(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.
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.
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.
Monkey See, Monkey Say 