Jim’s last rest

We have known for a long time that Jim and Annie Coubrough had gone to their long sleep in Dawn Township before their son Matt and daughter Flora Jane (aka Jenny Atwell) headed west to Saskatchewan. We were fairly sure they must have been buried somewhere in Dawn Township, too, but where? We had a few clues, but that’s all they were: clues. Until very recently, the exact location was a mystery. Enter once again the hand of fate.

The anniversary celebrations at Rutherford Presbyterian Church (about which more later) were held September 28, 2003, and I was there. I stayed one night with Mr. & Mrs. Lee MacDonald, who are keenly interested in tracking down their ancestors in the Rutherford area—people they know to have arrived there in the mid-1800s. They had heard the same story as us: all of the 19^th Century MacDonalds there were related to each other. (1) So far, though, they have had no more success in proving these connections than we have. As you will have guessed, we spent much time discussing various possibilities, and one of the things we talked about was the total disappearance of Jim and Annie Coubrough’s graves. They drove me around to all the known graveyards in the area. I found nothing new, but Lee had better luck. He happened to poke a stick into the ground and, purely by chance, found the completely overgrown flat stone of one of the folks they had been hunting for some time.

We went again to the Gould Cemetery, though I had already been there several times. We found nothing new there, either, but I was still convinced that Jim and Annie had to be there. Not only was it the closest to where they lived, but their tiny granddaughters, Annie and Barbara Atwell, were already there. It was getting dark by the time we finished, but after Lee’s fortuitous stab, we planned to go back the next day and prod around a bit. Unfortunately, by the time we got organized in the morning, I had to start my 6-hour drive back to Kingston. Knowing I wouldn’t be back that way for a while, I decided to stop at the Lambton County library in Wyoming, Ontario. As usual, I had stayed gabbing later than I had planned, so I had only about an hour, but I stopped anyway. I didn’t really expect to find anything in such a short time, but as with my discovery of Jim and Annie’s marriage date (2) , it seems I was meant to be there that morning.

The helpful librarian brought everything she thought might be useful, one of which was an old newspaper. The first time I went to the Gould cemetery, I saw that all of the surviving stones had been moved to a double row, in the centre of the fenced area, and cemented in as a protection against vandalism. One of the things the librarian brought was a newspaper clipping, which, after noting that the Gould cemetery had never had any official sanction, explained when the stones had all been moved, and why. Besides the many markers that seemed to be missing altogether, the project’s volunteer workers had found, in a fence corner, a pile of stone fragments, many smashed beyond recognition. A small gleam appeared: could this be the reason for Jim and Annie’s having disappeared without a trace?

Since I was last at the library, about three years ago, some kind souls had indexed all the births, marriages and deaths listed in The Dresden Times. There were quite a few Coubroughs listed, most of them children and grandchildren of Jim and Annie. I didn’t have time to check them all, but one of them fairly leaped off the page at me and I had to look: James Coubrough, May 12, 1904. The librarian searched it out for me, and I was absolutely astounded when I saw what she had on the screen.

This is from the front page of the Dresden Times, dated Thursday, May 12, 1904:

One of the old and respected residents of Dawn township, in the person of James Couborough, was called to his long home on Tuesday afternoon last. The deceased had been a sufferer for some years from partial paralysis, and on Tuesday was attacked with heart failure, which was the cause of death. "Jimmy" as he was often called, was well known in Dresden, having carried the mails between here and Rutherford for some years. In his early life he was a member of that famous Scotch regiment the 74th, and always liked to talk of his soldier life. After coming to Canada he followed the lakes for a number of years after which he settled on a farm in Dawn. He was at one time engineer on the old tug Beaver. At the time of his death he was in his 75th year. He leaves three daughters and one son to mourn his loss, viz. Matthew in Dawn, Mrs. Wm. Attwell Dawn, Mrs. Laflan Minneapolis, and Mary Ann at home. The funeral took place today at 2 p.m., service being conducted in the Presbyterian Church, Rutherford, by Rev. R.J.Ross, the remains being interred in Sturdie's cemetery con. 9, Dawn.

There is still no stone to prove it, but it seems I had guessed right all along. Sadly, there is still no trace of Annie. A search of the Dresden Times dated in the four weeks after her death turned up nothing, and while it is probably safe to assume that she is buried in the same place as her husband, she is as much an alien today as she ever was.

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Epitaph for Jim & Annie

Born January 26, 1831, in the village of Thornliebank, Eastwood parish, Renfrew shire, James Coubrough was the oldest of ten children of Mathew Coubrough, a calico factory worker, and his wife, Jean Allan. According to his obituary, Jim was “in his 75th year,” when he passed away on May 11, 1904, at his home in Dawn Township, Lambton County, Ontario. According to his birth registration, he would have been just turned 73. Either way, Grampa Jim had seen a lot in his time.

Being the oldest child in a large family, Grampa Jim started his working life at an early age, probably employed as his father’s assistant before he was 12 years old (3) . Jim’s father, Mathew, was a colour printer, which being one of the most highly skilled trades in the calico factory, was also one of the highest paid. Only the engravers, who produced the copper printing plates were paid more. The printer’s job was to mix colours and apply them to the cloth, one at a time, in the in the prescribed pattern: a painstaking process requiring a long apprenticeship. Printing was labour-intensive, and printers needed a helper (tearer). The factory owner paid the tearer’s wages if the printer was a woman; male printers paid their own helpers (4). By the time Jim was 12, there were already six children in the family, so even though his father had a good income, every penny that could be kept in the family could be put to good use. If Matt could hire his son, the boy would essentially be working for free, but his father would be able to keep his whole salary.

