I have previously recounted the immigration to Canada of my great grandparents Alexander Shand Hadden, his wife Jessie McKenzie Gaull and their children, Alexander (or Alec, as he was known), Andrew (Andy), John (Jock), and Edith in 1923. Alexander and his middle son Andy were the first to immigrate, followed later in the year by Jessie and the remaining three children.

I was delighted then when Ancestry.com this week announced that they had added the Canadian Ocean Arrivals passenger declarations (Form 30A) database. This group of records contains the images of the pre-printed form that all passengers, adults and children, arriving at Canadian ports were required to complete. The form was officially in use between June 1, 1921 and December 31, 1924. Only those enroute to the United States were exempt from completing the form. I immediately searched the database and found the Form 30A for all six members of the family, although I had some extra work to do in finding Andy as his form was incorrectly transcribed so that he appears in the index as Andrea Samuel Hadden!

Alexander and Andy sailed on August 10, 1923 from Glasgow, Scotland aboard the S. S. Marloch, picture above. The ship had been christened in 1904 and made its maiden voyage in 1905, originally named as the Victorian, and had accommodation for over 1,600 passengers, the majority of whom, like the Hadden family, sailed 3rd class. Alexander listed that his current occupation was ‘Seaman’ but that his intended occupation was ‘Farm Work.’ He carried three pounds in British currency with him to allow he and Andy to join his mother, Mrs. Helen Gammie, at their destination.

Jessie, Alec, John, and Edith sailed on November 9, 1923 aboard the S. S. Metagama, all bound for Aneroid, Saskatchewan – and their first Canadian prairie winter.

As British subjects, they were not required to complete an immigration application or naturalization papers in order to immigrate to Canada (this would change but not until 1947) so the Form 30A is a great document to now have for the family, documenting their departure from Scotland and confirming my Canadian roots. Of course, I was also pleased to note from the forms that they reported no family members were physically or mentally “defective,” there was no tuberculosis, and no one was “Otherwise debarred under Canadian Immigration Law.”

We have a tendency today to pride ourselves on the advances made with household conveniences. There is a gadget or tool to do almost everything. We can chop, peel, clean and disinfect like never before. Our grocery stores are filled with not only fresh, organic foods but also with ready made or instant everything. Along the way to our modern world though, we have also given up some conveniences – the delivery of some food and products right to our front door. Ice was delivered for the ‘ice box,’ the predecessor of the refrigerator, coal was delivered through a chute to basement coal bins for furnaces, bread and assorted pastries were left at the front door, and milk and dairy products dropped off on porches or in really ‘modern’ homes, placed in a milk chute. The process was simple for residents of the home – you left the empty, glass milk bottles on the porch along with a note detailing your order for the milkman to ‘fill.’ Payment was by personal cheque, not credit card, left, again, with the milk bottle empties.

My grandfather, John Gaull Hadden, and his brother, Alexander Gaull Hadden, were two such delivery men in the first half of the twentieth century. Alexander, or Uncle Alec as he was known to me, my father and his siblings, was a Brown’s Bread delivery man in Toronto. Uncle Alec is pictured above standing beside his horse-drawn delivery wagon. Many years ago, when Uncle Alec identified himself in the photo for me, he also informed me of the location of the photo, taken in 1928. Although there are only fields behind him and no buildings within sight, today that location is considered to be an older, very urban part of Toronto’s east end.

My grandfather, John, delivered milk for Silverwood’s Dairy with whom he was employed for over 35 years, beginning his dairy career on December 17, 1935. In 1947, he became a milk route inspector and, in 1953, a milk route foreman. As a child, my grandfather employed me as his ‘assistant’ – my job was to accompany him to the dairy on Sunday afternoons to balance his books, using a large. pull lever, adding machine. The pay was perfect from my perspective – a small carton of chocolate milk, fresh off the assembly line. Those were the days!

As the result of a car accident in August 1970, John was unable to return to his milk route and so he retired in February 1971.

