Who are we?

A love letter to my family

20 min readSep 1, 2022

Growing up, we weren’t taught much about our family’s history. I knew that we had vaguely English-Irish-Scottish roots, that we’d been in Southern Ontario for a while, and had heard a few scattered stories — like the one mom likes to tell about our great grandma in Twillingate being rescued from drowning by the family’s Newfoundland dog. When I asked Mom what culture we belong to she struggled a bit and tossed out words like Anglo-Saxon, Canadian, and WASP, before landing self-deprecatingly on “wonder-bread Canadian”. Dad also had a hard time, and ultimately decided that he’s “a fairly typical Canadian.” But, if we’re Canadian, what does that mean? More specifically, I wonder about who our ancestors were — where they came from, what they believed, and what their lives might have looked like.

Lately I’ve gotten kind of obsessed with filling in the blanks of our family’s story. Maybe it’s the result of becoming an uncle and moving up a rung, into the next generation. Or it might come from feeling a bit ungrounded, disconnected from community, ceremony, song, dance, tradition, things that are undoubtedly and fundamentally human but feel strangely foreign, as if they belong to other people, or in the past, but not to me. For sure, some of my interest is political. I don’t think it’s entirely an accident, or unique, that we don’t know our past. An anthropologist I like uses the terms ‘not-talking’ and ‘not-knowing’ to describe “strategies deployed within settler families to erase the history of colonialism and the dispossession of Indigenous people on which their own settled and secure lives depend.” Rather than any one individual’s failing, she describes this as a collective culture of silence that obscures settler histories. I wonder if, and how much, her explanation might apply to our not-knowing.

Whatever my motivation, genealogy is complex. By the time you follow the spreading branches of our family tree back nine generations to the late 18th century — all the grandparents, their parents, and their parents (et cetera) — it includes over a thousand ancestors. Any attempt to fit their stories into a linear narrative necessarily cherry picks and obscures other, sometimes conflicting, stories. But, with that disclaimer, after I mapped out the birthplaces of our ancestors, and colour coded them by generation, some pretty strong patterns emerged.

*A map of our ancestor’s birth places. Click on* *this link* *and you can scroll around, zoom in, and sort by generation.*

The overwhelming majority of our ancestors come from England. They first came to Colonial America as part of a mass Puritan migration that started in 1620 with the Mayflower pilgrims. They settled on the Eastern coast, largely along the Hudson River valley and the New England colonies of Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. Our family stayed in the area until the American revolution (1765–1791) triggered a migration north to British controlled lands around Lake Ontario. It’s unclear to what extent our family were British Loyalists, or how much they were just taking advantage of cheap and abundant land that had recently been expropriated from the Mississauga people. Regardless, our family has stayed in the area ever since, the last settler from Europe being our maternal great great grandpa, Harry Linney, who emigrated from England to Toronto in 1889. Somewhere along the way, probably during one of Colonial America’s “Great Awakening” religious revivals of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, our family became associated with the Methodist Church. Which, in 1925, merged with the Presbyterian Church to become the United Church — a church our family continued to attend into living memory (Mom has stories of going to Timothy Eaton Memorial Church in Toronto with Mere and Pere, where Pere had a formal role as the church usher). In the most recent generations we’ve stopped attending church and now identify as Atheist.

As you know, I’m not a historian or a genealogist. I’m writing this essay not as an authority, but as a starting point in the exploration of some questions that I’ve been interested in for a while:

We’ve had a privileged upbringing, and our family is relatively wealthy. What are the historical roots of our wealth?
When our ancestors came to Turtle Island (North America), what was their relationship to the Indigenous people on whose lands they settled?
What were the beliefs, values, and traditions of our ancestors, and to what extent do they continue in our family today?

I want to explore these questions through the lives of three ancestors, each representative of what I consider a distinct period in our story. Rev. William Johnson, a Puritan pastor in the Colony of Massachusetts, David Turney, an early settler on Mississauga territory, and Dr. William Young, a devout Methodist in Toronto. It’s worth pointing out that they’re all male and relatively wealthy landowners — characteristics that make them easy to find in the historical record. They’re also all from our paternal line, again, mostly because they happened to have easy records to find. Since the map suggests a homogenous lineage across both sides of the family, I think it’s safe to say that their stories shed light on our maternal family history as well. Some of their stories come directly from the primary sources I was able to find, such as birth and baptism records, wedding certificates, government census, land deeds, and obituary notices. The rest I infer from a more general historical record, and is my educated best guess of what they might have done, thought, and believed.

