POSTING # 14

The Welland Canal is Open; The Hunter Family and the ‘Gypsy Gene’; The Hunter Family Goes from Wales to Australia; From Australia to Wales and then to Canada; The Hunters in Toronto; Uncle Syd and the Hangman; Short Stuff (Mini-Stories about Kids and Pets)


The Welland Canal is Open

The St. Lawrence Seaway, which is 50 years old, officially opened this year on March 20, tying 2007 for the earliest opening.

This means that the Welland Canal is open and the boats are back.

We have missed standing by the locks and watching the behemoths enter and leave. We have also missed the awesome optical illusion that occurs when one sees the ships from a distance appearing to sail through vineyards and fields.

We are glad to have the boats back!

The Hunter Family and the Gypsy Gene

A psychologist friend argues that some families have a ‘gypsy gene’. According to the theory, persons with this ‘gene’ love to take off for what seem to be greener pastures, while neighbours who lack the ‘gene’ are happy to stay put.

At the one extreme of ‘staying put’, there is the example of Adrian Targett who lives in Cheddar, England. Researchers discovered a 9000 year-old skeleton in a cave near Cheddar and when they compared the DNA in the bones of the remains with that of some of today’s residents of Cheddar, they concluded that Mr. Targett was a direct descendant of that prehistoric person. Some 300 generations later, Mr. Targett’s family is still living in the same location!

On the other hand, there are the Hunters---or, at least, the Hunters to whom I’m related---who must have acquired this ‘gypsy gene’ at some point in the 1800s.

As far as we know, my ancestors lived for centuries in the Scottish Lowlands, baking bread and getting along.

(A colleague in the government, Bill Stewart, who was Scottish-born---and had the accent to prove it---, told me I should be proud to know that the Clan Hunter was a sept of Clan Stewart. When I asked him what in heaven’s name a ‘sept’ was he explained that the Hunter Clan belonged to the Stewart Clan although it didn’t share the name. Apparently this meant that the Hunters fought with the Stewarts whenever the Stewarts felt it was necessary to crack some skulls, or whatever.)

Then, around 1830, the ‘gypsy gene’ seems to have come into the Hunter genetic makeup. My ancestors moved to northern Wales to bake bread for the workmen who were employed in a huge infrastructure boom, as companies rushed to build canals, aqueducts and railways.

In the early 1880’s, as the boom was coming to an end, my grandfather took his wife and two daughters to Australia. Then he moved his wife and four children back to Wales. And in 1907, he moved his wife and seven children to Toronto.

You can see what I mean by a ‘gypsy gene’.

Here are a few stories about the Hunter travels but I have to warn you that the stories are not backed up by much documentation. (What little we know about the Hunters is set out in a family tree website that my brother Jim and I are working on.)

There is, on the other hand, a fair bit of documentation for my mother’s family and for Pat’s family. I once told my father that I thought I would try to do some research on the Hunters, thinking he would be pleased but he said, “Do you think that’s a good idea?’ I tried to explain about the importance of documentation but he said, “Every family has skeletons in its closet. It’s better not to disturb them.”

I wasn’t sure then and I’m not sure now what kind of skeletons he was referring to.

Of course, one person’s skeleton may be another person’s amusing case of human frailty.

That reminds me of a visit I had from a genealogist when I was working in the Canadian Immigration office in Leeds, Yorkshire. He told me he had a client, a prominent Crown Attorney in Ontario, who wanted to know more about his British ancestors. My visitor told me that he had traced the family back to a man born in the early 1800s. The problem was that some of the man’s birth records were missing while others were incomplete.

The genealogist said that he had encountered that situation before and it usually meant that the person concerned had been born out of wedlock, had become prosperous and then arranged to have some of the records ‘disappear’.

The genealogist had come to see me to find out how I thought a Crown Attorney in Canada would react. “Would he be upset if I told him that it was likely that one of his ancestors was a bastard?”

I said that it would depend.

I, for example, would be amused but if the Crown Attorney was hoping to be able to tell his friends that he was descended from royalty, he might be upset.