I was fortunate enough to receive a summary of my grandfather’s employment record with Silverwood’s Dairy through a simple request to them many years ago for the information. With the more recent concerns and issues about privacy, I am not as certain I would be as successful with the same request today. But it costs nothing to ask and the rewards of obtaining this information are well worth the effort.

Happy Thanksgiving to my American, or at least transplanted Canadian and Scottish, friends and relatives. Today, across the USA, Thanksgiving dinner is being served at family gatherings and for genealogists, it is all about families. “Disturbing the dead and irritating the living” as the saying goes!

As my mother was born in Detroit, I must admit to occasionally feeling ties to my neighbours to the south. When I was young, I can now admit, these feelings typically resulted in feigning a mysterious illness so that I could stay home from school and watch the Macey’s Thanksgiving Day parade on television. My recollection is that it sometimes worked but if I held the thermometer on the light bulb for too long, my mother, the trained nurse that she was, just didn’t buy the 114 Fahrenheit degree fever that I was faking.

Here, in Canada, we celebrated Thanksgiving, a harvest holiday celebrated in various forms around the world, last month. In my family, we have started breaking away somewhat from the North American tradition of the big turkey dinner – likely something that would have been good news to the ‘bird’ pictured above with my cousin, Donald Hadden, in a photo taken in Garrick, Saskatchewan in the late 1930’s.

So to my cousin David Hadden and his family in Florida and Louisiana, Hadden descendants that I’ve learned are in the Pasadena, California area, friends Doug and Suzie in Florida, and John Perkins and family in Louisiana, to the Kimmerly cousins known and unknown and, to the Faulkner and Knox cousins of my wife Ellen with whom we have not yet connected but one day hope to – enjoy your time together. I know that you are thankful for it.

One of the joys of family history for me is the ‘thrill of the chase.’ There are however some genealogical puzzles that just don’t seem to have a good solution – mysteries that remain mysteries. I come back time and again to these in the hope that I might see something new, some detail, no matter how obscure, that I seemed to have previously overlooked. One such puzzle concerns John Foley.

I have previously shared information and stories about my great grandfather John Foley who died in 1927 while on a business trip to Los Angeles, California. There are a number of reliable sources and documents that verify his death date. The puzzling aspect of John’s life is determining just when and where he was born.

The family lore surrounding John Foley’s life is the sometimes tragic tale of a man who in spite of being orphaned as a young boy and growing up unable to read or write, persevered to overcome personal and business setbacks to amass great wealth.

Moving back in time, the 1911 Census of Canada shows John living at 96 Pickering Street in Toronto with his second wife, Annie (McElroy), in addition to John’s three children from his first marriage and his son, John from his marriage to Annie. John is listed as being born in April 1865 in Ontario, Canada. In 1901, the Census of Canada shows John as a widow (his first wife Mary Jane Fitzgerald died in 1899) living in Toronto with his three children and an elderly housekeeper along with two boarders who appear to be the housekeeper’s children. Again, John is listed as being born in April 1865 in Ontario, Canada.

I have been unable to positively identify John in either the 1891 or 1881 Census of Canada which may be explainable through the family story that John made his living during this time of his life by working in the ‘bush’ – hunting and trapping. It just might be possible that as a result he wasn’t enumerated.

John is found again in the 1871 Census of Canada, this time living with his parents and siblings in Barrie, Ontario. John is listed as being born in Ontario, Canada and eight years of age, putting his year of birth at about 1863. To further support all that the census reports state, John listed his age as 29 when he married Mary Jane Fitzgerald in 1894 and gave his place of birth as Barrie, Ontario. This places his birth around 1865. When he married Annie McElroy in 1903, John gave his age as 39 and again his place of birth was given as Barrie, Ontario. This places his birth around 1864. A final piece of information – when John died, the rather large monument at his grave lists his date of birth as February 16, 1864 (pictured above left).

So here is the problem – the 1861 Census of Canada lists John living with his parents, William and Bridget, in Pickering Township, Ontario. Not only was this census obviously conducted prior to any birth date used at other times in his life but John is listed in 1861 as being born in the United States around 1859.