We can’t be sure how long Jim worked in the factory, but we know he decided it wasn’t the life for him. Jim was 20 years old in the spring of 1851, and had already left home, though we don’t know the exact date. By the time of the census, at the end of March, his younger sister, Annie, had taken his place as their father’s helper in the factory, and Jim was no longer living in his parents’ home. He was most likely in the Army by then, and was in the colonial city of Halifax, Nova Scotia not later than September of that year. Though he was still very young, Jim found himself a bride in Halifax. He married a mysterious older woman, Annie MacDonald, on September 23, 1851, the Rev. Alex Romans, A.M., officiating.

Jim stayed in the Army, so he and Annie were pretty mobile in the first few years after their marriage. On January 8, 1854, three weeks before Jim’s 23rd birthday, he became the father of a bouncing baby boy, who he named Mathew after his own father. They never saw fit to write down whether they were still in Halifax then, or whether they had already moved to St. John, New Brunswick (5) , by the time Matt was born, but Matt was baptised in Saint Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, in Saint John on March 4, 1854, by the Rev. W. Donald, A.M. Matt was no more than two years old when Jim and Annie hurried back to Halifax early in 1856: Matt’s sister Flora Jane was born there on February 8, 1856. They lived in that city again for a while when Jenny was a baby, then Jim left the Army and they decided to “go west.”

When Jim’s regiment was recalled to Britain, he was determined not to go back to the factory life: he and Annie decided to stay in the colonies. They were still very young (Jim was 27, and Annie a few years older) when they decided to join Annie’s relations on the wild frontier of Canada West. They sent word ahead that they needed a farm, and in the late fall of 1857 made their way to the Halifax docks to catch the steamer for Montreal, perhaps with Jim working for at least part of their passage. There, they transferred themselves and all their worldly goods to a lake boat bound for either Toronto, Hamilton, or Windsor. The Royal Mail Line promised direct transportation to Hamilton: “the only line without transshipment” They stopped at Kingston, Cobourg, Port Hope, Darlington, Toronto and Hamilton. At Toronto, Niagra, and Hamilton, they offered direct connections to the local railroad: “At Hamilton GREAT WESTERN RAILWAY for London, Chatham, Windsor, Detroit, Chicago, Galena, St. Paul, Milwaukie, &c.” This was an attractive option to a family with two and a-half young children, but more expensive than other lines where one’s effects were often smashed in the process of being transferred from one company’s ship to another at the various stages. They expected Annie’s relations to meet them in Chatham, where they transferred themselves and their worldly goods to yet another boat–or at least that was the plan.

Coll MacDonald bought them a farm in January 1858, and they were on it by March of that year, but on the subject of how long they had been in Dawn Township by the time they took up residence there, they were discreetly silent—perhaps in shock. After the crowded streets of a big city like Halifax, the dark brooding forest of Dawn Township seemed like the end of the world. Poor Annie. How depressing it must have been to have travelled all that way, pregnant as she was, to find that the “fine productive farm” they had purchased was mostly primeval forest, with a farm of any sort years of back-breaking work in the future. But it was home now and she would at last be able to spend more than a few months in one place. They stayed with Annie’s relatives for the winter, while Jim started to clear enough land to build a house on. Their new house was completed in the late spring, and Annie’s second daughter, Mary Ann, was born there on May 13, 1858. They never looked back

Coll MacDonald, who bought Jim and Annie’s farm, was most likely Annie’s relation. His branch of the family may have been fairly well off. He paid cash for the entire 200 acres of his own farm, and for Annie and Jim’s farm, too. Moreover, as he held the mortgage on it for the 25 years it took them to pay it off (1858 to 1883), he must have felt he was able to manage without the $312 their fifty acres had cost. While Coll seems to have been fairly well off, Jim was less well-endowed in the cash department. He went to work on the lake boats soon after he arrived in Dawn Township, and continued there for years. He probably needed steady employment to supplement the farm’s meagre income—a necessity all too familiar to Jim and Annie’s farm stock descendants. Or he may just not have taken to the grinding toil of being a farmer. As hard as life was in the Army, it likely wasn’t any worse than the struggle to convert virgin forest into a farm that would feed you.

With young Matt and his mother doing most of the work, the farm never progressed beyond the original ten acres they had cleared. Bill Dowswell tells a story of Matt’s father once complaining that Matt wasn’t a very good farmer, as the farm wasn’t doing very well. Matt replied that if his father had stayed home to help more often, maybe it would do better. This might have been true, since two men could do a lot more work than one; at the very least, they would have been able to work more land. Ten acres is just about the most a man with an ox-team can manage by himself, and even that would require a solid effort. Worse, the land they had wasn’t that great. Today, after 150 years of farming, the land Jim and Annie settled on is still only marginal farmland, and Dawn Township is one of the poorest in the county.

Coll, of course, held the title to the farm for all the years he held the mortgage. There was not yet a tax on income in Canada West (6), so it was more likely to have been by way of insurance, than as a form of tax evasion, that the farm was transferred to Annie’s sole custody when they finally paid off the mortgage in 1883. If marital property came from the wife’s family, as Annie’s farm did, it was sometimes settled on the wife as protection against a drunken or spendthrift husband. Jim didn’t fit this category, but life on the lake steamers was a hazardous one. Every year, ships sank when they ran aground or were broken up by huge storms common on the Great Lakes. Hundreds of sailors were lost every year. Had anything happened to Jim, his family could have been destitute; having the farm in Annie’s name was a way to avoid this. If it was hers, it couldn’t be seized to settle his estate.

When Annie’s fourth child, another girl they called Barbara Ann, was born in May 1860, their little family was complete. At six and four years, Matt and Jenny were perhaps still not able to do a full day’s work, but were no doubt a help to their busy mother, none the less. As with most people, Jim and Annie’s lives went on in their comfortable routine (or perhaps in a rut, depending on how many things went wrong on a particular day). Every spring, Jim ploughed a field and a garden before he went back on the boats, then Annie and Matt planted and harvested. Annie milked her cow every day, and turned some of the milk into cheese and butter. Winter evenings were the time for spinning wool by the light of the fire, and weaving it into heavy cloth. Other than the place she lived it, Annie’s early married life was probably differed very little from those of generations of her northern Scots ancestors. Most of the products of her kitchen and her loom would have been for the use of her family, with a little to sell, or exchange for things she couldn’t make herself, such as tea and sugar.

