We’re having a little bit of an upset in Ontario at the moment, surrounding that bête noir, speed cameras.
The Province’s Premier, the one in charge, says that speed cameras are nothing but a cash-grab and that he’s going enact legislation to make them unusable. This in a Province where speed limits seem to be merely suggestions and efforts to curb speed (and therefore improve road safety) are at best, minimal.
I learned to drive in a country where speed cameras are used extensively, namely the UK. When I go back, which seems to be quite often these days, I’m immediately aware of the speed discipline that drivers employ; in Ontario the speed limit seems to be the absolute minimum, in the UK they are generally abided by, and plenty of people drive well within the limit. Tellingly, there are twice the number of cars in the UK than there are in Canada, but only half as many injuries and fatalities on the roads. From this we can reasonably deduce that speed cameras are, at least in part, a boon to road safety. So why is Ontario so against something that will aid road safety?
It’s political. That’s about the strength of it. Speeding is a curse in Ontario, and you’ll regularly read about drivers cussing one another out because they were driving at the speed limit and not some speed well north of it. “Hand your license in if you can’t do 20 over” is a common refrain from the speeding fraternity. It seems that posted speed limits impinge on people’s personal freedom to drive at whatever speed they like, and hang the road safety implications because, “Hey, I’m a good driver!”. Our politicians see this expression of personal freedom as a vote winner and are being aggressive in reducing what they see as limitations of drivers in the hope of winning over, or at least retaining, the support of the supposedly put-upon drivers of the Province. People who are killed or injured speeding? Pfffft. It’s eerily reminiscent of the argument for gun ownership in the US, death and injury seems to be an acceptable price for personal freedom.
I’m at a bit of a loss to follow this logic. Drivers can’t be trusted to obey posted limit signs, so why would a responsible government not put in place a cheap and effective method of control? It’s only a cash-grab if you speed, and is so easily avoidable, but it also comes with a free side order of road safety, so what’s not to love?
I guess it will take the death or injury of a politician’s loved one, or a large number of ordinary people, for things to change, which is really a very sad state of affairs for the twenty-first century. In the meantime I will drive to the limits, avoid any cash-grabs (if there are any left), and hope that no one in orbit get hurt by a speeding driver. What a life.
We have just visited a few more graves belonging to relatives I never knew I had, this time in London, Ontario.
When I started up this Ancestry.com thing, I had no idea that any of my ancestors had left England, but that misunderstanding was blown away when a distant cousin from the USA contacted me through Ancestry. She’s from my dad’s side and had been born with the same surname as me, and she opened up a branch of my family tree that I hadn’t found at that point. It turned out that I had an entire dynasty related to me in the USA, and I’m talking hundreds, probably thousands, who all came from one couple arriving in the New York in 1822, from Leeds, in Yorkshire, England.
When I did the Ancestry DNA test, I was matched up with people from my mum’s side of the tree, which I hadn’t really started to research. Curious to see where people fitted, I started to build that side of the family tree and, just like my dad’s side, I found that there were some wanderers.
My mother was born in Torquay, Devon, although I knew that her dad’s side of the family were from Exeter, also in Devon, and her mum’s side were from a small village just outside Torquay called Kingskerswell. My earlier forays into the family tree, when my mother was still alive, hadn’t gone too far and she maintained that the records relating to the Exeter branch of the family were all lost in a fire. When I kicked the family tree thing off again, after her death, I found that she was only partially right about the fire. The whole 1931 Census for England and Wales was lost in a fire, and that included many records relating to my family. But, thankfully, there were many other records that were obtainable, and like my dad’s family tree, the whole thing opened up and hasn’t stopped opening since.
My maternal grandfather was a Stevens, and the Stevens family are solidly Exeter born and bred, despite my grandfather sneaking off to Torquay at some point in the 1920s. My maternal grandmother was a Hill, and the Hills hail from Kingskerswell, and other small places in south Devon. My maternal great-grandfather, though, married into the Bater family, who come from Dolton, in central North Devon. The Baters are, to say the least, a very large family. My maternal great-grandmother, Edith Bater, was one of thirteen children, brought into the world by William and Eliza Bater, and William Bater himself was one of seven children, so you get the idea that there are a lot of Baters related to me in North Devon.
