Presented by: Sher Leetooze
Sponsored by:
Summary:
Where did my Bible Christian ancestors come from? Where did they settle? How did they come to be scattered all across Ontario and North America? Through research and use of maps, Sher Leetooze will try to answer these questions.
Description:
People came from Great Britain in the first half of the 1800s for many reasons, but the most compelling reason was economic. How else could a family have a 100 acre or 200 acre farm for £5? If you divide the people into categories by occupation, the largest group to come to Ontario were farmers, and farm labourers. If you divide that group into religious categories, by far the largest was Bible Christian, followed very closely by Wesleyan Methodists – for instance on one page of the 1852 census, there were listed 10 Bible Christian families, 2 Wesleyan families, 1 Episcopal Methodist family and 1 Roman Catholic family.
Depending on the community’s location within the province, this was usually the norm. Location in the province had a lot to do with the religious affiliation of any one family or person. One of the first areas to settle Bible Christian families was Cobourg in the early 1830s where the BC Missionary, John Hicks Eynon settled. And so, more BCs followed Eynon to Upper Canada, and settled in the vicinity of his circuit. Eynon’s circuit was some 200 miles in circumference and covered from Scarboro to Cobourg taking in all the townships in between. That first circuit formed the central settlement area for BCs.
It was the custom for BC ministers to be transferred between circuits every three years. Sometimes they were sent to a nearby circuit, but often the new circuit was hundreds of miles away. When Cobourg area ministers were transferred down to the Huron County area from Eynon’s original area, many families uprooted and followed them – often leaving grown children on the original farm, thus splitting families.
After familiarizing people with the Bible Christian immigration pattern, I will show maps of various areas and show the circuits. I will tell about the movement of ministers between the various areas, and show how families came to be in those areas. Just when you think you have found a great way to track family movements, I will show people how and why the various areas of families moved to the American mid-west and to our own Canadian western provinces – mostly Manitoba. Now we have many families split again. So, if you wonder how your family is related to same name families in the American Mid-West, in Manitoba, Huron/Perth County or Cobourg/Bowmanville families – they likely are, and research using Religious groups and their movements may help you find lost cousins.