Thus far, all of my efforts to determine the when and where of John Foley’s birth has not solved the puzzle. Your mission, should you choose to accept it is to unravel this mystery and to please end my torment! Comments, tips, suggestions and, most of all, a solution are as always welcome.

No one knew Uncle Disney, in fact, no one had even heard of him. He was a rare find thanks primarily to a slow point in my research.

At a time when I didn’t know where to direct my research focus, a ‘dry spell’ as I refer to it, I decided to track the movement, if any, of my Gaull ancestors through Aberdeenshire using the Scottish census returns. I found John Gaull, my great great grandfather, listed in each census, taken every ten years, from 1861 through 1901. There was something different about the 1901 census however. Sure, John and his family were prospering on the the dairy farm that John ran at Cairnley, near Monymusk, Aberdeeenshire but listed as a family member was a month old infant named Disney Hay. Disney’s relationship to John, the head of the household, was listed as grandson.

In researching my ancestry, I’ve come to know this Gaull family well, or so I thought. Older relatives had told me stories of their time as children on the farm, of the trouble they had caused from time to time. But no where had there been a mention of anyone by the name of Disney nor was I aware of any of my great grandmother’s sisters marrying someone by the name of Hay. Who was this grandson?

To my astonishment, Disney Hay, I discovered, was the illegitimate son of my great grandmother, Jessie McKenzie Gaull. He was born on February 18, 1901 at the Cairnley farm. His father was a local farm servant also named Disney Hay. Jessie would later marry my great grandfather Alexander Shand Hadden and have three more boys, including my grandfather, John Gaull Hadden. Disney was my grandfather’s half brother and an uncle my father, his siblings and their first cousins would never know.

I don’t have a photo of Uncle Disney but do know that on the day he turned 18 years of age, standing all of 5 feet, 3 inches, with dark hair and blue eyes, he joined the Royal Navy. For the next 11 years, through to 1929, Disney served on a number of ships before being discharged to take up a civilian life. Disney eventually married and had a son Leonard.

More searching is required but one day, just maybe, I will have a photo through which I can really ‘meet’ Uncle Disney.

If you were to grow up as Ellen, you would have been born on a Friday in April 195? (a gentleman never really tells!). You would enter the world and be given the name Ellen Louise Wagner. The local newspapers on the day you were born would warn of an impending rail strike and the steelworkers would be threatening to strike for higher wages. Immigration would make the front page as news of the largest wave of Dutch immigrants to Canada, 1,300 in all, arrived in Halifax.

In sports, the New York Rangers hockey team were battling the Detroit Red Wings in the finals for the coveted Stanley Cup championship. The Rangers had been victorious in their ‘home’ game the night before played in Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens! Apparently, the Rangers own ‘Gardens’ at Madison Square, was unavailable for their use necessitating the home games being played away from home!

Automobiles, the ‘horseless carriages’ of a previous generation, were becoming more sophisticated and expensive but a bargain could still be found. The car ads on the day you were born boasted that a used 1949 Mercury, complete with a radio and a heater, was selling for $1,795.

If you grew up Ellen (pictured above, age 2), you were the youngest of four children born to a golf course designer and superintendent and a registered nurse. As the ‘baby’ of the family, your brothers and sister probably thought you got away with way too much – and they might have been right! You grew into a ‘Gidget’ type 1960’s look, full of a perky zest for life bubbling within a 5 foot petite frame.

As a adult, you would experience the ups and downs of life eventually to marry a tall, dark, and handsome man (okay, maybe I’ve embellished this last part in a somewhat self-serving manner). You would celebrate the triumphs of six children, worry about the trials of their life experiences, and embrace the joy of being a grandmother.

There is much we can glean from the newspaper reports about the day we were born that helps set the context for the world and environment in which we were raised. And, as we scour the records for information about ancestors, there is much we can celebrate and share about our own life experience – like growing up Ellen.