All the Baters, and all of their spouses, were in the business of farming, be that humble labourers or actual landowning farmers, and they all came from an area in north Devon bounded by the Taw and the Torridge rivers. At some point around 1850, one of William Bater’s brothers, George, left Devon and made his way to Toronto, Ontario, Canada. At about the same time, two of William Bater’s uncles, George and Richard Cudmore, also from Dolton, made their way to Toronto, and onward to Clinton Township in Huron County, on the eastern shore of Lake Huron. That seemed to spark a trend because while none of William Bater’s thirteen children moved to Canada, four of his grandchildren did, and they all arrived in the city of Guelph in Ontario, albeit fifty or sixty years after the original Bater and Cudmore incursions into Ontario. George and Richard Cudmore stayed in farming, but George Bater worked in a paper mill in Toronto, and the later arrivals all went into manual labour in the cities of Guelph, Cambridge and London, Ontario.
The Cudmore families expanded and moved on, mostly into the United States. Some pushed westwards into North Dakota to establish farms on the American Prairies, and Alice Cudmore, wife of Richard Cudmore and native of Dolton, eventually made her way to one of her son’s farm in North Dakota after Richard died, and she ended her days there. She’s buried in Hannah ND, quite close to the Canadian Border and the Province of Manitoba, where some of my dad’s family had ended up, homesteading on the Canadian Prairies.
All of that family history is detailed here so that I can link the visits we have made to the graves of some of the people who travelled to the New World from rural North Devon. To start, though, in 2023 we visited the church of St. Edmund in Dolton, Devon, and saw the graves of my 3 x great grandparents William and Eliza Bater, at the time not really understanding just how pivotal they were in the migration to Canada.
In early 2025, we drove up to Huron County*, Ontario, and visited the graves of Richard Cudmore, and his family members, who had stayed there farming the newly reclaimed land. They lived in log cabins, they cleared the trees, and set up the townships that still exist today. It was quite humbling to visit a tiny roadside cemetery in rural Ontario and find the graves of my family, people who’d travelled out from England to establish themselves on that new farmland.
Then just this last week, we went to London, Ontario, to visit some of the graves of the newer immigrants to Canada. The Steer and the Ebsworthy families arrived in Canada from North Devon just before the First World War and established themselves as factory workers, at least initially. Again, it was quite humbling to know that the graves held a little piece of North Devon, and were related, as all the immigrants I’ve mentioned here, to my 3 x great grandfather, William Bater of Dolton.
There were many other arrivals from North Devon into Canada, and not just from the Bater family. The Cater family from Kingskerswell, linked by marriage to my grandmother Lilian Hill, are represented in Newfoundland. John Cater arrived in St. John’s around 1850 and took a job as a shipping agent. He married a local girl, Anne Murphy (most likely with Irish roots, like so many people in Newfoundland), and founded a dynasty of his own that’s centred in Grand Falls. There is an outpost of the Bater family in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and further south in the United States, in Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri and beyond, both Baters and Caters have established themselves.
I have no doubt that there are many people like me, discovering the exodus of their families from the UK to Canada and the United States. I’m fortunate to have followed in their footsteps, albeit unwittingly, and have been able to visit not just grave sites but the towns and villages that they lived in.
I have so much more research to do, and so many more people to discover. Who knows where those spirits of the past will take me?
We acknowledge that the land we stand upon today is the traditional territories of the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, and Neutral peoples and is connected to the Dish with One Spoon wampum, under which multiple nations agreed to care for the land and its resources by the Great Lakes in peace.
We also acknowledge the Upper Canada Treaties signed in regards to this land, which include Treaty #29 and Treaty #45 ½.
We recognize First Peoples’ continued stewardship of the land and water as well as the historical and ongoing injustices they face in Canada. We accept responsibility as treaty people to renew relationships with First Nation, Métis, and Inuit Peoples through reconciliation, community service, and respect.
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.
At the top of the list was John Richard Cudmore (1811-1887), my great-great-great-granduncle. His sister, Elizabeth Cudmore (1796 – 1873) was my great-great-great-grandmother, and the mother of William Bater (1829-1894), my great-great-grandfather, whose grave we had visited in the churchyard of St Edmund’s, Dolton, when we were in England last year. John Richard, better known simply as Richard, arrived in Canada at some point between 1841 and 1845, and his first Canadian born son, William Horace Cudmore, entered this world while the family were in Tuckersmith Township, now Clinton Township, in 1845.
