Vital Stats
Born
December 2, 1856, Middlesex County, Ontario
Died
April 26, 1943, Bothwell, Ontario
Married
Martha Helen Talbot, December 18, 1884, St. Luke's Anglican Church, Waterloo, Quebec
Children
6
Siblings
9
William McGaffey was the son of an Irish foreman and a Quebec mother, raised on a Zone Township farm in a house with ten children in it. He went east to his mother's province to marry, brought his bride home to Kent County, and farmed there for thirty years. He and Martha buried two little boys before either had reached school age. Then, somewhere past sixty, when most farmers of his generation were handing the land to a son, William moved into the town of Bothwell and went on the road selling medicine. The census found him still at it at seventy four. He died on Chestnut Street at eighty six, fifty eight years married, with his widowed daughter Laura raising her own family in the same small town.
William's father, John McGaffey, was born in Ireland about 1822. On William's death certificate, filled in from what his widow knew, the birthplace is given more exactly: County Tyrone. His mother, Nancy Galbraith, was born in 1831, and every record that names her birthplace says Quebec.
That second fact matters more than it looks, because the family did not come to Kent County straight from Ireland. They came by way of Lower Canada.
The 1861 census of Zone Township shows how. John, thirty five, is entered as a foreman, not a farmer, living in a one storey frame house. Nancy is twenty five and born in Lower Canada. So are the two eldest children in the house, John, fourteen, and Jane Ann, nine. Then the birthplaces change. Richard, eight, William, six, James, four, and Robert, two, were all born in Upper Canada.
Read in order, the column is a migration record. The McGaffeys were in Quebec until about 1852 and in Ontario by about 1855. William was among the first of the children born on the Ontario side. His death registration puts his birth in Middlesex County, the next county up the Thames from Zone, which fits a family still finding its footing when he arrived.
By 1871 the family had settled into farming. John was entered as a farmer, Church of England, Irish, with nine children at home: Jane Ann, Richard, William H. at fourteen and in school, Robert, Betsey, Alexander, John and the baby Nancy E.
The 1881 census caught William at twenty four, still single and still in his father's house, with his brothers Richard and Robert, his sister Elizabeth, and the younger children Alexander, John, Emma, George and Joseph. The enumerator that year was Samuel Harris. Four years later the same Samuel Harris, by then Division Registrar for Zone, would write down the birth of William's first son.
The family grew to at least eleven children. The names recorded across the censuses and the family's gravestones are Jane Ann, John, William Henry, Richard, James, Robert, Elizabeth, Alexander, John, Nancy Emma (Embley), George and Joseph Galbraith. Joseph carries his mother's maiden name as a middle name, which is the strongest single confirmation that Nancy was a Galbraith.
On 18 December 1884, at twenty eight, William married Martha Helen Talbot at St. Luke's Anglican Church in Waterloo, Quebec, in the Eastern Townships.
The register describes him as William McGaffey of Bothwell, Ontario, Bachelor, and her as Martha Helen, daughter of the late Benjamin Talbot of Shefford. Her father was already dead. They married by licence, as their daughter Laura would twenty two years later. The witnesses were Alice Marion Talbot, almost certainly Martha's sister, and James A. Kennedy.
Why would a Zone Township farmer marry in Waterloo, Quebec, eight hundred kilometres away?
The earlier family history offered an answer: that William and Martha lived a life split between the two provinces. The records do not support that.
William's own mother was a Quebecer, and the McGaffeys had lived in Lower Canada within his parents' memory. It is far more likely that the Galbraith and McGaffey families still had people in the Eastern Townships, and that this is how William came to know a Talbot girl from Shefford. He married into his mother's country and brought his wife home.
She was twenty three. He was twenty eight. They were married for fifty eight years.
The first child, Harold Talbot McGaffey, was born in Zone Township on 21 October 1885, ten months after the wedding. William registered the birth himself on 12 November. The registrar first wrote the mother's name as Martha McGaffy, then struck it out and wrote Talbot above, and noted in the margin the above is as I rec'd it.
