(That’s dead relatives)

We had occasion to visit the lovely town of Blyth, Ontario, in Huron County. It’s about two and half hour’s slow drive from home, and a lovely place to enjoy a play at the annual Blyth Festival. It’s also close to the place where a large group of my relatives, on my mother’s side, had ended up after emigrating from England in the middle of the nineteenth century.

From my family tree research, I had discovered a few graves of those relatives just twenty minutes from Blyth, and this was too good an opportunity to be missed.

In the England and Wales Census of 1841, Richard Cudmore is shown as being an agricultural labourer and living in Dolton, Devon. In the Census of Eastern Canada for 1861, Richard is listed as being a farmer and living with his wife Alice and their six children in a single story, log-built house. I can’t verify whether he was farming his own plot of land or working for someone else, but Tuckersmith, like most other rural townships in North America, had been divided up into small parcels of land and it’s likely that he worked one of these. I’ve seen maps of other areas, notably in Kansas and in North Dakota, with the land parcels’ owners named, but the records of Huron County, at least those I’ve found so far, don’t go into that detail.

Richard Cudmore stayed in Tuckersmith for the remainder of his life, and died in 1877. He was buried in Turner’s Cemetery, just south of Vanastra, Ontario, between Clinton and Seaforth, and there he remains. It wasn’t hard to located the cemetery, nor the grave, and it was quite the feeling to be close to one of my relatives, but in a country thousands of miles away from our shared homeland. The cemetery is small, but meticulously maintained (by whom I don’t know), and is fittingly surrounded by the rich, arable farmland that Richard had worked.

Talking of land, I must acknowledge that the area around Tuckersmith is native land and was the subject of Treaty 29, The Huron Tract Purchase, signed by the English Crown and certain Anishinaabe peoples on July 10th, 1827. Full details of the treaty can be read here.

Of course, Richard Cudmore wasn’t the only one of my dead relatives in Turner’s Cemetery. His son John and his daughter Elizabeth are there, as is another daughter, Sarah Alice Crich. There are many members of the Crich family in Turner’s cemetery, as there are on the census listings for the time. It was inevitable that a Cudmore would marry a Crich at some point in Tuckersmith, and of all those Crich family members resting alongside Richard Cudmore, I’m certain that there will be family connections. Indeed, subsequent research has shown up many more family graves in Clinton itself, right up to Keith Ward Jenks, a direct descendent of Richard Cudmore, who died in 1944 when he was aboard a Royal Canadian Navy vessel taking part in the D-Day Landings.

While we were out and about in Huron County, we visited a grave in Harpurhey Cemetery near Seaforth, that of another of Richard Cudmore’s sons, Henry, and his wife Ann. Henry died in 1930 and Ann died in 1945, so their gravestone was significantly newer than those we found in Turner’s Cemetery.

On the way home we called in at the Exeter (Ontario) Cemetery looking for a member of the Crich Family. As it’s quite a large cemetery compared to the country burial sites, and I couldn’t work out the plot numbers, I didn’t find the grave. I’ve since discovered that he’s in his wife’s family plot, the Rowcrofts, so if we go again I know what to look for.

I can only speculate what drove agricultural workers from North Devon to get on a ship and travel to the New World. It may have been a lack of work in England, or it may have been the prospect of being able to own (subject to the treaty of course) some land of their own. My family tree is littered with Baters and Cudmores who travelled from Devon to Canada and to the United States, sometimes landing in one country and ending up in the other, but they were nearly all farmers, or in a trade related to farming.

Following up the descendants of these immigrants, I’ve discovered that after they established themselves, some made their way to other homesteading projects both in Canada and in the USA. Crich family members set up in Saskatchewan, while others went to North Dakota, curiously not too far apart geographically, even if they were in different countries. Indeed, after Richard Cudmore’s death in 1877, his wife Alice went to live with their daughter Ann and her husband John Fitzpatrick, in Park River, North Dakota, and never returned to Tuckersmith Township in Canada.

Browsing through Google Maps and Streetview, as I do, I was hugely interested to see the settlements these immigrants made their way to, and what they look like now. One was a town called Wales, North Dakota, which even in it’s heyday was little more than half a dozen grain elevators by the railway track, and Hannah, a little further north, at the end of the railway line, and just a few miles south of the Canadian border. Hannah was very similar to Wales, except that there is a cemetery there and yes, there are some of my family’s graves there. Both Wales and Hannah are little more than ghost towns now, with Wales listed as having a population of ten. However, the land around the towns is still extensively farmed and probably doesn’t look too much different now than it did in the 1920s and 1930s.

Another branch made their way to Cedarville, Michigan, not too far from Ontario’s Huron County. As some point the family became involved with the Les Cheneaux Club on Marquette Island, which is in the Mackinac Straits and not too far from Mackinac Island. Marquette Island, and specifically the Les Cheneaux Club, was a summer getaway for wealthy Chicagoans when their summers became too hot, and my relatives were caretakers of the Club in summer and winter in the early part of the twentieth century. Indeed, my fourth cousin, once removed, Uldene Ethel LeRoy (nee Rudd), wrote a book called Six on an Island: childhood memories from Lake Huron, which was published in 1956. While searching around for the book, I discovered an undergraduate paper from Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, written by Uldene’s grandson, Joshua Lycka. It references her book and compares his own memories with hers. The things you find on the Internet!

Both my mother’s and father’s families have extensive connections with emigration to the New World. The Mayne’s led the way, but the Caters and the Cudmores from North Devon, and quite a few of them, followed up a decade or two later, and both branches of the family are now spread far and wide across Canada and the United States. I wonder how much more I will discover as I delve even deeper?