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?
It certainly broadens the mind, but it doesn’t get any easier with age.
We just made one of our now fairly frequent trips across the Atlantic Ocean, from Toronto to London. The prospect of four weeks in the land of my birth is an enticing one, obviously, but it starts with that overnight flight, and getting over that seems to take longer each time.
Of course, air travel has revolutionised the world. My ancestors who made the trip from England to North America rarely had the opportunity to make even one trip back to their homeland, so I do recognise my good fortune, but that’s hard to remember when you can’t make simple decisions after an almost sleepless overnight flight.
We always start our trips with a three to four hour drive up Canada’s busiest highway, the Ontario 401. Mostly it’s just a chore, but this time the weather was horrible, low cloud and rain, and that resulted in collision-related delays. We had allowed a big dollop of wiggle room on timing, so arrived at the airport more or less as planned, which was obviously a good thing. Another good thing in this multi-modal journey is the “Park N Fly” valet service where we simply dump the car at the PNF lot and have a bus whisk us off to the airport terminal. Sure, it’s not cheap, but well worth the relative ease of leaving your car somewhere.
Toronto Pearson airport went the way of London’s Heathrow and revamped their terminal waiting areas with bars and restaurants which will, with a phone-based app, deliver your food and drink requirements to the table you’ve chosen. There are two major issues with that, though. Firstly, most of the regular seating was removed to allow for the food outlet tables, and secondly the food and drink is scandalously expensive. It’s probably my advancing years that make me so curmudgeonly, but I won’t buy from these places on principle. On this trip we did locate some regular seating, and sat in comfort to enjoy the sandwiches we’d brought from home, which went some way to offset my grumbles about airport rip-off pricing.
** I tried to find a photo of the departures area, but couldn’t, at least not of the regular area around the gates. Anyone would think that the Airport wasn’t proud of it’s rip-off strategy.
Our flight was late leaving, but there’s not a whole lot you can do about that. The gate staff kept us informed, although I never enjoy being chivvied into boarding the aircraft quickly when I’ve been sat in the terminal for hours. Maybe airlines should allow a longer turnaround time?
We’d been messed about by the airline, British Airways, on our reserved seat allocation. We had paid a staggeringly high fee to book specific seats, but they’d changed the aircraft type and had to reallocate the seats, meaning that we’d lost our two window seats. I know, a seat is a seat, but I don’t like to get gouged on a fee to reserve a seat, then not get said seat. I have lodged a claim with BA to get that reservation fee back, so we’ll see what transpires there.
The aircraft for the flight was an Airbus A350. Big, for sure, and by modern standards quiet and smooth, but the seating on the ‘plane was horrible. The designers of these things must have to work quite hard to make seats so uncomfortable. Their primary aim is to save weight, but the thinly-padded shells you sit on are not good for a six-hour flight, so goodness knows what they’re like for a longer flight. We were in World Traveller Plus, one up from Economy, so the seats recline quite a bit. But that reclination causes havoc when you have to get out of your seat for a call of nature, but the person in front is in maximum recline. There was a woman in the row behind us had to get a flight attendant to wake up her next-seat neighbour so she could get out. There were lots of vacant Economy seats in the cabin behind the Plus area, and she settled herself there instead of coming back to the supposedly better seats, just so she wouldn’t be trapped again.
I must have slept a little, but I couldn’t get myself into any comfortable position at all, so whether I slept or not, I didn’t feel at all rested.
I should make a comment about the food service, because I fell foul of BA’s love of curry-based menus on our last trip. There were three options this time, in the shape of meat, fish, or pasta. I didn’t fancy the fish because it was trout, which is way too fussy for an aircraft meal. I didn’t think the lamb would be up to much, so I opted for the pasta, although not before being pleasantly surprised that all three options were still available by the time the cart reached our seats. The pasta wasn’t bad, but I passed on the curry-based starter, and only had half of the cheesecake thing they dished up for desert. Coffee was served, but it was such a miniscule amount that I barely tasted it. Airlines, not just BA, seem to strive for fancy meals when simpler, plainer fare would surely be easier, cheaper and more appreciated by mugs like me.