Laura followed on 22 October 1886, a year and a day after her brother. William went to the registrar at Zone on 7 December and registered her too.
A year later the family made the long trip east. On 31 October 1887 Laura was baptized in an Anglican church in the same Quebec registry district as her parents' wedding. The entry calls her father a farmer of Bothwell, Ont. and gives her birth as 22 October 1886. The baptism was a year after the birth, and the register it sits in is the one for 1887. Her godparents were her mother, Martha Helen (Talbot) McGaffey, and two Talbot women, Alice Talbot and Nancy E. Talbot. This was a christening held among Martha's family, on a visit home.
So Laura was not born in Quebec. She was born in Zone, registered in Zone, and carried to Quebec at a year old to be christened in front of her mother's people.
Arlis T. McGaffey was born about 1889, and Cora on 8 October 1890.
Then the losses began. Harold died in 1889, at three or four years old. By the census of April 1891 the house held only Laura, four, Arlis, two, and the baby Cora, whom the enumerator wrote down as Cassie. Arlis died in 1894, at about five. Both boys are recorded at the Bothwell Cemetery under their mother's name, which is where Martha herself would be buried sixty years later.
Laura was about three when she lost her older brother and about eight when she lost the younger one. When she had sons of her own she named one Stanley Harold and another Arlis Kenneth.
For the next twenty years William was a Zone Township farmer on his own account. The 1901 census, the one that asked for exact birth dates, gives his as 2 December 1856 and Martha's as 25 August 1861, both of which match every later record.
The 1911 census finds the family still on the land, with William earning his living from the farm and carrying $1,500 of life insurance, a sensible figure for a man of fifty four with a wife and two children still at home.
Some time around 1918 William gave up farming and moved into the Town of Bothwell. His death registration says he had lived there twenty five years.
He did not retire. The 1921 census finds William and Martha in a house they owned on Chestnut Street, with a young schoolteacher, Barbara Shoebotham, boarding with them. William, sixty four, gave his occupation as Agent and his industry as medicine. He was a wage earner, and had made $900 in the past year.
In 1931, at seventy four, he gave the same answer with more detail: Agent, patent medicine, $800 in the year, and twenty six weeks without work, in the second year of the Depression. The house was now recorded as a ten room brick veneer, owned, valued at $1,100. In the 1935 federal voters list he is still McGaffey, Wm., agent, Bothwell. On his death certificate the occupation is Traveller, and the years spent at it are given as thirty.
Patent medicine was sold in rural Ontario by commission men who went farm to farm with a wagon or a car full of liniments, tonics and ointments. It was steady work for a man who knew every farm in the district and every family on them. On the same 1931 census page, a Bothwell neighbour is listed as an agent for Watkins Products, one of the best known of those companies, so the trade was well established in the town. Which company William carried has not been established.
What the records describe is a man who did not stop. He changed trades in his sixties and kept at the new one into his late seventies.
In the 1921 census Laura, widowed four years, was renting an eight room house on Chestnut Street with her five children. Her parents owned a house on the same street. The two households fall in different parts of the town's census, so they were not next door, but in a town the size of Bothwell they were a few minutes' walk apart.
It is worth holding the two households side by side. William and Martha, in their sixties, with a house of their own and a boarder to help pay for it. Their daughter up the street, with five children and no occupation recorded against her name, working out the same arithmetic of rooms and boarders that would carry her through the next twenty years.
William died at home on Chestnut Street on 26 April 1943. The cause was a cerebral haemorrhage, due to arteriosclerosis, with auricular fibrillation as a contributing condition. Dr. Bartlett of Bothwell had been attending him since May 1941.
In other words: he died from bleeding in the brain, caused by hardening of the arteries. An irregular heartbeat was also a contributing factor.
Martha gave the particulars herself and signed as Mrs. Wm. McGaffey, wife. The funeral was handled by Fred H. Robinson of Bothwell, the same firm that would bury Laura forty two years later. He was buried at West Bothwell on 29 April.
Martha lived another twelve years. She died in 1955, in her nineties, and was buried at the Bothwell Cemetery next to William.