My advice was that he should get his fees before dropping the ‘B’ bomb.


The Hunter Family from Wales to Australia

Grandfather Hunter went ahead to Australia, leaving his wife and two young children in Wales. He seems to have done well in the new country and regularly sent money home, some to be used for daily expenses and some to be banked for the eventual purchase of tickets to Australia.

Grandmother Hunter was impatient to join him but he kept arguing that he wasn’t well enough settled to welcome them properly. Finally, Grandmother, prompted probably by some understandable fears about what could happen to a ‘single’ man in a strange country, decided that the time had come. She wrote a letter telling him that she was packing, and gave him the details of the ship she and the children would be travelling on.

Unfortunately, the letter and the girls traveled on the same ship.

Grandmother and the children arrived but there was no husband or father to meet them. According to the story, it took a few days to track down Grandfather.

And shortly after that, the letter arrived.

We are not sure exactly how long they stayed in Australia, but it was probably about 6 or 7 years. Two children were born during the stay and were named after Australian cities, Sydney (Uncle Syd) and Adelaide (Aunt Ady).

From Australia to Wales and then to Canada

In the late 1880s, the Hunters returned to Wales to take over the family bakery in Cefn Mawr (the name means the top of a large hill, in Welsh) and using money made in Australia built a reasonably substantial family home with bright red, glazed terracotta bricks. Dad and my aunts and uncles would often talk about the glazed bricks---it was, they claimed proudly, the only house in Cefn Mawr with them.

Pat and I visited Cefn Mawr in 1962 and the house was still standing, with its shiny glazed bricks. We learned that the house had been taken over by the village as part of their housing for low-income persons. The council had called it Toronto House, in honour of the Hunters who had immigrated to Toronto.

In doing some research on terracotta bricks, I was fascinated to read in Wikipedia that “The colour of terracotta varies with the source of the clay. London clay gives a pale pink or buff colour, whereas the Ruabon (North Wales) clay gives a bright red.” Cefn Mawr is next door to Ruabon.

The encyclopaedia goes on to say that normal, soft-surface terracotta bricks absorbed soot and over time became permanently blackened. Glazed terracotta bricks were introduced around 1890 and soon replaced the older ones because they could be cleaned.

So Grandfather Hunter seems to have moved quickly to take advantage of the new bricks.

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On our visit to Cefn Mawr, we met a retired school teacher who had grown up in the village and knew my grandfather and some of my aunts and uncles. He said that the village children liked to visit the Hunter Bakery and watch my grandfather at work. I gather grandfather liked to put on a little show for the kids. One of his tricks was to use his elbow to make dents in pans of freshly-risen buns so he could add a raisin mixture.

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It is not clear why Grandfather decided, in 1907, to move the family to Canada. There were financial and economic problems in Britain about that time and these caused a huge surge in immigration to Canada. Perhaps that was the motivation for the move. But here is a story that my mother pieced together from hints and clues dropped by Dad and his brothers and sisters---who never talked openly about the reason for the move to Canada.

According to the story, two poachers from the village had been killing deer on the estate of a local squire when gamekeepers spotted them and chased them into the village. They were found hiding in Grandfather’s barn, taken before the local magistrate and found guilty of poaching. The penalty for poaching in Wales in those days was ‘birching’ in which the offender was struck with a cane until the back was covered with welts and blood. Then the offender was dipped in a vat of brine. The brine was to increase the pain of the punishment and also to make sure that the back would be covered with heavy scars.

A false rumour spread through the village that Grandfather had squealed on the poachers. Although the rumour wasn’t true, people stopped shopping at the Hunter Bakery.

According to this story, the family had no choice. They had to leave.

The Hunters in Toronto

As in the move to Australia, Grandfather went ahead but this time with three working-age sons (including my father, who was 14 at the time). They lived in rooms until my Grandmother and the girls arrived. The reunited family found a house in a low-rent area of the city.

The first summer after the family was reunited; Grandmother Hunter decided that the family should grow cabbages and store them for the winter, as they did in Wales. The growing weather was ideal and in the fall they stowed a huge crop of cabbages under the front porch of their rented house. The winter was much colder than in Wales and the cabbages froze solid.

