Eliza Chandler was baptised in a Huntingdonshire village church in December 1846, the youngest daughter of a farm labourer who became a farmer while she was still a small child. She married a farmer's son from twenty miles away, raised three children on fifty acres of fen, and then watched the family business fail. Within months of the collapse she was on a ship to Quebec with three children under twelve. She spent more than forty years in a village in southwestern Ontario, moved to Toronto in her late seventies to live with her daughter, was widowed there at eighty three, and died in 1944 at the age of ninety seven. She is buried beside Samuel at Oakland Cemetery in what was once Mosa Township, Middlesex County.
Eliza Chandler was baptised on December 6, 1846 at the parish church of St Peter and St Paul in Fen Stanton, Huntingdonshire, a village of about a thousand people set two and a half miles southeast of St Ives and two miles south of the River Ouse.
The register names her father as Thomas Chandler and her mother as Mary, gives the family's abode as Fenstanton, and records Thomas's occupation in one word: Labourer.
That word is the starting point of the whole story.
By the 1851 census, four year old Eliza is in the household with Thomas, Mary and a large group of siblings: Catherine, John, William, Susannah, Thomas, Elizabeth and Mary A. Thomas is still an agricultural labourer. Nine people in a village cottage, living on farm wages.
Sometime in the next three years, everything changed.
The 1854 county directory for Huntingdonshire lists, under Fen Stanton, a section headed Farmers. Thomas Chandler is on it.
By the 1861 census he is described as a farmer of 130 acres employing three men and two boys, and Eliza, aged fourteen, is recorded as a scholar. By her wedding in 1870 his occupation is given without qualification: Farmer.
So the rise happened between 1851 and 1854, when Eliza was somewhere between four and seven years old. She was too young to remember the family any other way. She grew up as a farmer's daughter, in a household that could afford to keep a girl of fourteen in school rather than in service or in the fields.
There is a detail in the 1854 directory worth noticing. Other Fen Stanton farmers are listed with the names of their farms, such as West End Farm and Manor Farm. Thomas Chandler is listed with no farm name at all, which suggests he was still a modest tenant in 1854 and that the 130 acres came later. The climb was real, and it was also gradual.
Fen Stanton was an old parish of 2,405 acres, its soils a mixture of gravelly loam, clay and fenny loam. Manorial courts were still being held every year in one of the village farmhouses.
It was not a boom town. The population stood at 704 in 1801, 968 in 1831, 1,032 in 1841 and 1,070 in 1851, and it had fallen back to 886 by 1901. Eliza grew up somewhere settled and slow.
The village did have two schools during her childhood, a National School west of the church teaching about forty five boys and sixty girls and infants daily, and a British School in the High Street with about sixty scholars. Being recorded as a scholar at fourteen puts her in one of those two rooms.
The railway never came to Fen Stanton itself. There was never a station in the village. The St Ives to Cambridge line opened in 1847, the year after her baptism, with the nearest stations at St Ives and Swavesey, and the Huntingdon to St Ives line followed in 1866. The railway arrived close enough to change the district during her girlhood without ever running through it. Two of her descendants would make their living from it.
On February 9, 1870, Eliza Chandler married Samuel Thompson at St Peter and St Paul, Fen Stanton. She was 23 and he was 26.
The register records Samuel as a bachelor and a farmer, of Farcet, son of Joseph Thompson, farmer. Eliza is a spinster of Fenstanton, daughter of Thomas Chandler, farmer. The witnesses were Thomas Chandler and Catherine Chandler, her father and almost certainly her elder sister. The service was performed by the Rev. Stanley Walton, the vicar of Fen Stanton.
Two things about this marriage are worth pausing on.
The distance. Farcet lies just south of Peterborough, roughly twenty miles north of Fen Stanton. That is not a village courtship, and nothing yet found explains how the two families came to know one another.
Both fathers had climbed. The register calls Joseph Thompson a farmer, but the same 1854 directory that lists Thomas Chandler among the Fen Stanton farmers lists Joseph Thompson at Farcet as a machineman, working with agricultural machinery rather than owning land. Eliza married into a family that had made the same journey hers had, in the same decade. Two risen families, evenly matched.
Eight years later they would name a son Stanley, which may be a nod to the clergyman who married them.
After the wedding Eliza left Fen Stanton for Farcet, twenty miles north, and never lived in her home village again.