Jim’s life was lived much less in isolation than that of his wife; his life was completely different from that of his calico factory ancestors. Life on a sailing ship was pretty much life on a sailing ship, whether it was in the open ocean, or on the Great Lakes, and in Jim’s early days on the lake boats, he may have worked as an ordinary seaman. Before had he retired from the boats, he had become the engineer on a steam tug called the Beaver. The engineer was usually the senior man in the engine room, in charge of making sure the ship’s steam-driven engines could always do what was expected of them. On a large ocean-going vessel, he would have been a senior officer, but on a tug, he probably had a crew of no more than one or two—if that. Eventually, time catches up to us all and a time came when Jim was too old and stiff to work the boats any more. He took up carrying the mail between Rutherford and Dresden, a job he clearly relished. It was a nice relaxing kind of job that gave him time to gossip with his neighbours and friends. He continued this line of work until within a couple of years of his passing.

By the late 1890s, Matt had taken over farming his parents’ land. He and his sisters Jenny and Barbara were all married, with families of their own. Barbara was in far-Minnesota, but Matt was only about five miles from the home farm, and Jenny was conveniently only a mile away, in downtown Rutherford. Matt had taken up farming, of course, not ever having known any other life. That and his ever-increasing family took up much of his time, but there was always time for a family visit. Jenny’s family was growing, too, despite the loss of two tiny girls in the 1880s. She had married a steam engineer named Billy Atwell, who was one of three partners in a steam-powered sawmill. They lived in a one-storey frame house with an unheard-of ten rooms. The size of the house was originally matched to both the size of their family and its status in the town. The family was smaller now, but the space would not be wasted.

Jim and Annie’s second daughter, Mary Anne, known to her family as Minnie, had been a normal happy baby. Along the way, she had either been ill or suffered a head injury. The family knew her as “a cripple.” In the 1881 census, when she was 22 years old, she was said to be an “idiot.” She couldn’t read or write, but she could speak English (though not Gaelic.) By 1901, she was still single and living with her parents; she was 42. In the spring of 1901, her parents were beginning to show their age. Annie had been ill for over a year with “bronchitis,” and Jim was suffering some paralysis. Whether this was from years of working the boats in all weather, or the result of a small stroke (or both) is a mystery. Fact was, he could no longer look after himself, let alone the farm, his wife and his adult daughter. Reluctantly giving up their independence, they moved into town, where Jenny’s capacious house managed to fit them all in. Whether they ever suffered from peace and quiet or isolation there is not known, though they might perhaps have sometimes wished for it. Jenny’s oldest living daughter, Eliza Jane, had left Rutherford for a career as a milliner, but the other five living children, ranging in age from four to eighteen, were all still home.

For over fifty years, come pleasure, come pain, Jim had had his Annie to lean on. Then, on dreary Saturday, August 9, 1902, after two years of barely being able to breathe, she left him for her long sleep. Jim was devastated. With a heart of lead, and leaning heavily on Jenny’s strong arm, he followed his darling Annie to a peaceful, sunny hillside and laid her to rest beside their tiny grand-children (7) , and near Coll’s wife, Mary Ann Graham. The light now gone from his life, he trudged to the wagon for the long ride back to town. Annie’s will had given life’s use of their home farm to her husband, but Matt continued to farm it, as he had for several years already, and Jim continued to live with Jenny’s family. Over the next couple of years, Jim’s paralysis grew worse. On May 12, 1904, after suffering a severe heart attack, he left his dear, helpless Minnie in the care of her strong, loving sister, and followed his beloved Annie to his last rest.

By the terms of her mother’s will, Jenny became the sole owner of the old home farm at her father’s passing. The will also tasked her with looking after her sister Minnie as long as necessary, but since she had been doing this for some time already, it was no extra load. Once Matt and Jenny laid their father to rest beside their mother, in the Gould cemetery in Concession 9 of Dawn Township, there was with nothing left to hold them to their tiny farms. A year later, Matt, Billy Atwell, and their older sons went to Saskatchewan, where they could all begin new chapters in their lives.

Like most of us, Jim and Annie had gone from day to day, putting one foot in front of the other until bed time, then getting up to start again, but the world around them had changed an awful lot during their time in it. In the early days, crouched over a fireplace to do her cooking in clay or heavy cast iron pots, and spinning and weaving wool she had shorn from her own sheep, Annie’s life had been much like that of her grandmother. By the time Annie passed on, a housewife could cook her dinner on an electric stove in light-weight aluminum or enamelled iron pots, and though they still did their own sewing, most people bought factory-made cloth in a store. Annie had lit her home, first with oil lamps or candles, then with kerosene lamps; her daughters’ houses could be lit by gas or electricity. To clean her rugs and carpets, Annie’s options were limited to taking them outside and beating them; in 1901, vacuum cleaners were used to prepare Westminster Abbey for the coronation of Queen Victoria’s son, Edward VII. Photography didn’t exist when Annie was born, and was a still a raw new process years later when Jim was born in 1831. The first-ever photographs had been produced only four years earlier and Jim would be eight years old before they improved to the point where an image would stay visible for more than a few hours, yet moving pictures had existed for nearly ten years (8) before he passed on.