Arriving in London. Heathrow’s Terminal 5 is about as good as you’re going to get in that airport. It’s busy, for sure but everything runs quite smoothly. The UK Border was a breeze, with a very pleasant young border person welcoming us to the UK, and the baggage reclaim was similarly easy, which certainly takes the edge off the sleepless hours in the air.
Some hours later, at our destination and feeling helplessly tired, decisions were hard to make and tempers were beginning to fray, which is why bed was so welcome. The time difference is an issue, but not that first night when sleep is all you crave, regardless of what the clock says.
Our first full day here, though, was a struggle. The time difference and the sleep deficit all combined to make everything fraught. We did at least do something spontaneous, but not before some ritual shouting at each other; we have an excitable but tired four-year-old with us as well, which really doesn’t aid our attempts at achieving Zen.
Our second full day had me wide awake at 5am, which is the other issue with travelling, at least for me, and why I’m sat here at seven-thirty in the morning having finished this blog entry. As I said, travelling doesn’t get any easier. For our next, grown-ups only trip, I think we will seriously have to look at the BA version of Business Class, with its pods and bed-like seats. I guess we should start saving.
Having spent the first fifty years of my life in the UK (except for three years in Belgium and Germany), I was a temperate man. That is temperatures lower than -4C and higher that +20C were somewhat of a novelty for me. I also had that English resistance to the damp, especially having spent fifteen years in the village of Blewbury, Oxfordshire, which was a mass of natural springs and chalk streams, and permanently moist. Then I moved from the coastal climes to Canada’s Great Lakes, and the continental weather systems that lurk there.
We’re sat here today, February 16th, watching the snow fall and having been experiencing sub-zero temperatures for weeks, probably six so far, I wasn’t counting. While this part of Southern Ontario doesn’t get hit with really cold weather, it did bring to mind a trip I made to Canada in 2008, when I was still living in England.
My intended had said, “Hey, come over for March Break”, for she was a school teacher, “We’ll rent an RV and have a drive around Quebec”. Now I may not be the sharpest knife in the box, but I looked at the calendar, and I looked at the prevailing weather in that fine Province, and realised that we were not going to experience fine, balmy, RV-friendly weather in March. We scotched the RV idea (a wise move as it turned out), and booked hotels in Montreal and in Quebec City instead. All very exciting.
But when my intended picked me up at Lester Pearson Airport in Toronto, with me just having flown over the frozen wastes of Quebec, the snow started to fall. My intended was driving, not her favourite pastime to be sure, and the weather started to get worse and worse. We were expecting to stay in downtown Montreal that night, but to be honest, we really should have stopped off on the way, but we didn’t. The run up the Ontario Highway 401, and the Autoroute du Souvenir, was 550 Km and should have taken about five and half hours. In the event, it took us nine hours, and we didn’t get into Montreal until at 1:30am. My driver was done in. Still, we did get there.
The following morning we ventured outside. I’d left London and it had been +12C, now in Montreal’s Old Town, it was -20C, and I could feel every one of those degrees below zero. The snow looked nice, and watching the skaters on the outdoor rink was lovely, but I wasn’t really prepared for that level of cold, especially given that the wind was wicked. While we had slept, the snow came in some more, and dumped on the city, making it look wonderful, but there was only so much snow I could take when feeling so, so cold. More snow fell, but we went out to a little restaurant that evening, walking between the shoulder-high mounds of snow, and I marvelled that the city seemed to be functioning well despite the white stuff, but then I realised that this was pretty normal for Montreal in winter. I made a mental note to never return to the city between the months of October and April!
The following day we drove along the St Lawrence River to Quebec City. Yet more snow had fallen and it was waist deep in parts of the old town. It was still seriously below zero as well, but I was starting to acclimatise. Quebec City, though, was a revelation. When we arrived the snow was deep, although paths had been cleared. But, by the following morning, the snow on the roads and sidewalks had gone, almost completely. No, we hadn’t experienced a sudden thaw, but the City Fathers had brought moving equipment in and trucked all the excess snow away. I asked the English speaking co-owner of the hotel what had happened, and he explained that the snow is carted off and dumped in a field on the edge of town. It can still be there in May, he said.
The run back to Southern Ontario was actually trouble free. We did it without an overnight, while sharing the driving, all 1075Kms. The weather had improved, and it was even a wee bit warmer, so my English bones were beginning to feel a bit happier. I learned a lot on that trip, not least that Quebec can be a very cold place in winter. I also learned that a short period of acclimatisation is a good idea if you’re coming straight from a temperate climate.
