged to retrieve it at some point later, and apparently picked up my grandmother in the process. The rest is history. At 99, this still made her smile.

Donald McLaren

(Week 2 of 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks).

Welcome to week 2 as I battle a bad bout of writer’s block. In the meantime, I’ve jumped onto this year-long family history challenge as a gentle way back in. Welcome to my second post of 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks. This week I flip over to my maternal ancestors.

Week 2: Favourite Find (Donald McLaren)

This week’s theme brings to mind one of the more challenging searches that uncovered a tragic family story—and hence, a favourite find.

One line of my mother’s family is well-documented (published book full of family lore, trees, and even an annual picnic for descendants). I have wanted to know about all the other less-documented ancestors. One such family was that of my maternal grandmother’s grandmother, Jane McLaren. I traced her and her siblings and parents back to the 1871 Canadian Census, but then hit a dead end. I had some bits and pieces about Perthshire, but not when or why they came to Canada. There was no family lore to fill in the gaps. Frustrated, I delved into Scottish records instead, and found them there.

Donald McLaren was born at the turn of the 19th century in the Scottish parish of Little Dunkeld in Perthshire. He married a local lass named Isabella Forbes, and by 1841 they had settled in as a family with a young son and a second child on the way (named after Isabella’s parents James and Margaret, respectively). They are well-enough situated to have a young woman living with them to help run the house. She may have been a relative.

They lived alongside the River Tay, one of the dominant geographic landmarks of Little Dunkeld, their parish in Perthshire. The river may be familiar to Scotch-lovers. I loved that Donald’s occupation is listed as “distiller,” though I have been unable to find where he worked.

Details of Donald McLaren’s family from the 1841 Scottish census, c/o Ancestry.com

Following up with the family ten years later proved much more difficult. Isabella was living in Little Dunkeld with James and Margaret, along with two more daughters: Jane (my grandmother’s grandmother) and Amelia Ann—spelled Jean and Emelia in the census. Charlotte was gone, and so was Donald. But I knew that Donald ended up in Ontario with the rest of the family, so where was he? And what kind of occupation was a “molecatcher’s wife?”

After much searching and browsing and few rabbit-holes later, I found Donald at a farm in Aberdeen, catching moles for a living. This broke my heart, and has been one of the saddest discoveries to date—and also a favourite, because if you can’t laugh at being descended from a molecatcher, what can you laugh at? On a personal note, I caught a mole once. I was a kid, on the ski hill, taking a break in the powdery snow at the edge of a run when I noticed a moving trail of snow beside me. I scooped up the snow at the head of the trail and found myself ogling the most adorable furry mole in the palms of my mitted hands. Did I inherit an obscure talent from my great³ grandfather? Maybe.

The economic collapse of the Highlands in the mid-1800s was the most likely cause of the McLarens’ sad situation. The Scottish Statistical Accounts of Little Dunkeld describes potatoes as one of the dominant crops, and the Highland potato famine left much devastation around the same time. I don’t know (yet) under what circumstances the family was able to emigrate, but their journey to Canada was complete by the time I initially found them in the 1871 Census, farming in Thurlow. By then, Jane had already married, and was living elsewhere with her husband and their firstborn son. Donald and Isabella had had another daughter, born in Ontario in the early 1860’s and named after her mother. The family were doing well enough to have a live-in farm hand.

One last thing to add, another double-duty on the theme of favourite find, this time a “Ah-ah!” moment. I’ve never been able to find Donald’s family in either the 1861 Scottish or Canadian censuses. I have not been able to track down their specific arrival date either, although I knew it had to be some time between the 1851 molecatching fiasco and the birth of their youngest daughter in Ontario in 1862. This weekend I found the answer.

In a nod to the importance of investigating siblings when one hits a brick wall, I followed a hint for Jane’s sister Margaret that popped up on Ancestry. The hint linked to a Landing document belonging to Margaret from a time in 1921 when she returned from travelling to Scotland as a 78 yr old widow. The document contained several bits of juicy information. Not only did it tell me that she was visiting a cousin named Mrs. Wallace in a Tay-side hamlet called Kindallachan in Perthshire, but it also told me that on her return she would be heading out to Banff to live with her married daughter. The most exciting information included on the document was the date and location of Margaret’s initial landing in North America: July, 1857 in New York.

(Handwritten on the reverse: Grandmother Hudson (Mary) sitting; Aunt Margaret (MacLaren) McTaggart standing – Nanny’s Aunt; At Louis Wright’s (sine) house in Wallbridge; also Happy).

A note about this photo: The inscription on the reverse of the photo was written by my grandmother (the girl lying down in the foreground). Happy is her brother. The friendly-looking Mary Hudson is my grandmother’s paternal grandmother. I have no idea who Louis Wright is, but I’m quite sure that the woman with her arm around my grandmother is her mother Rosanna Longwell, daughter of the Jane McLaren in this story. That would make Margaret McLaren her aunt (as written). Not sure why Rosanna is referred to as Nanny (she went by Rose), unless the caption is written for the sake of my mother’s generation who may have called their grandmother Nanny, similar to us calling ours Nana. Both Jane and her husband Barny (my Nana’s maternal grandparents) had passed away at least a decade before this photo was taken—Jane at 55 from drinking bad water, and Barnabus 6 months later from a broken heart.