Hi from southern Ontario,
Chez moi/at home: what's happening here? Let’s start with weather, lots of rain, yesterday and today, hot and humid, temps up to 30C and 70% humidity, though it actually hasn’t seemed that hot. We close up the house in mid morning-you may remember we don’t have AC-and then open all the windows about 8pm, with 6 ceiling fans and every window in the house opens, we get great cross breezes. The weeds in my garden are growing very well!
We are expecting our new dryer to arrive in 2 weeks, hanging up clothes to dry in the basement while running the dehumidifier is getting tedious! My plan to dry laundry outside has been derailed by all the rain.
I spent a large portion of yesterday working on a spring flowering bulb order (wholesale) for the Hort Society members. Our October meeting is an Open House and bulb sale.
WikiTree and family history: because it has been so rainy etc, I haven’t been working in the garden, which had left lots of time to WT. I have added 12 people to the Alton Cemetery category. I’ve also been working through some of the Hunters who are buried at Alton and many other local cemeteries. I’ve been trying to prove or disprove a relationship between a Hunter family that lived in Alton and a Hunter family who lived about 40 km away. Some extended family members from both families intermarried with other people in both communities, but I don’t see any actual immediate family relationships between family 1 and family 2.
And for many years I have wondered why one of Robbie’s GGU’s ended up in Illinois, the family arrived in Canada in 1830, with 7 children, the oldest child was Andrew Dods born 1809 in Scotland, he just disappeared, he is not on any records for the family after their arrival. He is found on the Dods family tree documented in the family bible which is currently in a local museum. Several years ago I found an Andrew Dods living in Shannon, Illinois. I would have dismissed him as someone with the same name except that most of his children have the same names as his siblings. Okay so after much research he is confirmed as the missing Andrew Dods.
But I had no idea why he would have moved to Illinois. Which leads me to another topic, reading. One of the books I bought at the library book sale 2 weeks ago is a self published book named ‘From Bloody Beginnings’ by David Richard Beasley, published 2008. It is about the battles and conflicts during the Revolutionary War in the Mohawk Valley and surrounding areas. It is described as non-fiction, but is written as a story from the viewpoint of the author’s 3 x GGF including his move to Canada as a United Empire Loyalist. It’s badly sourced and what sources there are, are on the author’s website. Though after finishing reading the book it was interesting.
And it does describe the 1837 rebellion in Upper Canada in detail. Including much information about why many Canadian settlers moved to the U.S. in the late 1830s, nepotism, bribery, oligarchy, patronage, trying to create an Official Religion to be Anglican and many other issues.
My assumption is that Andrew Dods left for the same reasons that other Canadian settlers did. If you want to know more about the 1837 rebellion, you can Google it, but many websites are lacking in background details.
What else: reading: another book I bought at the book sale is called ‘the boat people’, which I erroneously assumed was about the Vietnamese boat people, it isn’t its about several hundred Tamil refugees who arrived in Vancouver in 2010. So far it’s well written and very interesting.
And I am a little concerned about our trip west, we will be driving through the British Columbia southern interior where forest fires are currently on the rise, most of the earlier fires were quite some distance north.
