by Amy Zoethout | Apr 7, 2021 | Archives, Blog
Take a closer look at the Huron County Museum & Historic Gaol and its collections as staff share stories about some well-known and some not-so-well-known features, artifacts, and more. Archivist Michael Molnar looks at the Land Registry Copy Books available through the Huron County Museum’s Archives that can help with family research.
Did you know that the Huron County Museum has Land Registry Copy Books for the County of Huron?
Land Registry Copy Books contain historical (1835 – 1950s) information about the transactions of real property (specifically the ownership of land). These recorded transactions can be one way of confirming the existence of your ancestors in Huron County – confirming is a very important and rewarding step when conducting family research.
These historical Land Registry Copy Books are housed in the archival stacks at the Huron County Museum and can be accessed by appointment with the Archivist. While the Museum is temporarily closed to the public, learn more about the Archives’ new virtual research services here: https://www.huroncountymuseum.ca/huron-county-archives/
You can find information in the Land Registry Copy Books about your ancestors if you know a lot and concession number (rural) or a lot number (urban). You can access an historical map of Huron County with names and lot and concession numbers here: https://digital.library.mcgill.ca/countyatlas/huron.htm. This map can be a great starting point.
The Land Registry Copy Books housed at the Huron County Museum include information for the following communities:
Former Townships of Huron County: Ashfield, Colborne, East Wawanosh, Goderich, Grey, Hay, Howick, Hullett, McKillop, Morris, Stanley, Stephen, Tuckersmith, Turnberry, Usborne, and West Wawanosh.
Towns and Villages: Bayfield, Bluevale, Blyth, Cranbrook, Crediton, Dashwood, Dungannon, Ethel, Exeter, Fordwich, Goderich, Hensall, Kinburn, Lakelet, Lucknow, Manchester (Auburn), Nile, Port Albert, Seaforth, St. Joseph, Summerhill, Varna, Walton, Wroxeter and Zurich (not an exhaustive list).
You can access online historical land registry information for properties in Ontario through OnLand: https://help.onland.ca/en/what-is-onland/
by Amy Zoethout | Oct 26, 2020 | Archives, Blog, For Teachers and Students, Investigating Huron County History, Uncategorized
This military badge is from the Canadian Medical Corps worn on a Nursing Sister uniform by Maud Stirling, a First World War Nursing Sister. This artefact is one of more than 3,000 artefacts currently available on the Huron County Museum’s online collection.
by student Museum Assistant Jacob Smith
As a final year history student, I have grown accustomed to spending several hours preparing and writing essays. This is an important skill that takes years of practice. If you are developing an essay that is based on local history, the Huron County Museum & Historic Gaol has several resources that can aid you in your studies.
The first research tool is the Huron County Museum & Historic Gaol’s online collection, which can be found here. This is a database where the public can view over 5,000 artifacts and archival materials in the Museum’s collection. This tool provides background information on the artifacts, such as its provenance, dimensions, and past owners, and allows viewers to examine objects that are not currently on display. Examples of objects currently available in the collection include textiles, tools, personal items, furniture, photographs, documents, and much more.
Another excellent research tool is the Huron County Museum’s Digitized Newspapers. Here, researchers can glance at newspapers dating from the mid-1800s to the late-2010s. This database is free, easy to use, and accessible from the comfort of your own home! The digitized newspapers provide a vast wealth of information, ranging from local news and gossip, fashion, and global affairs.
The Huron County Museum & Historic Gaol also has an extensive archives collection. Here, researchers can locate coroner’s inquests, assessment rolls, court records, voter’s lists, and many more. By booking an appointment with the Archivist, researchers have access to a vast collection of resources, and a knowledgeable staff member to assist you.
This World War I propaganda poster was found through the Huron County Museum’s digitized newspaper database (Source: The Exeter Advocate, 1918-8-22, Page 2).
A bonus resource! Ancestry.ca is a helpful tool that allows people to research, share information, and connect with others. Sources such as military death, and census records, images, and family trees. This source requires a paid subscription, but often has free trials that allows researchers to access its extensive content. Researchers can also access Ancestry Library Edition free from home until Dec. 31, 2020 with a Huron County Library card.