Stationary steam engines had been in use for some time by 1831, mostly as pump engines, but mobile steam engines, while rapidly increasing in popularity, were hardly yet commonplace. Steamships had been crossing the Atlantic for less than twenty years, and railroads, nasty, dirty, noisy, magical inventions were no older. Jim lived to see them both not only rise to maturity, but be superceded by yet newer means of transport. He and his son Matt had started farming with oxen, but cars, internal combustion engines and even powered flight (9) happened during his lifetime. When Jim started farming, they cut grain with a scythe, tied the bundles by hand, and spread it on the barn floor to be beaten with sticks in order to remove the hulls before grinding it for flour or “porritch.” By 1900, there were horse-drawn binders that cut and tied the grain, and steam-driven threshing machines to separate the wheat from the chaff—machines to do it all, including one to wash the dishes after feeding the threshing crew.

Jim and Annie were definitely pioneers. They had travelled an awful lot of miles from their Scots birth places before they met, and with their military moves, probably almost as many after. They had seen or heard of huge numbers of marvellous new inventions, including among other things, a can opener that worked better than the chisels or axes people had previously used to open canned food, and kerosene lights that, besides being cleaner and cheaper to operate, gave much better light than their animal-fat predecessors. They were salt-of-the-earth, God-fearing citizens: Sunday morning church-goers who practised their faith all week long. They were decent people, who were at least part of the reason we are who we are. Perhaps the best epitaph we can give them is us.

Still having a few minutes left in my planned hour, I checked a couple of the other Coubrough’s in the index, though I didn’t have time to copy them all. The front page of a paper dated Thursday, September 19, 1918, had a picture (12) of a very serious-looking John Brown Coubrough, and a short obituary:

Death of Pte. Coubrough

Mr. and Mrs. M. Coubrough of Ogema, Sask., have received the sad news of the death of their son, Pte. John Brown Coubrough, who was killed in action on Aug. 8, 1918, aged 24. He is their second son who has died in France. Simon died of wounds on May 2, 1917. Harry (13) is still in France and Dell is in training in England. The photo of John B. was taken after he had been in the trenches last year.

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Other Front Page News

As a small-town newspaper, the Dresden Times had to make the best possible use of every inch of every page. As was common at the time, they did this by using very small print, and very little white space, which accounts for the crowded appearance typical of the old newspapers. Upon occasion, if news was scarce, they might use bigger print and more space between lines, though this doesn’t seem to have happened often. Another way of saving space was to put things in where ever they fit the best. For those of us used to the screaming headlines of modern city newspapers, some of the Times’ front page news isn’t quite what we would expect to see there.

All of us have read stories of how older people had their children or grandchildren read the paper for them, as they could no longer do it for themselves. For many people today, this is hard to believe. Today’s papers have much larger print, most of us who need reading glasses can afford them, and electric light is much brighter than that given off by a coal oil lamp. The first two items are from the paper dated May 12, 1904; the rest are from that of September 19, 1918. I didn’t copy everything on the front page, but all items here are in the order they appeared.

Thursday, May 12, 1904

[On spring cleaning:]

     When you see a man these fine evenings sneaking out of the back door after tea and casting a furtive glance over his shoulder as he climbs the fence, you may make up your mind that he is trying to evade one of the most sacred duties of a good husband and citizen, having been commanded to carry all the house hold furniture up and down stairs, beat carpets, move stoves, do a few more chores before seeking a blissful repose on the pantry floor.

[Sour grapes?]

     Business men who never think of beating down the banker, the butcher or the drayman in their rates will hag-gle with the newspaper over the price of a small advertisement, even after the same paper has done them many a kindness. If only they knew how small they make themselves appear, they would deal wit the paper on the same straightforward lines on which they like to do their own business.

Thursday, September 18, 1918

     Don’t forget the Rutherford School Fair on Tuesday, Sept 24.

     Hear the popular entertainer, Geo S Steer of London, at the Town Hall, Fair Night.

     NOTICE.—We beg to inform the public that we will sell no gasoline on Sundays until after the war.—W.P. BROWN. (14)

   General News

     Thanksgiving day is the only legal holiday between now and Christmas.

     A woman 82 years old is working in a Sarnia munitions factory, and is able to do a good day’s work.

     Robert Garrett, Wellington Street, has sold his handsome residence on that street to James Law of Dresden. —Sarnia Canadian

     The caution to use little sugar in preserving is easy to comply with. One can’t get the sugar to use unless the brown grade is used.

     FOUND.—In Dawn Tp. on Saturday, an automobile chain. The owner can have same by calling at this office, proving property and paying for this ad.

     Candy Manufacturers in Canada have used, in the past, 11 per cent of all the sugar consumed in Canada. This has been reduced to a maximum of 5½ per cent by the Canada Food board, owing to the sugar situation.

     An Italian girl who came from Buffalo and is now employed at the Leamington canning factory made $36.84 (15) last week peeling tomatoes, only working seven hours’ overtime. Several others made nearly as much.

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2004

Last summer I told you about a trip Lynda and Alison Lenfesty and I had made to Rutherford. I told you how we had gone to the Presbyterian Church service, and how we had been invited back in the fall for their 120^th anniversary celebrations. We had intended to all go back for the party, but in mid-summer, Lynda’s job—and her family— unexpectedly moved back out West. I finally decided to go the party by myself, and I think it was meant to be.

On the earlier trip, I had agreed to write what little I knew about our Browns, who had helped found the church. Late in August, I contacted the minister to see if he still wanted my scribbles. He did, but a few days later, he e-mailed me in a panic: they had had a committee meeting for the celebration, and someone had told the minister that his Presbyterian Church building was not the original—it had been moved there from another small village in the area after the Presbyterian Church had joined the Methodist church to become the United Church of Canada in 1925. The Brown’s original church is now the United Church, located next door to (immediately east of) the current Presbyterian church. (I had known of this union, but hadn’t thought of it in my great glee at finding our very own ancestors to be celebrities.) The Reverend Mr. Song’s panic was due to his belief that since his church was not the original, it must not have been on John Brown’s land; thus, I could no longer belong to the Church’s history. Mr. Song was also convinced that I had my dates wrong. At that same meeting, he had learned that the Rutherford Presbyterian congregation dated from 1876, not 1883, as he thought I had said, and they would thus be celebrating the 127^th anniversary.

