Martha Helen Talbot was born on a farm in the Eastern Townships to an Irish father and a mother named Lovina Galbraith, and she grew up hearing that Colonel Thomas Talbot, the Squire of Malahide, was her great uncle. At twenty three she married a Kent County farmer and went west with him to a town that had just finished being famous. She raised six children in Bothwell and buried three of them. She ran the Anglican Guild, kept the Eastern Star's books for years, and outlived her husband by twelve years. In August 1954, a reporter came to her daughter's house to photograph her on her ninety third birthday, and the story he wrote was not about her age. It was about the Talbot family stories she could still tell.
Her father, George Talbot, was born in Ireland about 1809. By 1838 he had land at North Shefford in Quebec's Eastern Townships and was described as a farmer when he married Lovina Galbraith in the Anglican church there.
They were still farming the same ground thirty three years later. The 1861 census finds George, an Irish born farmer of about fifty one, with Lovina and a houseful of Canadian born children. Martha arrived that August, the youngest of a long family. By the census of 1871 she is nine years old and living at home among brothers and sisters named Benjamin, Nancy, Alexander and Alice.
It was an Anglican household in a Protestant, English speaking corner of a French speaking province. When Lovina died on 4 July 1888, the burial register at North Shefford entered her as Lovina Galbraith, widow of the late George Talbot, of North Shefford, a farmer, aged sixty eight years, four months and twenty nine days. Two of her children signed as witnesses: Alice M. Talbot and Alexander Talbot.
Alice is worth holding on to. Four years before she buried her mother, she had stood up at her sister Laura's wedding.
There is one more thread from that household that runs straight into the rest of this story. Martha's mother was a Galbraith, born in Quebec. So was the mother of the man she married. William McGaffey's mother, Nancy Galbraith, was born in Quebec in 1831. Two Galbraith women of the same generation and the same province, and a marriage between their children. The families almost certainly knew each other long before the wedding.
Every family has a story it tells about itself. Martha's was unusually grand, and she could still tell it at ninety three.
The Talbots of North Shefford held that they were kin to Colonel Thomas Talbot, the Squire of Malahide, the Irish aristocrat who took a vast grant on the north shore of Lake Erie and spent forty years planting settlers on it. The road he cut is still Talbot Street. The land patents he issued at Malahide Castle were still being held, in direct line of succession, by families in Orford and Howard and Raleigh townships within living memory.
By the family's reckoning, Martha was the granddaughter of a lesser known brother of his, which made the Colonel her great uncle.
What matters here is not the pedigree. It is that a girl born on a Quebec farm in 1861 grew up on stories about an eccentric and famous relative who had built a corner of Ontario, and then, at twenty three, married a man and moved to that exact corner of Ontario. Bothwell sits in Kent County, inside the country the Colonel opened, very likely on one of the deeds given to her husband's father, John McGaffey.
When the Windsor Star came to interview her seventy years later, the reporter called her "Grandniece of the Squire of Malahide." She could still recall, he wrote, "some of the family traditions regarding her noted and eccentric great uncle."
A local history of the Bothwell oil boom printed her portrait with the caption "Mrs. Wm. McGaffey 'Martha', Grandniece of Colonel Talbot." In her own town, that was simply who she was.
She married William Henry McGaffey at St. Luke's Anglican Church in Waterloo, Quebec, on 18 December 1884, by licence, before the rector Rev. David Lindsay. The witnesses were her sister Alice Marion Talbot and James A. Kennedy.
She was twenty three. He was twenty eight, a farmer's son from Zone Township in Kent County, eight hundred kilometres west.
She signed the register herself, in full: Martha Helen Talbot. It is the only surviving sample of her handwriting.
Martha always dated her Bothwell life from 1884. She came out with William that year, and she told the Windsor Star so seventy years later.
She arrived twenty years too late for the spectacle. Oil had been struck at Bothwell in 1863 and the place had gone up like a rocket: eight thousand people, hotels, theatres, money. By the time Martha got off the train it was a town of about a thousand, and she remembered it clearly.
Her own description, as the paper reported it, is the best thing anyone has written about Bothwell in the 1880s. The town "still retained some of the grandeur of the days when it was a roaring community of 8,000 oil seekers, but many of the buildings, once top entertainment and social centres, were empty shells."
That is an eye witness. A young woman from a Quebec farm, walking through a small Ontario town full of theatres nobody was using.
Harold Talbot McGaffey was born in Zone Township on 21 October 1885, ten months after the wedding. She gave him her own surname for a middle name. Laura followed on 22 October 1886, a year and a day later. Arlis T. came about 1889, and Ethel in the same year. Cora was born on 8 October 1890. Twelve years later, when Martha was in her forties, there was Howard.