Fifteen years of living in Canada and I have become accustomed to the sharp winters, and the compensating warm summers of course. Indeed, trips back to the Old Country have had me making that most Canadian of observations about England, “Goodness, everything feels damp”. I reckon I have acclimatised now.
I was born and raised in England, and didn’t immigrate into Canada until I was fifty. As I have discovered, though, I’m not the first of my family to come here, not by a long shot.
On my dad’s side, originally from County Cork in Ireland, we had been generations Leeds, the centre of the industrial heartland of Yorkshire’s West Riding. In the early nineteenth century, a few of the Maynes had left England, one couple to the USA, and two couples to South Africa, but most remained in Leeds. A few generations later there was a small emigration to Alberta, Canada, of more than one couple, and into the twentieth century, Toronto, Ontario, was the destination for a Mayne or two.
But this movement pales into insignificance when compared to my mum’s side of the family, with the Baters and the Caters. Both families are from Devon, in the south west of England. The Caters were from south Devon, south of Dartmoor, and gravitated to the village of Kingskerswell, which lies between Newton Abbot and Torquay. The Caters married into the Hill Family, and the Hills married into the Bater family, but more of that later.
John Cater, born in Kingskerswell, took himself off at some point in the mid 1850s and settled in St John’s, the capital of Newfoundland. He married a local girl, Anne Murphy in 1857, and that started a most extensive dynasty of Caters around that great island. Successive generations lived and died as “Newfies”, but also migrated out into Ontario and into the USA. I’ve recently been in contact with a modern day member of the original John Cater clan, still living in Ontario.
Then there was the Bater family. The Baters come from North Devon, in and around the River Torridge area. To a man, they were all farm workers; some farm owners, some farm workers, but farming was their only profession. In the late nineteenth century there appears to have been a paucity of work for farm labourers, and quite a few of the young men, some with their wives and children, upped sticks and sailed from Appledore in North Devon, to Quebec City in the French-speaking province of Quebec. From there they made their way on the newly laid train network, to Guelph, a community to the west of Toronto. This wasn’t one or two people, it was many, and the period they emigrated stretched from 1870 to 1910. They all seemed to have headed for Guelph, but from there spread out to the farms of Bruce and Middlesex counties, and the industry of Galt, Cambridge and London (Ontario).
Using the number of deaths recorded for family members as a constant for those arriving but never leaving, and that is Caters and Baters, I have 197 in Ontario and 128 in Newfoundland. Of course many have moved on, largely to the USA, but also to other Canadian Provinces. There are many still alive, naturally, and populating modern Canada, but they’re harder to track down.
There was another emigration route from the fields of North Devon, and that was to Peoria in Illinois, USA. It looks like having crossed the Atlantic and arrived at Quebec City, these settlers have embarked on a second vessel (possibly from Toronto, avoiding the St Lawrence River and its shallows), and made the trip through the Great Lakes, Ontario, Huron and Michigan, to Chicago. Then they made their way up the Illinois River to Peoria, and the rich farmlands that were opening up there. Further migration took them down into Kansas and Missouri.
Quebec City Harbour at the end of the nineteenth century
All of this goes to show that I really am a latecomer to the Canadian party. The ease of my move, in a few hours by air, contrasts starkly with the sea voyage undertaken by my ancestors, many of who never made the trip back to England during their lives. These were brave people, setting our for a new life, and pretty much making a success of things, given that I can’t find a Cater or Bater who ever gave up and went back to Devon. I may be a latecomer, but I am in very good company.
The Seven Stars Inn in Kingskerswell
To finish, the link between the Caters and the Baters was facilitated by the Hill family of Kingskerswell. My maternal grandmother was a Hill, descended from the Caters of Kingskerswell. Her father married a Bater from Dolton, North Devon, and there the link was made. Families, all over the world.
I’ve not written anything for ages, so, as it’s well into the new year, I thought I should knuckle down. The trouble is that there’s so much “noise” out and about, what with Trump, Musk, et al. Still, life goes on and I can always look away from the awfulness unfolding around me.
