(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 4th 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.
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.
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.
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.
Monkey See, Monkey Say 