In the Myrna Coubrough version of history, however, these are only minor glitches. Not to be denied my moment of fame, I re-checked the land office records, confirming that James Brown’s land had run east from the concession road, and north from the sideroad. Since the current church is west of the original, between it and the road, the “new” building does in fact sit on what was once Jim’s land, even though it may no longer have belonged to the Browns by the time the new church was moved there. As to the dates, the land records also confirmed that the church trustees did actually buy the land from Great-great-Grampa Jim Brown on October 19, 1883. I proposed the idea that the congregation might have met in the schoolhouse or another local building for some time before they could afford to build a church (as was often the case in prairie communities). Mr. Song was not convinced, but other people I spoke to agreed that this was exactly what had happened. A couple of them even remembered attending services at the school when they were children in the 1920s, after the union and before the “new” church had been moved in.

On the Sunday designated for the celebration, having turned up much too early for the Presbyterian service, I decided to go next door to the United Church service, which was held an hour earlier. (When I later went to the Presbyterian one, as scheduled, I found I was not the only one who attended both.) As might be expected, the congregations were both quite small, even though both churches were filled to capacity that day. The present United Church(whose construction was at least partly due to the efforts of Grandma Liz’s mother, Annie Thomson Brown), is bigger inside than I had expected from its exterior. Seating about 100 people, it is slightly larger than its neighbour, which holds about 80 or so. The pews in both are sawn oak, and the floors are the original hardwood. The lumber for both was probably the product of one or more local sawmills—possibly even Billy Atwell’s. Otherwise, they both look pretty much like any other little country churches.

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Other branches

1. I have several times mentioned the family of John Coubrough and Margaret Herald. You will recall that they had been married in Melbourne, Australia, but returned to Scotland after the death of their eldest son, Thomas. When I last talked about them (Jan 2003), I thought that the girl recorded in the Scots records as Christina was probably the same one who was in the Australian records as Kestrina, but I had no further information on any of the children. I have since learned a bit more about some of the kids.

In Glasgow, in 1880, “Christina” was married to a John Christie, but that’s all I know about them. Margaret Herald’s daughter Mary Ann seems to have led a bit harder life. The 1891 census for Shettleston, Lanark, had this entry: Mary Ann Coubrough, Unm, 27, Inmate of the Refuge, born Australia. The census page I saw didn’t give the name of the institution, but I think it must have been some sort of women's shelter or hospital. The 25 women listed on the page ranged in age from 11 to 68; a few were widows, but most were unmarried, and all were listed as "inmates of the refuge." Possibly Mary was that pariah of Victorian society—an unwed mother? She had not been living at home with her family in the 1881 census, when she would have been about 17, so perhaps she had already gone out to work by then. Unfortunately, that is currently the end of her story, but she’s still on my list.

2. Quite some time ago, I saw an index entry for a boy named Samuel Waterson Coubrough, and knew that he had been born in Eastwood parish, in 1887. Since I long ago found out that Margaret Steele Coubrough, married Samuel Waterson in Eastwood, I assumed the boy was related to them and never got around to looking further. Thanks to Barbara McCue, we now know the names of his parents, but they weren’t who you might expect.

We knew that Margaret Clarke MacDonald, Margaret Steele’s mother, had died when the girl was about eight or nine years old, and that the girl’s father, Robert, had married a young widow, Mary Sandilands, who had a small daughter of her own. Robert and Mary had three more children, but only the middle one, David, seems to have survived childhood. Robert himself died in May 1857, leaving his poor wife widowed again. In spite of her hard-luck life, Mary was a woman deeply concerned about all her children, whether she had borne them or not. Margaret seems to have grown very fond of her step-mother—so fond, in fact, that not only was Margaret married from Mary’s house (as one might expect of a young woman with no other family), but she also named her first daughter after her step-mother, rather than after her own mother. Margaret’s family lived only a few doors from Mary for many years, until Mary’s death in 1903.

Margaret’s half-brother, David, was the only other one of their father’s children to stay in Thornliebank. Though he moved his family to Montréal (Canada) sometime after 1906, he and Mary McKay Smith were married in Thornliebank, in 1891, and all thirteen of their children were born there. For quite some time, we had thought that David and Mary had had ten children; then last year we found they were the parents of the twins Essie Briton and Charles Gilroy, who had both died within a few weeks of their birth. Now, Barbara McCue has discovered a birth registration showing Samuel Waterson Coubrough, born January 13, 1887, to be their fourth child. Samuel is not a common name in the Coubrough family, and I had wondered where it came from. Upon further reflection, though, it makes sense.

David had been barely a year old when his father died, and only about 10 when his sister married, so it wouldn’t be odd for him to be close to the man his older sister had married, especially given the apparent deep affection the family had for each other. In a small town, one would expect families to be heavily intermarried, so as an Irish-born outsider, Samuel Waterson was probably doubly intriguing to a young boy. Under these circumstances, it would be no real surprise that David and Mary might have named their son after a man David admired.

Barbara has also come up with a few more clues to the origin of the names of some of David and Mary’s other children. It seems that the twins were named after people who not only lived near Mary and David, but were probably related (though we haven’t quite figured out exactly how, yet). Charles Gilroy King, b 1856, son of William King and Helen Gilroy, was a doctor, who seems to have been the namesake of two of Mary and David’s sons. And Essie Britton, who lived just down the street from the Coubroughs, was the daughter of Joseph Britton and Jane Hutchison, is the woman Charles Gilroy Coubrough’s twin sister was called after. A girl named Agnes Hutchison, also in Thornliebank, had a daughter name Agnes Coubrough Hutchison. We don’t know for sure yet whether the child’s mother was Jane’s sister, but it seems probable that the baby’s father was a Coubrough. (Now we just have to find out which one.)