Someone posted a photograph on Facebook of an old railway station at Alexandra Palace in North London (UK). It was built right into the main structure of the Palace, too, which caught my eye, not least because I didn’t know there had been a railway there. I have no great connection with Alexandra Palace beyond my living in North London myself for a few years, but I did travel past the place every day when I was commuting from Stevenage in Hertfordshire into London every day in the early 1980s.
Alexandra Palace isn’t a palace in the royal sense, but a palace of entertainment and sports. It’s known affectionately as “Ally Pally”, and because it sits atop a big hill, you can see it for miles around, even in the suburban jungle of North London. It was opened in 1873 and has gone through many iterations in its lifetime, most notably perhaps as the BBC’s first home for a regular television service, starting in 1936. Ally Pally is still functioning, too, as concert, exhibition, and community venue. Curiously, though, despite having seen it every day for years, and lived relatively close by, I’ve never been inside.
But I digress. The station was the terminal point for a broad loop of line coming out from the London to Edinburgh Eastern main line. It must have been quite a slog up the hill with a full load, because it’s some climb up to the Palace. The branch was opened in 1873, along with the venue, but closed in 1954. The track bed is still in use, only now as walking trail, known as the Parkland Walk (North), and still utilises some of the old railway infrastructure to traverse the now busy roads.
I write all of this as a way of both highlighting my total ignorance of the history of North London and it’s many esteemed buildings and infrastructure, and the fact that my trips past Ally Pally were now over forty years ago. Where on earth did the time go? Indeed, this realisation of time past manifested itself on a trip to the UK in 2023. We were on a train going from Hackney Downs into Liverpool Street and I was remarking to the good lady wife that the trains were somewhat improved compared to the ones I’d used on that route in, wait for it, 1981! I hadn’t even begun to consider the passage of time, beyond a decade or two, but four decades and counting? It was no wonder things had changed.
Anyway, enjoy the photographs of Ally Pally station, and check out the links below, while I go away and consider how time passes so darned quickly.
My family tree, or at least my knowledge of it, continues to grow.
But I’ll start with the headline. Before I started this family tree thing, I wasn’t aware of any of my relatives having lived their lives outside the United Kingdom. Now I know that my relatives lived in Australia, South Africa, Canada, and above everywhere else, the United States of America. Across my mother’s and my father’s sides of the family, we have had relatives die (that’s the measure I use because quite a few returned to England) in forty-eight of the fifty States of the USA. Only Hawaii and South Dakota don’t hold my family’s DNA. I haven’t done a count up, but I’m sure it’s a few thousand or so.
My dad’s side has a sizeable dynasty in the US, centred in Ohio and Indiana, but spread across continental America. Sizeable groups lived and died in Washington State and Oregon, Kansas and Colorado, and down into Texas. Much of the wider spread is Twentieth Century mobility, with sixty-six deaths in California, and thirty-six in Florida leading the way, but the roots have stayed in the Midwest. It started with one couple arriving in New York in 1822, but has been supplemented by relatives arriving in Chicago, Illinois from Ontario, and Montana from Alberta.
Now I find a whole other group of British escapees from my mum’s side of the tree settled in the Peoria, Illinois, area. It seems that they moved rural North Devon and sailed to Montreal in Canada. From there, they caught another ship that sailed down the St Lawrence River, through Lakes Ontario, Huron and Michigan to Chicago, then down the Illinois River to Peoria. They swapped their Devon farms for new land in the Midwest, and established themselves and their communities in the middle of the Nineteenth Century.
Let’s not forget those who stayed in Canada and set themselves up in Newfoundland, Ontario, and Alberta; not as many as in the USA, but still more than I had reckoned on.
I saw a photograph of a bumper sticker today, coined after the recent 2024 US election, that said “This Country Was Built On Immigration”. My family have certainly played their part in that construction.
It occurred to me that I hadn’t noted down any details of our trip last August to Fairfield County, Ohio, and the grave of Washington Franklin Mayne. We were in Columbus for the weekend on another matter, but couldn’t pass up the opportunity to visit old WF’s last resting place.
Why? You may well ask.
Washington Franklin Mayne was the third child of Henry Collins Mayne and his wife Anna Robinson, and was born in Loudoun County, Virginia, in 1826. Henry and Anna had arrived in New York from Leeds, in the English county of Yorkshire, in 1822 and made their way to Northern Virginia to set up a farm. Henry’s father, Joshua Mayne, is my great-great-great-Grandfather. Not only was Washington Franklin the third Mayne born on US soil, but he was the last to be born in Virginia as the family moved westwards, to Perry County, Ohio, after his birth.
