Blog Post Thirteen
Photo by Eniko Polgar
Voice of My Pioneer
I used to recoil at the thought of filtering through old newspapers, straining my eyes to scan through every article in hope that it might mention someone in my family tree. To be honest, I thought combing the newspapers would be a tremendous waste of time. I was absolutely wrong. In 2020, I subscribed to two online newspaper archive websites and was utterly shocked and thrilled with how much material I found beyond birth announcements, obituaries, and notices to creditors which are all extremely valuable. My entire paternal family all settled in a small town in rural Manitoba around the turn of the century and remained there in large numbers for approximately the next eighty years. When I first started using newspaper databases like Newspaper Archive.com and Newspapers.com, I chose to do surname searches because I knew I would find a lot of ancestors that way. I worked through the results like a checklist over the course of a few weeks because, yes, there were thousands of mentions in this local newspaper over an eighty year period. The small newspaper has hundreds of articles about my various relations contributing to different local clubs or organizations across the decades, and playing for local sports teams like hockey, baseball, and curling. The little mentions in the local newspaper have given me so much context about the daily lives and hobbies of several people in my family tree that I can’t believe I ever avoided old newspapers.
Take a Look, It’s in a Book
Once I finished filtering through the search results for my own surname I started a new search with the same strategy but with my paternal grandmother’s maiden name, Metcalfe. Amongst the results was a very brief mention of my 2nd great grandmother Elizabeth “Lizzie” Metcalfe, or Mrs. Thomas Metcalfe as she was often called in the paper. This small clipping was from a 1978 edition of The Winnipeg Free Press which was curious to me because Lizzie died in 1972. The article is about a few episodes of a radio show on CBC Radio called Voice of The Pioneer hosted by Bill McNeil. McNeil loved oral history and spent many years speaking to older people across Canada to get their stories; he started recording these stories around the time of Canada’s centennial in 1967. The clipping refers to the profiles that were upcoming and much to my surprise one of the profiles is about Lizzie. I started trying to track down this recording. I filled out a form on the CBC Archives website figuring I would hear something within 6-12 months. As I researched the radio show I learned something even better, McNeil had put those recorded stories into book form and published six volumes of pioneer stories also called Voice of The Pioneer. What luck! I thought, even if I can’t get my hands on the audio I could surely find Lizzie’s printed story in one of these books. The problem was, I had no idea which volume Lizzie’s story was in and in researching the books online I could only find two of them, still without a clue as to if her story was in either volume. This was going to mean buying at least one, if not both, to find out. I bought a used copy of the first volume in 2021 and, much to my disappointment, her story was not there. The good news was that I didn’t spend very much on it and it has a lot of really great pioneers’ stories so the book is still quite valuable, in my opinion, when it comes to Canadian history and the experiences of pioneers, immigrants, and farmers. Soon after, I found a different volume from the book series. The book was listed for an absurd price so I kept it on my wish list for two years until I found a copy for considerably less. Still, with no idea if Lizzie’s story was there, I bought the book and hoped for the best because I was not at all sure I would be able to track down the other volumes. When that book arrived in the mail I couldn’t flip through those pages fast enough and, there it was, “We Only Knew We Were Heading West” by Mrs. Thomas Metcalfe[1]. At two and a half pages in length, I felt so lucky to have actually managed to find Lizzie’s story no matter what it was about. The story she tells is about how she, along with her parents and eleven siblings, moved from Ontario to Manitoba in the early 1890s.