3. Speaking of intermarried families, there is a possibility that David’s mother-in-law was related to his other half-sister, Isabella Gunn. When Mary Sandilands married Robert Coubrough, she was the widow of a man named William Gunn, and she had one child: a daughter named Isabella. Since Mary’s own mother was another Mary, it doesn’t seem much of a stretch to think that the child was called after her father’s relation. We have as yet no proof, but in a tiny place like Thornliebank, it seems unlikely that there was no connection whatever.

4. A while back, I wrote that, within a few years of his death in 1857, Robert Coubrough’s three oldest sons had all moved to England. I also wrote that they had all married raised their families there, but that I hadn’t known much about any of their children. Thanks to Maureen Allen, that has changed and I now know a bit more.

By 1861, Robert, the oldest, was no longer at his step-mother’s home , so he was probably the first to go to England. By 1866, when he was about 24 years old, he had established himself as a draper at Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, and on August 23 of that year, had married Mary Ann Bowers, daughter of a type founder, in South Hackney parish, Middlesex. I have already told how poor Mary Ann was 29 years old and had been married for less than eight years when she died in the early summer of 1874. I also said that she had died at the birth of her seventh child, but on closer inspection of the dates, the boy, Arthur, was as much as 9 months old when his mother died. Given how close all the others were, however, it is just as likely that she died in the birth of her eighth child, as from complications with the seventh. I had thought that Margaret MacDonald Coubrough, born October 1868, was Mary Ann’s first child. This was not so: Mary Ann had given birth to a stillborn son late in 1867, so Margaret was just the first one who lived. She was followed, in late 1869 or early 1870, by a boy named Robert; then by another stillborn boy at the end of 1870; James, in the summer of 1871; Eleanor, in the summer of 1872; and Arthur Robert, in the fall of 1873. Neither Robert, James nor Eleanor lived more than three months, and while Arthur managed to grow up, he was said to be “feeble minded,” perhaps a victim of whatever complication had taken his mother’s life. According to the 1901 census, he worked as a “chaff cutter” but I don’t know if he ever married. Arthur’s only full sister, Margaret, married James Theophilus Barber, late in 1893, in Edmonton (near London), England. Margaret’s first child, James Theophilus, was born in Edmonton in the summer of 1894. She was the one who reported her father’s death to the registrar in 1912. I don’t yet know anything else about her, but she, too, is still on the list.

Last time, I said that Mary Ann’s widower had remarried, though pretty much all I knew was her name: Catherine Amelia Channer. I have since found that she was the daughter of a farmer, Thomas Channer, and was about 10 years younger than her new husband. Our Robert was a busy man. His first wife had borne at least seven children in eight years of marriage. Now, he and Catherine would have nine more children, starting in the spring of 1877 with a stillborn girl. This unfortunate child was followed by: Jessie, spring 1880; Amelia, late 1882, Mabel Catherine, spring 1884, Gertrude Mabel, late winter 1887; Alexander, late fall 1889; Kate, about February 1891; Thomas, late fall 1892, and Constance, spring 1897. Little Mabel Catherine died in the spring of 1875, just before her first birthday, but all the others grew up. So far, I know very little about any of these children, except that Gertrude Mabel married a man named Wellington in 1917, and Kate married a Palmer in 1919. Amelia was married in 1909, but I don’t know her husband’s name. Nor do I yet know if any of these girls had any children.

We know Robert’s next younger brother, John MacDonald, married Annie Inwood and had five children. Annie Inwood died in December 1899, and John married Louisa Adcock before the March 1901 census, but we still don’t know the exact date. John and Annie’s son, John, married Ethel Swannell in Hitchin, in about 1902, but I still don’t know if they had any kids. John and Annie, of course, were the great-grandparents of Carolyn Willis, of Tallahassee, Florida.

When I last wrote of James (16) and his wife, Sarah Hewish, they had had seven children, James had died in 1892, of peritonitis, and Sarah in 1908, of pneumonia. All but one of the children had grown up and had families of their own. Here is an update.

William James, b 1877, married Emma Marchant, 13 Dec 1903, at St. Mary Hornsey, Islington, London. They had four children: William Henry, 1904; Winifred Gertrude, 1906; Gracie Phyllis, 1911; and Doris May, 1915. Winifred married Thomas William Stapley in 1931, but I have no further information on the others.

Margaret MacDonald, better known as Maggie, was born November 1, 1878. She had a son named Stanley MacDonald Coubrough, b 1896, and a daughter Alice Lillian, b 1898, fathers not named. October 1, 1899, she married Christopher Gibbs, by whom she had two more girls: Annie, 1899, and Helen, 1900.

Richard David, b 1880, was probably married in 1903, but I don’t know his wife’s name, nor whether they had any children.

John Robert, b 1882, married Jessie Mothershead in 1915; no other information so far.

Harry Hewish, b 1885, but we don’t know anything else about him.

Bessie Emma, b 1887, married Arthur George Lee, a clerk, on December 21, 1912. No other information yet.

Horace, b. November, d December 13, 1888.

5. One of the earliest family records I have is for Mathew Coubrough and Jonet Sheirer, whose first son, John, was born February 24, 1664, in Campsie parish. We know that Mathew C and Jonet Sheirer had at least five children: John, b May 1658; James, February 1660; Margaret, December 1661; William, February 1664; and James, b November 1666, all in Campsie parish. The old parish registers in Scotland rarely record dates of death or burial, so we don’t know how many of them grew up to raise families of their own. It is probably safe to assume that the first James died before the second James was born, but after William, (17) but there is otherwise no indication of what happened to them after they were baptised. Nor did we know what happened to their parents, at least until recently.

