Blog Post Eight
Photo by C M
Finding the Blains, Part 3
Contextually Speaking
In the previous installment I found a cemetery record transcribed by the Manitoba Genealogical Society for William Blain which gave me more important information in the search for William’s death record. He was buried in an unmarked grave in January 1918 but I needed some context here. Why had his grave been left unmarked? Why is there no death record for William? Was his burial rushed? Was there a backlog of burials to perform and death records to write and register? Perhaps because this year in question, 1918, was the year that the Spanish flu wiped out large populations of people around the world, this was the pandemic that lasted about two years and slowly made its way to most corners of Canada. It is possible that William’s death could have occurred at a time when Winnipeg could have become bogged down with the flu and its resulting deaths. My next move was to research the Spanish flu in Manitoba and figure out if my theory was possible. I searched the Winnipeg newspapers from the time and it looks as though the Spanish flu was not mentioned before the summer of 1918 and William had already died by then. In the August 30th, 1918 edition of the Winnipeg Free Press it is mentioned that the flu had created a pandemic in Europe but that there had been isolated cases in New York by that summer but the local experts in Winnipeg were not at all concerned about the flu getting out of control when it reached their city. It seems the pandemic did not hit Winnipeg until the autumn so, it did not look like my theory could be confirmed, the Spanish flu had not yet hit Manitoba when William died.
Winnipeg Free Press, August 30, 1918.
Take Me to Church
Feeling like I had hit a wall again, I thought I would backtrack and consider two things: church records from the Anola area of Manitoba when William lived there with his daughter’s family towards the end of his life, and church records from the Ottawa area when the Blains and some of my other ancestors lived there raising their children. Neither would help me with William’s death specifically but church records can mention the names of their congregation for any reason, and the Ottawa region records could also help with my search for William’s wife Jane because she died in this region. I had no idea what church any of these ancestors attended, only that they were Presbyterians. While a Presbyterian church could be found in neighbouring towns, there were no Presbyterian churches in Anola. In fact, Presbyterian and Methodist services were held in a local schoolhouse in those days so the chances of any records existing are slim. Presbyterianism is rooted in the Church of Scotland but did suffer division in the 1840s which split the followers in Canada between two national head churches in the 1870s: the Presbyterian Church of Canada and the United Church of Canada, the latter being where the majority of Presbyterians and Methodists in the county joined.
The 1891 Census of Canada, Ontario, Russell, lists the Blains as Presbyterian.
I knew one of my ancestors was listed in the directory of Ottawa and surrounding areas from 1871 and I knew that the Blains had lived in the area too but never had their name show up in my search results, possibly due to a spelling error. Previously, I mentioned William’s daughter Susan. She was married in this region so I checked the marriage record for a name of a church or a Reverend who would have performed the marriage. Sure enough, a Reverend William Moore was listed but not the church or denomination he belonged to, only the denominations of the bride and groom. It was not uncommon for clergymen to travel around a specific region performing marriages and baptisms if churches were few and far between and it often didn’t matter if the clergyman’s religion and the citizen’s religion were the same or not. If a family wasn’t near a church, they couldn’t afford to be particular about it. So, Reverend William Moore may have been from the Presbyterian Church but it was not guaranteed.
Ontario, Canada Marriages, 1857-1924 showing the name of the Reverend William Moore.
So, I had a religion, and the name of a reverend who may have been from a Presbyterian church. I hoped the directory would have a list of churches and their denominations listed so I started from the beginning of the directory. Sure enough, I found Reverend William Moore listed as Presbyterian pastor for the Bank Street Church in Ottawa. It’s worth noting that city directories actually have a wealth of historical facts in them; they often include a brief history of the city up to that point, list the prices of goods, names of business, not just the names of the families living around there. Well, I say families, but the lists only have one entry per family and that’s always the head of the household and that’s often always a man so that’s who you have to look for. I knew my other ancestors from Ireland were living in Cumberland Township but there was no sign of the Blains there so I knew I would have to comb through the directory to figure it out. After going through four directories, page by page, I came up empty handed once again.
Canada, City and Area Directories, 1819-1906; Ontario, Ottawa, 1870 describing Bank Street Presbyterian Church and noting Reverend William Moore.
It was at this point I decided to take a break with the search for a death record for William Blain with the intention of coming back to it after a few months when I may find newly released records to work with. In genealogy, sometimes you have to know when to press pause on researching an ancestor once you feel like you’ve run out of places to search. I chose to shift focus to William’s wife, my Scottish 3rd great grandmother Jane Ward Blain.