Four families, two countries, one small Ontario town. Long before Laura McGaffey married the railway agent Stanley Thompson at Bothwell in 1906, their ancestors were fen farmers and shepherds on the edge of Peterborough, a labourer turned farmer in a Huntingdonshire village, and two Irish families who reached Kent County by way of Quebec. Over the course of the 1800s, all four lines crossed the Atlantic and ended up within a few miles of each other.
Listen to the full story below, or trace the four streams on the map.
A note on the sources: the further back these lines go, the thinner the paper trail gets. Parish registers stand in for census returns, and some relationships rest on a single record or on family tradition. Where a connection is probable rather than proven, the story says so.
Joseph Thompson was baptized at Alconbury Weston, a clay farming parish off the Great North Road, in June 1805. By 1833 he had moved fifteen miles north to Farcet, on the fen edge just south of Peterborough, and married a local girl, Sarah Willis, who was most likely the daughter of a Farcet shepherd. They had ten children in sixteen years and buried at least three of them young. Joseph was working machinery in 1854 and was a farmer by 1870. When he died in 1873 he owned copyhold land in the village. Nine years later, in the same year his sons James and Samuel lost their farming business, a bank went to court over that land. Samuel and his family sailed for Canada that summer.
Twenty miles to the south, Thomas and Mary Chandler were raising a large family in Fenstanton, near St Ives. When their youngest daughter Eliza was baptized in 1846, Thomas was a labourer. By 1854 he was on the county's list of farmers, and by 1861 he was working 130 acres with three men and two boys. He was still farming there in 1877. Eliza married Samuel Thompson of Farcet in 1870, joining two families that had climbed out of wage labour in the same decade.
John McGaffey was born in County Tyrone in the 1820s. He was in Quebec by the late 1840s, and by about 1852 he was married to Nancy Galbraith, a girl from Shefford. Their first children were born in Quebec. By 1853 the family had moved to Upper Canada, and in 1859 they settled in Zone Township, on the railway line George Brown had laid out Bothwell to supply. John was a foreman in 1861 and a truckmaster in 1875, and by 1881 the county atlas called him a farmer, mill owner and lumber dealer, with 54 acres on the fifth concession. His parents, Richard McGaffey and Margaret Mills, are believed to have followed him out and to have died in Zone in 1881 and 1882. His sons went into the oil fields. One of them, most likely his son John, was killed in 1897 when a cable snapped on a drilling derrick at Bothwell. Nancy died in Pontiac, Michigan, in 1915 and was brought home by train to lie beside her husband at Thamesville.
George Talbot and Lovina Galbraith were both born in Ireland, he about 1809 and she about 1820. They married in Shefford, in Quebec's Eastern Townships, in January 1837, and farmed at North Shefford for the rest of their lives. By 1861 they were living in a brick house, which in a township of log and frame homes said something. Their youngest daughters were Martha and Alice. Lovina died in 1888, already a widow. Nancy Galbraith, John McGaffey's wife, had been baptized in the same Shefford Anglican community in 1831. Whether Nancy and Lovina were sisters is not known, but when Martha Talbot married Nancy's son William in 1884, the two families had almost certainly known each other for decades. Martha carried one more thing west with her: the family's belief that Colonel Thomas Talbot, the founder of the Talbot Settlement, was her great uncle. It has never been proven, and she never stopped telling it.
Samuel and Eliza Thompson settled at Glencoe. John and Nancy McGaffey were at Zone, and their son William brought Martha Talbot there from Quebec. Glencoe and Bothwell sit twelve miles apart on the same Canadian Pacific line. In 1906 Samuel and Eliza's son Stanley, the C.P.R. agent at Bothwell, married William and Martha's daughter Laura.