Not much is known about Washington Franklin as he grew up in the Zanesville Ohio area, but we do know that he studied at Ohio Medical College to become a Doctor and started a practice in the village of Basil, Ohio. As well as being a respected doctor, Washington Franklin acquired a lot of land in Basil and was a well known figure in the area.
The land acquired by Washington Franklin Mayne was on the original lands of the Shawnee, Mingo and Delaware peoples, and their ownership of that land is fully and respectfully acknowledged.
Washington Franklin married Eliza Jane McNeill of Ross County, Ohio, in 1865 and they became the parents of four children while living in Basil.
All that is by way of background as to why I would want to visit a small and very pretty little village in rural Ohio. Washington Franklin died in 1884 at the age of 56, and was buried in Basil Cemetery, just yards from the home and doctor’s office he built in the village. Eliza Jane died in 1924 at the home of her daughter Gertrude, in Piqua, Miami County, Ohio. Although buried in Piqua, Eliza’s name is engraved on the handsome stone memorial that marks Washington Franklin’s final resting place.
As we motored south from Columbus, it’s only a 35-minute drive, we both remarked on how similar this part of Ohio was to our part of Ontario; the same crops in the fields, the same buildings on the land. As we arrived in Basil we came across a town parade, an annual event for the people of Baltimore Ohio, the larger town that swallowed up old Basil. I thought perhaps they were out in my honour, but alas, no. We found Washington Franklin’s gravestone easily, stood and soaked up the atmosphere, and I felt really quite humble to be there at the place were one of the founders of the Mayne’s American dynasty had built his life, and the lives of his family.
Washington Franklin and his siblings were the start of a vast family network covering a good portion of the USA, from Indiana to Tennessee, to Kansas and to Colorado, and many places in between. There are many more graves for me to visit, particularly in Indiana, but for now the is trip to see old WF’s grave and the village he made his mark in will have to do.
I was reminded again this afternoon of just how much some people are in too much of a hurry when they’re driving. I had to make a right, on a red light, onto LaCroix Street, but to my left is a bridge. When I’m looking to see if the way is clear, I get about 100 metres of clear sight before the road dips down on the other side of the bridge. That 100m or so should be ample for me to pull out into the road when I can’t see another vehicle approaching from my left. But, and it’s a big but, if the approaching vehicle isn’t speeding. Sadly, they nearly always are. I looked left today, could see no vehicle approaching, so made my move. A quick glance in the mirror as I made the turn and there was a blue car bearing down on me at a rate of knots. No worries, I’m in my lane, but why did the driver of the blue car feel the need to come hurtling over the bridge like that? The car was something anonymous, but it had a personalized licence plate and the driver was a young woman bobbing around in her seat, hopefully to some music. She passed me, but less than 200m ahead I passed her again as we both drew to a stop at the next set of lights.
Quite possibly because I’m officially a Senior these days, and I’m retired, but I genuinely don’t see why everyone is rushing around. The young woman in the blue car gained nothing by driving so fast, and I crossed Richmond Street before her, despite my sticking to the 50Kph speed limit, so what was the point? You see it all the time with people make risky passes on ordinary roads, only for me to come right up behind them at the next set of lights. I absolutely do not get the rushing around when 99% of the time there is absolutely no benefit to speeding and taking unnecessary risks.
I’m certain that people who encounter me on the road cuss and curse me because I don’t generally exceed the speed limit. They’ll call me grandad, and get seriously bent out of shape because they perceive that I’m driving too slowly. Maybe I did when I was younger, although I don’t really remember if I was a one to hurry, even when riding my motorcycle in London.
Anyway, I will continue to drive in an unhurried manner. I will stay aware of people who are in a hurry (even though I know what they do is pointless), and I will keep up with the flow of traffic, up to the posted speed limit, at least. If everyone did that then there’d be far fewer road collisions.
That last sentence reminds me of the fellow who made a Facebook post claiming that he’d been stopped by the cops for driving at the speed limit, and asked why he wasn’t doing at least ten over. If that happened then I’m a Dutchman’s uncle.
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