Saturday, 8 October 2011

Mild Genealogical frustration

I've been trying to figure out the history behind our house. I think that we should know this if it's to become a bed and breakfast. So far I've heard that it was built 200 years ago. Or in the 1870's. It was a muster station during the War of 1812. And a coach stop on the lake shore road from St. Catharines to Hamilton. What I do know to be true is, the land on which the house sits is lot #8 on the "Broken Front" concession (which means it's the concession along the lake shore). This lot, which also reached back onto concessions 1 and 2, was granted to Joseph Wardell around 1791. You can check out his family's history here:
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~wardell/183.htm
The land was further subdivided at some point, into roughly four smaller lots. The house we live in is on a half-acre even smaller cutout. We met our new neighbours the other day, and they moved into their house in 1965. I asked them who was living in our house at that time, and they said the last name was "House". This got me wondering how the land got from Wardell to House, and I found that Joseph's granddaughter, Abigail, married a Patrick House. They had a son, William House, who is shown to have the property when this map was published in 1876:
http://digital.library.mcgill.ca/countyatlas/images/maps/townshipmaps/lin-m-Clinton.jpg
(when you're looking at this map, you're looking along the lake shore, lot 8). Whenever I had looked at this map previously, I was never sure if our house sat on the lot belonging to William House or Joseph Culp, as there are houses showing on both. Ours is the only "old" house in the area though; the neighbour's is a brick house probably built in the 1950's. I figured that if a House lived in our house in 1965, it had probably passed down in the family throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.
However.....
Yesterday I visited a wonderful genealogical research centre in St. Catharines, called Mayholme Foundation. There, they had a map from 1862, earlier than the other map, and on it it showed that there was one house, and that was on the property of Joseph Culp, right next door to William House. Could this be our house? Perhaps I misunderstood our new neighbours, or they misunderstood me, about which house I was enquiring. Joseph Culp was the brother of Elizabeth Culp, who was William House. So, brother and sister lived next door to each other, which makes perfect sense in such a small community. Likely someone bought it from someone else at some point when the land was sub-divided. Incidentally, both Joseph and Elizabeth Culp were the children of "Flat Head Jake" Culp; not quite sure why he sported that name, although it did  make me laugh. I also saw a "Satan Jake" in my searching. No idea where that came from, either. That's likely as far as I'll get, although apparently I can go up to Brock University and use their archives to get the land registry information. Some sad things I did find out, although I suppose it was very common-place back then...William House and Elizabeth Culp had eleven children in all, although only six survived. She had two boys and then a girl, the girl, Jane, died young, at around a year old. About five months later, Elizabeth was born, and three weeks after that the first two children, Joseph and Albert, died within four days of each other, most likely of influenza I would guess. So poor Elizabeth House was all of a sudden left with just one child again, after having three less than a year previous!
Another sad story of note, and there must be many, is that of Joseph Culp's son, Joseph Jr., who married Joanna Jamieson in 1879. They had three sons before Joanna passed away on Christmas Eve, 1890. Ten years to the day later, Christmas Eve 1900, their middle son, Perly passed away at the age of 16. I can't find any info on what caused his death, but I do find it a bit odd that he died on such a significantly sad anniversary.
Two of Joseph Wardell's sons, Thomas and Joshua, were listed in the muster rolls of the War of 1812, serving with the 4th Lincoln Regiment. Could this be where the 'muster station' rumour came from?
I'm sure that over time, we'll hear bits and pieces of what went on on our little piece of the lake shore. Until then, we'll just have to keep our eyes and ears open!
Thanks to the Culp and Wardell families for keeping such in-depth records on the 'net of their family histories.
Have a gorgeous Thanksgiving weekend!

2 comments:

  1. It seems like you are well on your way to figuring out what is what about the property. Congratulations to you and Rod.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thank you Duncan! We look forward to finding out more, and of course to seeing you next time you come down for a visit!

    ReplyDelete