Winnipeg Free Press, 20 Apr 1978, p.29
Looking for a Place to Happen
Lizzie’s father, Alfred Maynard, was a blacksmith born in Kent, England in the summer of 1843. In 1857, Alfred along with his parents and younger brothers had immigrated to North America aboard the American Congress[2] arriving at the New York port. They made their way to Canada and first settled in Ontario in the York area outside of Toronto[3] in 1861 and it was around this time that Alfred met Harriet Parr. Harriet was first generation Canadian from an Irish family living in the Peel area of Toronto; Alfred was 23 years old when he and Harriet were married in 1867 in Woodbridge, Ontario[4]. Sometime after their wedding Alfred and Harriet relocated to Simcoe County in the Tecumseth area near Barrie where Alfred continued making a living blacksmithing. Lizzie was the third of Alfred and Harriet’s twelve children and the Maynards are said to have made many friends in the county over the decades. But, this was not a place a family could grow crops or raise cattle; Alfred’s desire to have farm land of his own influenced the family to move west where the land was plentiful and opportunity was on the horizon. Alfred had likely been reading about the possibilities in the prairies in the newspapers advertising about opportunities to apply for land grants to establish a farm, make a living, and build a homestead to pass down to future generations. In 1892, the year their twelfth and last child was born, Alfred traveled to Manitoba to see for himself what the province had to offer. After considering Carnduff Alfred heard about Dauphin, explored the area, decided it was the best place to build a new homestead, and headed back to Simcoe County to sell what he could before making a big change.[5] After twenty-five years in southern Ontario the Maynard family packed up and moved to Manitoba in 1894.
Rock Me Like a Wagon Wheel
In her story, Lizzie briefly recounts her early years and how hard farming was for her parents in Ontario as the land was rocky and not suited to farming. But, when farming was a necessary was of life, the solution could only be moving west. Alfred was no stranger to manual labour, as Lizzie notes in her story, and the idea of moving west and starting fresh in order to have a successful farm appealed greatly to the Maynards. After a couple of decades not progressing on poor land, Lizzie remembers she and her siblings being very excited to leave Ontario but she does remember the year incorrectly. She believes the move happened around 1883[6] but her youngest siblings were born after that in same place in Ontario they had always lived so, the move wouldn’t have happened until the mid-1890s. Lizzie recalls that there wasn’t really a solid plan to move west, they just packed their belongings and piled themselves into a large single wagon. They travelled until the roads became rocky paths as they moved through northern Ontario which is notoriously rocky terrain. Often, parts of the wagon would break and Alfred would have to repair it but this meant losing as much as an entire day to do so. The weather was either hot and dry or cold and wet for days at a time, and the bugs were relentless, according to Lizzie. The Maynards never really knew where they were going or where they ended up until they asked a man on a horse. He informed them they were in Manitoba and Alfred decided they had travelled far enough; it was the small and newly formed settlement of Dauphin they had reached[7]. Alfred went on to become one of the most significant people in establishing the successful farming and agricultural community in Dauphin which continues to thrive to this day. For Lizzie, farming the land no longer seemed so difficult, the journey to reach such prosperity was the hardest part.
Louder than Words
Newspapers have provided me with considerable context to my ancestors’ lives. Without that 1978 article in the newspaper, and without the digital archive that keeps it, I never would have known Lizzie had been interviewed by Bill McNeil or that her story was also in a book. Without the newspapers, I never would have been able to read letters written to the paper by Alfred about his travels to California where he speaks so passionately about the agriculture in the state. Because of these papers, I’ve been able to read the words of a small handful of my ancestors which is a real gift. Newspapers, especially small town papers, add so much colour to a person’s life; once you know the important facts it’s so rewarding to fill in the blanks about what they did with their lives in between being born, getting married, and dying. Knowing Lizzie’s first-hand experience about how gruelling traveling by horse and wagon across central Canada was before the turn of the century is so valuable to those of us who did not have the pleasure of knowing her. Do yourself a favour and include newspaper archives in all of your research ventures, you absolutely will not regret it.
[1] Mrs. Thomas Metcalfe, “We Only Knew We Were Heading West,” in Voice of the Pioneer, Volume Two, Bill McNeil, (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1984), 197-199.
[2] New York, U.S., Arriving Passenger and Crew Lists (including Castle Garden and Ellis Island), 1820-1959. Ancestry database.
[3] Maynard household, 1861 Census of Canada, Vaughan, York, Canada West, District 03, population schedule, page 83, Ancestry database.
[4] Maynard-Parr marriage, 31 Mar 1867, Woodbridge, York, Ontario, Canada.
[5] Dauphin Valley Spans the Years. (Dauphin: Dauphin Historical Society, 1970), 116; imaged, University of Manitoba (digitalcollections.lib.umanitoba.ca : accessed 26 April 2021).
[6] Metcalfe, “We Only Knew We Were Heading West,” 197.
[7] Metcalfe, “We Only Knew We Were Heading West,” 198.