My father loved to tell how the cabbage turned to mush in the spring and then, as the weather warmed, to sauerkraut. He said that many British immigrants made that mistake during their first year in Canada. As you walked along the street, you could tell the houses of new immigrants from Britain by the sauerkraut smell.

The part of Toronto where they first lived is now known as Cabbagetown, and is, of course, anything but a low-rent area.

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Once when I was young, I was looking through a box of books in the attic and found a book with an inscription, “To Alexander, good luck in Canada.”

I showed it to Mom and asked who Alexander was. She looked uncomfortable, and said that he was my Dad’s brother, my uncle, but that he was ‘bad’ and that he had “gone out west’. The family had no idea what had happened to him.

That was strange. I had never heard of an Uncle Alexander. Checking birth records recently I found that Alexander had been born in Wales in 1890, shortly after the return from Australia, and three years before my father was born.

He is shown in the 1911 Canadian census as living with the Hunter family on Oak Street in Toronto.

For years, I assumed that Alexander was one of the skeletons that Dad had talked about and I wondered what sins or crimes he had committed.

Recently a cousin told me there was nothing wrong with Alexander. She said she understood that he simply got fed up with the nagging of his mother and his sisters---usually about how much he could spend from his earnings, and how much he had to hand over to the family.

One day he set off for work with his lunch box, and never returned.

So, we are left with a mystery. What happened to Alexander?

My mother wondered if Tommy Hunter, the country and western singer, might be the offspring of Alexander. I sent him an email but never received a reply.


Uncle Syd and the Hangman

Uncle Syd was head of the Ontario Provincial Police detachment in Perth Ontario after the Second World. One of the people from the area had been convicted of murder and sentenced to hang. The Warden of the Lanark County Gaol asked Uncle Syd to meet the hangman who was coming on the train from Toronto.

Uncle Syd met the hangman, took him to the Gaol so he could drop off the rope he had brought in a large suitcase (he preferred to use his own rope), and check out the gallows.

Then they drove to the hotel and the hangman asked two favours. First, could my uncle have a piano moved to his room, and second could my uncle spend the evening with him. Uncle Syd agreed with both requests.

While the two men were having dinner, the hotel staff moved a piano into the hangman’s room. The hangman and my uncle went up to the room and for the next two hours the hangman played classical music. Uncle Syd said that he played well, and with feeling.

The next day, Uncle Syd drove the hangman to the courthouse. The hangman did his job and Uncle Syd drove him back to the train station.

They shook hands and the hangman climbed onto the train. Uncle Syd handed him the large suitcase, and the train pulled away.


Short Stuff (Mini-Stories about Kids and Pets)

I mentioned in last week’s Posting (#13) that Pat loathes camping. I enjoy it and used to take the children off for a few days in the Gatineau Park, outside of Ottawa.

We camped several times in one of the ‘civilized’ sites in the Park (with flush toilets, showers and stone fireplaces). I then thought it would be fun to try one of the ‘wilderness’ sites. As usual, Pat would drive us up and drop us off.

As we drove to the Park, Pat asked whether there would be bears. I said I was sure there wouldn’t be.

As we drove into the wilderness site, there was a huge cage with steel bars resting on a trailer. The door of the cage was open and a large slab of raw meat was hanging from a hook attached to the roof of the cage.

A bear trap!

A good dinner was followed by a very nervous night of fitful sleep and wide 'awalkefulness'.

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On another camping excursion, we packed carefully, taking everything we could possibly need. At the site, I showed the kids how to lay a fire with dry leaves, twigs and branches and I asked one of them to get the matches. They looked at each other, and then at me. We had forgotten the matches. (We found a kind camper who shared his matches with us.)

The next time we went camping, we packed matches into every bag and box we took. And daughter Jen, who was very young at the time, coined the expression that has become one of the family’s sayings: “It’s better to have too much, than none.”

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See you next Sunday for more stories from our family’s universe! Posting #15 will include some stories from my years at Queen’s University.