Fortunately, parish registers are not the only source available. About two years ago, the General Register Office for Scotland began digitising all of the old wills and testaments in their archives. The aim was to not only make the documents as widely available as possible, but to reduce wear and tear on the original documents. Some of these are 500 years old, and, as you can imagine, getting rather fragile. Anyway, a few months ago, I downloaded copies of several of these old documents and have begun transcribing them. The ones from the late 1700s and 1800s, in a fairly modern script, are quite easy to read and I finished three of the four in a few hours each. The other two, from 1669 and 1676, are something of a challenge.

The one dated 1669 is the testament dative of Jonet Sheirer’s husband, Mathew Coubrough. In general, this type of document was drawn up after a person died without a will, and included a summary of the person’s assets and debts. It was often used to determine the person’s net worth and to determine which creditors got paid. Under Scots law, a living wife was entitled to one-third of the estate, any living children split another third between them (18) , and the last third, known as “the dead’s part,” was his or hers to dispose of as they saw fit

Mathew’s document, being only a testament dative (19) , doesn’t’ tell us his last wishes, but it does give us a few more bits of information. We learn that he died in 1669, and that his wife was still living at the time; her survival is not explicitly stated, but since she was the one who made the inventory, we safely say she was alive. It does give a fairly detailed summary of his net worth, including a “deid’s part to be divided in 3 parts,” but I haven’t managed to figure it all out yet. The text is all hand-written, of course, and 17^th-Century writing was quite different from modern writing. Not only were the shapes of the letters different, but there were 28 letters in the Scots alphabet (two are no longer used), the text is a mixture of English, Scots and Latin, the dates are a mixed Arabic and Roman numerals, and there are herds of abbreviations—some standard, some not. Add to this my imperfect knowledge of 17^th-Century legal phrases and the not very neat handwriting , and you have my whole catalogue of feeble excuses for not having finished it yet.

The 1676 paper is a testament dative for Jonet Coubrough, wife of John Thomson. I have figured out that John Thomson was the one who made the inventory, so he survived her, and Jonet probably died quite young. She and John had a son who was only about 13 or 14 months old when Jonet died in August 1676. This boy, James, was the only child of Jonet that I found record of, but I can’t say for sure if he was her only child; regardless, she probably wasn’t more than 45 and likely a lot younger. I haven’t hacked through the whole thing yet, (same excuses, though the hand-writing is marginally better), but it does appear that there is also a fairly detailed list of her “goods and geir.”

I intend to print the transcripts (some year) as I think they will be interesting, even if I haven’t successfully proven our connection to either of these people. Watch this space for updates.

6. In January 2000, I told you that farms marked on the map (p25) were most likely the original 1905 homesteads. This is probably not the case as the original homesteads were at McTaggart, much closer to Weyburn.

The Ogema history book (1961) says that one of the Coubrough boys walked to Weyburn and back for a Christmas turkey. The walk from McTaggart would have been about 3 or 4 miles each way—certainly a long enough stroll to be carting a turkey, but perhaps not quite as bad as the trip from Ogema, as I first thought.

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Reunion News

The 2005 Reunion, to be held somewhere in Scotland, is still a go, but I have no further details right now. Be sure to watch this space for news. I will also post information on the web site as it becomes available.

Question corner

Here are some of the things I am working on. If you know the answer, please don’t keep it to yourself. The rest of us would dearly love to know too.

1. I have long believed that the 10-year gap between James Coubrough and Jean Muir’s sons Robert (1795) and Matt (1805) must have had other children in it. I still haven’t found out who they were, but I think we have found one in the four-year space between the first William (1791) and Robert. I told you a while back that the International Genealogical Index (IGI) lists a boy named Thomas Coubrough, born May 20, 1793, in Eastwood parish, son of Janet Muir and Thomas Cowbrough. More recently, Barbara McCue (Thornliebank), took a look at a microfilm copy of the original register, and it now seems likely that the boy’s mother was Jane, not Janet, and that his father’s name was more likely to have been James than Thomas. The only Coubroughs to be found in the Eastwood register between 1791 and 1800 are James and Jean, so Barbara and I think that the boy was most likely the son of James Cowbrough and Jean Muir. The mystery children between Robert and Matt are still a mystery.

2. Still looking for space alien Annie’s family. As I mentioned last time, there is a possibility that her family came to Canada via Cape Breton, but as yet I have no further information one way or the other.

There is also the possibility, just occurred to me, that Annie’s daughters may have been named after her sisters. Annie's first daughter was Flora Jane, after Annie’s mother and Jim’s mother. Was Mary Anne named after Annie’s oldest sister and Annie herself? Was Barbara Ann called after her father’s sisters? Jim’s first two sisters were Barbara and Ann. Did Annie have a sister named Mary?

She certainly had a brother named Ronald, which we know because he was living with Matt and Liz in 1901. Coll MacDonald who held the mortgage on Annie’s land was probably her brother or a close cousin. The deed when Coll bought that land was witnessed by a William MacDonald, who was most likely a relative of Coll’s, and therefore, of Annie’s. If they were all her brothers, one of them may have had her father's name, if there was a way to figure out which one was older.

3. I mentioned a while back that Jean Muir’s husband James might be the son of Malcolm Coubrough and Margaret Waters, who had had a son James christened in Campsie parish in 1752. I noted that if this had been the case, Jean Muir’s first son should have been called Malcolm, but that Jean’s father was called James, and the boy could have been named after him. It has since occurred to me that perhaps James Jr. might have been the first son who lived, rather than the first son. If a previous child called Malcolm had died after James was born, but before the one we know as Malcolm (1787), it would explain why the second boy was given that name. James and Jean are one of my favourite mysteries and I keep hoping to find something new about them.