The 1871 census finds Samuel and Eliza at Farcet Fen with their first child, Walter, about ten months old. Samuel is recorded as a farmer of fifty acres employing one man. It was a considerably smaller holding than the 130 acres her father worked.
In 1878 the Farcet register records the baptism of Stanley James Thompson, son of Samuel and Eliza, Samuel's occupation given as farmer. Eliza appears simply as Eliza, with no middle name, as she does on every record of her life.
By the 1881 census the household at Farcet Fen was Samuel, 38, Eliza, 34, Walter, about 10 and at school, Stanley J., about 2, and Mary C., about 1.
It looked settled. It was not.
Samuel had been farming in partnership with his brother James, trading as J. and S. Thompson of Farcet.
In March 1882 the London Gazette carried three notices under the Bankruptcy Act of 1869, in the County Court of Northamptonshire at Peterborough: one against the partnership, one against Samuel alone, and one against James alone. A first general meeting of creditors was called for the Angel Hotel, Peterborough, on March 21, 1882.
Eliza was thirty five. Her children were eleven, three and two. The way of life that had defined her father's rise, her own childhood and her entire married life was being wound up in a hotel meeting room.
Within months the family sailed.
In the summer of 1882 the Thompsons appear on the passenger list of the Allan Line steamship S.S. Sarmatian, bound for Quebec, with their stated inland destination given as London, Ontario. Samuel's death registration, made forty eight years later, records exactly forty eight years in Canada, which confirms the year independently.
For Samuel this was a second start after a business failure. For Eliza it was something else. She left the village where she was born, her parents, her seven or more brothers and sisters, and every person and place she had known before the age of twenty three. She was thirty five years old and had three children with her, the youngest not yet three. Nothing suggests she ever went back.
The family settled in Glencoe, a village in Middlesex West, and stayed for roughly forty years.
The 1891 census places Samuel in Glencoe, Middlesex West, already established. By 1901 Samuel and Eliza are in the village with Mary C. still associated with the household, while Stanley had begun the working life that took him into the Canadian Pacific Railway. By 1921 the census gives an address at last: King Street, Glencoe. Eliza was about seventy four, and the couple were living alone.
Samuel did not farm in Canada. His death registration records his occupation as tax collector, a small public office. The land ended at Farcet Fen in 1882 and no one in the family went back to it.
In about 1924, in her late seventies, Eliza moved to a city for the first time in her life.
Samuel's death registration shows the couple living at 71 Galley Avenue in the Parkdale district of Toronto, with six years of residence at that address as of October 1930. They had gone to live with their daughter Mary Cathleen, by then married to William Henry Ghent, a railway clerk born in Ontario.
Samuel died there on October 16, 1930, aged 87, of a cerebral thrombosis with a stomach cancer of six months or more standing as the contributing cause. His doctor attended him at the house from October 7. The informant on the registration is Mrs Mary C. Ghent, daughter, of the same address.
Four days later he was taken the two hundred kilometres back to Glencoe and buried at Oakland Cemetery. After forty odd years in the village and only six in the city, that was still where the family belonged.
Eliza was eighty three and a widow.
The census of June 1, 1931 finds her still there. The household at 71 Galley Avenue, in the electoral district of Parkdale.
The house was owned, brick, eight rooms, valued at six thousand dollars, with a radio. Her son in law earned twenty three hundred dollars that year.
Small things stand out. Mary Cathleen's age of 51 makes her the one year old Mary C. of the 1881 Farcet Fen census, which means she crossed the Atlantic as a baby in arms. Eliza's age of 84 matches her December 1846 baptism precisely. And the enumerator wrote her down as a lodger rather than as the mother of the woman of the house, which is almost certainly a clerical convention rather than a description of how the family felt about her, but it is how she appears on the page.
Eliza outlived Samuel by more than thirteen years and died on January 2, 1944, aged 97.
Where she spent those years, and where she died, has not yet been established. Toronto is the likeliest answer, since that is where she was living in 1931 and where her daughter's household was.
She was buried at Oakland Cemetery, on Longwoods Road in historic Mosa Township, beside Samuel. Their stone reads:
SAMUEL THOMPSON DIED OCT. 16, 1930 AGED 87 YRS.
HIS WIFE ELIZA THOMPSON DIED JAN. 2, 1944 AGED 97 YRS.
Both ages are exactly right, which is rarer than it sounds. Samuel was born April 1, 1843. Eliza was baptised December 6, 1846. Her life ran from the reign of the young Queen Victoria to the middle of the Second World War.