Harold died in 1889, at three or four. Arlis died in 1894, at about five. The two little boys are buried together at Bothwell, a few rows from their parents.
Laura grew up, married the Canadian Pacific agent at Bothwell in 1906, was widowed at thirty, and raised five children in the same town. Cora married William Richard Glazier in 1918 and later lived at Blenheim. Howard went to Chicago.
Martha's public life ran through two organizations, and her obituary led with both.
She was past president of the Anglican Guild, the parish women's organization that in a town the size of Bothwell effectively ran the church's practical life: the money, the catering, the visiting, the fundraising.
And she was a life member of Bothwell Chapter No. 87 of the Order of the Eastern Star, having served several years as its treasurer.
Her daughter Laura's obituary calls Laura a chartered member, which means she was there at the founding and her name is on the charter itself, and she went on to become Past District Deputy Grand Matron, an office that represented the provincial Grand Chapter across a whole district.
Martha was not a founder and never held district office. She joined a chapter her daughter had helped bring into existence, and then she kept its books.
Take the order of that in. Laura was widowed at thirty and started something. Her mother, already an old woman, came in behind her and spent years as treasurer of it. The chapter was Laura's achievement. Martha made herself useful in it, which at seventy is its own kind of decision.
The Eastern Star did not treat her as a name on a roll. When she died, the chapter held its own funeral rites for her at the Fred Robinson Funeral Home at seven o'clock on the evening before her funeral. At ninety three, after years as treasurer, her sisters in the order came and said goodbye to her in their own form.
The McGaffeys farmed in Zone Township until about 1918, and then moved into the town of Bothwell. William gave up farming past sixty and went on the road as a travelling agent selling patent medicine, which he did for nearly thirty years. The Windsor Star, writing in 1954, called him simply "a commercial traveler."
They owned a house on Chestnut Street and took in a boarder, a young schoolteacher, to help with it. By 1931 it was a ten room brick veneer house and William, at seventy four, had been out of work for half the year. Up the street, Laura was running a nine room boarding house with five children in it.
In the 1935 voters list for Bothwell, Martha appears as McGaffey, Mrs. Wm., married woman. She had the federal vote and was using it at seventy three.
William died at home on Chestnut Street on 26 April 1943, at eighty six, after fifty eight years of marriage. Martha gave the particulars for his death registration herself and signed it Mrs. Wm. McGaffey, wife.
She was eighty one. She went to live with Laura, and stayed there for the rest of her life.
On 24 August 1954, the day before her ninety third birthday, the Windsor Star ran her photograph on page three under the headline "Nonagenarian Finds Time for Bible."
The picture is remarkable. She is sitting with an open Bible in her lap, white haired, in a dark dress, entirely composed, looking directly into the lens.
The article called her the town's oldest citizen. It reported that she was "still quite active", a member of Bothwell United Church, where she attended services regularly. Her birthday would be quiet, family and a few close friends, "however, many of Mrs. McGaffey's old friends are expected to drop in to offer their greetings, and she will be happy to see them."
She was ninety two years and three hundred and sixty four days old, and the town still expected a queue at the door.
She had been in failing health for about a year. In the middle of October 1955 she developed pneumonia, and after a week's illness she died on 20 October.
The Chatham Daily News carried her obituary the next day under the plainest possible description, and then a phrase no other ancestor in this family gets:
"One of Bothwell's oldest citizens, and niece of the famous Col. Talbot, Mrs. Martha Talbot McGaffey died yesterday."
The notice named her survivors: her son Howard McGaffey of Chicago; her daughters Mrs. Cora Glazier of Blenheim and Mrs. Laura Thompson of Bothwell; her granddaughters Mrs. Stanley Hore of Kitchener and Mrs. George Brearley of Bothwell; her grandsons Victor and Harold Thompson of Bothwell and Arliss and Arthur Thompson of London; several great grandchildren, and two great great grandchildren.
She lies in Bothwell Cemetery under a red granite stone with McGAFFEY across the top, in three panels.
WILLIAM H. McGAFFEY · 1856 to 1943 · HIS WIFE · MARTHA TALBOT · 1861 to 1955 · AT REST
ETHEL McGAFFEY · 1889 to 1921 · BELOVED DAUGHTER
She is named on it as Martha Talbot. Seventy one years in Bothwell, six children, a husband of fifty eight years, and the name the stone gives her is the one she was born with in North Shefford.