5. About a year ago, Mr. Bill Dowswell told us that Grampa Jim was a merchant sailor on Lake Huron. My questions were: What did he do? Was he an officer or an ordinary seaman? What ships did he sail on? Well we now have some answers—of sorts. According to his obituary, he was the engineer on the steam tug (20) Beaver. If he really was the engineer, he would have been one of the senior men on the boat, though “engineer” could also have meant that he was one of the “black gang” who fed the steamer’s boilers with wood or coal. I haven’t yet found anything about the Beaver, but I’m looking.

6. A while ago, I came across a little boy named Samuel Kane Coubrough in a death register index. As we know, Samuel is not a common name in the tribe, and Kane is even less so. I had no idea to whom he belonged, but with such an unusual name, I didn’t think he’d be hard to find. Well, I had that part right: he wasn’t hard to find; his mother was a different story.

A couple of months ago, Barbara McCue bought a copy of Samuel’s death registration, which said that he had been 16 months old when he died of bronchitis on April 5, 1907. The registration didn’t list his father, but the child’s death had been reported by his guardian, John Kane. According to Barbara, it was–and is—against the law in Scotland to register the name of a child’s father unless he is there in person to admit his paternity (possibly the reason so many illegitimate children were christened with the names of their fathers). This law, coupled with the guardian’s name, made it seem fairly obvious that the child’s father had been a Samuel Kane, but even though the registration gave her name, the boy’s mother is still a mystery.

We know that Samuel’s mother was Annie Coubrough, domestic servant, but there were at least four women by that name who would have been the right age at the right time, and possibly in the right place. We are no further ahead than we were before, so for now, he will have to stay on the alien list.

7. Grampa Matt’s sister Barbara has been a perennial subject of this column. We know she moved to the US sometime after the 1881 census but before that of 1891. Since the advent of the picture, “my cousin Barbara Lochland”, bearing the imprint of photographer’s from that city, we have assumed that she went to Minneapolis. We do not know when she married, or where; nor do we know her husband’s first name, or even the correct spelling of his surname—alien list material if there ever was. According to her father’s obituary, Barbara did live in Minneapolis. The writer called her “Mrs. Laflan,” but he spelled Grampa Jim’s last name incorrectly: Can we trust him to have spelled Barbara’s right? The Dresden Times index has several Coubrough marriage notices. When next I go there, I will check them again. The paper began publication about 1885, but maybe we’ll be lucky.

8. Another Eastwood Coubrough who is something of a mystery is one Euphemia, born 1854, daughter of John Coubrough and Mary Ewing. A marriage record for her shows she married Stewart Raeburn in 1875, but the birth records for three of her children, all born after 1885, don’t name Stewart Raeburn as the father of any of them. Her 1910 death certificate says she was “married to Stewart Raeburn,” wording that usually means the spouse was still living, but if he was still alive at the time his wife died, why wasn’t he the father of any of her children? Were they estranged? Was he in a prison or other institution? Stewart and Euphemia don’t seem to have had any children together. Perhaps he disappeared soon after they married? Why did she wait 12 years to start having kids with other men? Yet another mystery.

9. I have mentioned John Coubrough & Jonet Buchanan, at the head of the Strathblane line. All their children were baptised in Campsie, but John later moved to Strathblane. All this time, I thought that John and Jonet had eight children: Christian, 1704; Margaret, 1705; Christian, 1708; Jonet, 1710; Jean, 1712; John, 1717; James, 1719; & William, 1723. (In the IGI, the 1723 child is Katherine, but I believe the register says William.) I was rather surprised to find another girl, Agnes, apparently baptised the same day as James. Was she the child thought to be James? Or James’ twin?

Footnotes:

1. Lee is related to us through another direction as well. His grandmother was the sister of Nels Eden, husband of Annie Coubrough.

2. See January 2003 edition.

3. This story has as much fact as possible, but I have taken some license with the details.

4. This inequity was because women were paid less than men, even if they were equally skilled.

5. Lacking any written record, we may never know whether Matt was born in Halifax or St. John. St. John is given in the 1861, 1871, and 1881 censuses while Matt was still in his parents’ home, as well as the 1901 census, when he was in his own home. The 1891 census gives Halifax, but it is the only such mention.

6. Ontario was "Upper Canada" until the "union of the Canadas" in 1841. After that, it was Canada West (Quebec was Canada East) until Confederation in 1867, when they became the provinces of Ontario and Quebec.

7. Annie, Barbara, & Mathew Atwell.

8. Antoine Lumiere had shown the first moving picture in Lyon, France, on December 28, 1895. Two of his sons would become famous as the fathers of cinematography.

9. The Wright brothers Silver Dart flew at Kitty Hawk about 6 months before Jim died.

10. Eequivalent to several dollars a word today.

11. Marconi’s famous "letter S" had been sent from Signal Hill, in St. John’s, Newfoundland, to a station in Ireland, in December, 1901.

12. The picture shown in the paper was similar to this one, except with no cap, but was so poor that I could not reproduce it here.

13. These are the spellings that were in the paper.

14. I don’t know which Brown this is, but I don’t think he is ours.

15. This is roughly $600/ week or $2400/ month in 2003 dollars—not bad wages for peeling tomatoes!

16. Youngest of Margaret Clark MacDonald’s four children.

17. If he had died earlier, the third boy would probably have been called James, rather than William.

18. If the spouse was no longer living, the children were entitled to one-half of the estate, to be shared between them.

19. There were several types of documents related to distributing a person’s worldly goods: a testament dative is a summary of assets and debts; an inventory is a detailed list of the person’s assets, and a will or testament was a document made by th e owner of the goods, saying how he or she wanted them distributed.

20. The obituary just says "tug", but it had to be a steamer. A sailing ship, having no engines, needed no engineer; diesel, electric, & turbine engines had not yet been invented.