While writers may feel overwhelmed at the thought of composing a research essay, there are helpful resources close to home or even accessible without leaving home. With the Huron County Museum and Historic Gaol’s resources, writers have the exposure to a wealth of extensive resources, which are readily available from your personal computer. Keep these resources in mind when you are composing your research essay.
by Sinead Cox | Mar 9, 2016 | Exhibits, Investigating Huron County History, Project progress
What’s your journey to Huron County? This spring, visitors to the Huron County Museum can follow the journeys of seven families across the globe and through time in Stories of Immigration and Migration, a temporary exhibit dedicated to tales of settling in Huron County. The exhibit traces the circumstances that caused individuals within Canada and across the world to leave their former homes, as well as the migrants’ experiences building new lives in Huron. With Stories set to open on April 5th, researcher Sinead Cox shares why the journeys of some Huron County families are more difficult to research than others:
Museum staff are looking forward to shedding light on local histories that have never been featured in our galleries before with Stories of Immigration and Migration, an exhibit which spans a period from 1840 to the present day. When research started several months ago, I had the pleasure and privilege of speaking or corresponding directly with the more recent ‘migrants’ featured in the exhibit, and the opportunity to include their own words, insights and chosen artefacts. For those individuals who arrived more than a century ago, however, our research relied on archival records that often uncovered as many questions as answers.
One compelling story that remains incomplete is that of Samuel and Mary Catherine James, a Black farming couple born in Nova Scotia who were some of the earliest settlers in Grey Township circa the 1850s. Nova Scotia was a destination for many former slaves from the colonial United States, including loyalists who had served the British crown during the American Revolution, in the eighteenth century. The James family also lived in Peel, Wellington County, before settling in Grey–which was part of the “Queen’s Bush” territory, rather than the Huron Tract lands managed by the Canada Company. Since the Jameses were farmers, they probably came to Huron County to achieve the same objective as most other pioneers: to own land. The James clan, including children Freeman, Coleman, Magdalene and Colin, farmed in a row on Lots 24 of Concessions 9, 10 and 12, Grey Township. According to 1861 census records, the whole family lived together in the same log house when they first moved to Huron.
Tragedy struck the James family when, in a matter of only three months–between November 1866 and January 1867–Colin (aged 23), Freeman (aged 39), and Mary Catherine (aged 77) all died. Whether their passings were related or coincidental, this unimaginable loss must have been a devastating blow to a pioneer family that relied on family members to share the burden of work. Mother and sons are buried at Knox Presbyterian Cemetery, Cranbrook.
According to land registry records, Freeman’s farm at Lot 24, Concession 12, still not purchased from the crown at the time of his death, was taken over by his sister Magdalene “Laney” James’ husband, Charles Done. Charles was also a Black farmer from Nova Scotia, and living in Howick when he married Laney at Ainleyville (now Brussels) on November 4th, 1867.
Laney and Coleman, the two surviving James siblings, each raised large families in Grey Township. In the 1871 census, Coleman and his wife, Lucy Scipio, already had eight children, five of them attending school. According to the same census, both Coleman and Laney could read and write, but their spouses could not. The family was struck by tragedy once again in April, 1873 when Coleman’s nine-year-old son, also named Coleman, died of “inflammation of [the] liver” after an illness of nine months.
Coleman sold his farms in 1875, and by the 1881 Canadian census, both he and Laney had left Huron County and relocated to Raleigh, Kent County with their families. This move to Raleigh would have enabled the James siblings to join a larger Black community at Buxton: a settlement founded by refugees that came to Canada through the Underground Railway.
The James family had relocated many times: according to tombstone transcriptions, Mary Catherine was born in Shelburne, Nova Scotia, and Colin in Digby, before the family moved to Ontario and lived in Wellington County, Huron County, and Kent. Census, birth and death records indicate that Coleman’s children ultimately settled in Michigan. Most farm families in nineteenth-century Ontario moved in search of the same benefits: a supportive community life, the ability to make a living, and good agricultural land. Black farmers, however, faced barriers of discrimination and exclusion that white settlers did not, and this sometimes necessitated leaving years of hard work behind to repeatedly seek a better life elsewhere.
It’s that moving on that can make traces of Huron County’s early Black settlers difficult to find in history books or public commemorations. The collections at the Huron County Museum, for example, are entirely acquired through donations from the community, which tends to emphasize the experiences of families that stayed here, found success, and had descendants who retain ties to the county to this day. We know less about the settlers who moved out of the county-even those who lived in Huron for decades, like the Jameses– and thus we also lack clarity about the opportunities they sought elsewhere, or the specific challenges they may have faced here.
The details I could glean from a few days’ of research did not provide enough information to interpret why the James family came to Huron County–or why they left–for Migration Stories. But I hope future research opportunities will add to this initial knowledge, and to a better understanding of the contributions and experiences of the individuals who have moved in and out of Huron County, including Black pioneers like the James family.
Special thanks to Reg Thompson, research librarian at the Huron County Library, for starting and contributing to the research used for this piece. If you have information about the James family and would like to share, contact Sinead, exhibit researcher: sicox@huroncounty.ca
You can see Stories of Immigration and Migration at the Huron County Museum (110 North Street) from April 5th until October 15th, 2016.
This post was originally published in February and republished in March after technical difficulties with the server.