Reverend William Johnson — Puritan New England (1706–1772)

Reverend William Johnson is our 8th great grandpa. He was born in Newbury Massachusetts, attended Harvard University, and went on to become the first pastor of the 3rd Church in Newbury, a Congregational church where he dedicated forty years of his life to teaching and spreading Puritan beliefs. Beliefs that must not have been far off from those that had compelled his ancestors to exile themselves from their home in England, cross the Atlantic, and settle on the lands of the Algonquin-speaking Pennacook people.

The arrival of William’s family was likely devastating to the Pennacook. The influx of European settler families, like theirs, introduced smallpox and other infectious diseases that Indigenous bodies had never seen and had no immunity to. Within the first century of contact the Pennacook population was reduced by as much as ninety percent. This seismic destabilisation of their population, coupled with opportunistic settler expansion, triggered a violent era of warfare — both amongst neighbouring Indigenous nations and between the new colonists. It was during this time of radical depopulation that the town of Newbury was “bought” by English settlers for three pounds from an Indigenous man who appears in the record as “Great Tom”. William was born there fifty six years later.

*3rd Church, Newbury Massachusetts (1929)*

In order to understand William, and what brought his family to Massachusetts, we need to understand the religion he dedicated his life to — Puritanism. The Puritans were radical believers of Martin Luther’s Reformation, which sought to reform the Catholic church to Protestant ideals. Like Luther, the Puritans saw Catholics as authoritarian, impure, unchristian, and fundamentally corrupt — Luther went so far as to say that the Pope was the literal antichrist. The politically powerful Church of England, intimately tied to the monarchy and interchangeable with the English government of the time, was technically Protestant but still dependent on Catholic support for political legitimacy. In this conciliatory way, the Church of England’s Catholic traditions persisted, and the Puritans continued to demand a more radical and complete transformation toward their Protestantism. The Church began to see the Puritans as a threat to their authority and eventually persecuted them for their beliefs — during the short reign of Mary I (the famous “Bloody Mary,” a Catholic reformer and Queen of England from 1553–1558), hundreds of Puritans were burned at the stake as heretics. As a result, over the course of the next century, the Puritans would flee England and establish new religious communities in New England.

It’s worthwhile to explore what Puritanism was — not only because it was the belief that pushed our family from England to settle on Turtle Island, but also because the more I learn about it, the more I’m struck by how similar their values are to the ones we were raised with. In particular — their values around education, rationalism, science and, notably, how much their anti-Catholicism resembles our Atheism.

*Robert W. Weir, Embarkation of the Pilgrims, 1843*

Puritans believed strongly in education — they wanted their children, regardless of gender, to be able not only to read, but also interpret the Bible themselves. They were a highly literate society and established some of the earliest schools in North America, including William’s alma mater, Harvard University.

Their enthusiasm for bookish learning and independent thought is captured in the Reformation mottos of ad fontes (to the sources) and sola scriptura (by scripture alone). The Puritans didn’t consider their ideas to be new, but rather a return to an original truth which had been lost and corrupted. They emphasised that the fall of man, when Adam ate from the tree of knowledge, was not only a loss of our moral capacities, but, crucially, our sensory and cognitive capacities as well. Adam, in his innocence, had once had a perfect knowledge of nature, but it was lost in his fall from grace. The Puritans made it their mission to recover Adam’s lost knowledge and, by so doing, restore humanity’s rightful dominion over nature. In their efforts, they turned to ancient sources, closer to Adam and free from Catholic corruption — Jewish, Babylonian, Egyptian, and Greek texts were sought out and translated. Nature, created by God and uncorrupted by fallen man, was seen as a valid source of knowledge and its careful study could elucidate scripture. Experimentation and the systematic observation of nature were developed as ways to compensate for our damaged capacities of sense and reason. In this way Puritans were early and devout supporters of science — for instance, seven of ten founding members of The Royal Society of London were Puritans.

The rationalism of the Puritans went beyond a love of science and old books. At the core, their rationalism was a belief that God had endowed humans with reason so that they could tell the difference between right and wrong. They were preoccupied with eternal salvation, and conceived of their daily life as a ledger book of sins weighed against good works. They were opposed to hedonistic excess of all types — drinking, gambling, sexuality out of marriage, homosexuality, and mixed dancing were all big no-nos.

A lot of what I’ve learned about Puritans comes from reading Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In it, he makes the argument that the ethics of Protestantism were a significant force in the development of capitalism. It’s a compelling argument, but I won’t get into it here. I’m more interested in the ways he explores how these ethics manifested themselves in Puritan’s daily lives. To quote directly from Weber: “[Puritanism] tried to enable a man to maintain and act upon his constant motives, especially those which it taught him itself, against the emotions… The most urgent task the destruction of spontaneous, impulsive enjoyment, the most important means was to bring order into the conduct of its adherents… The genuine Puritan even rejected all signs of religious ceremony at the grave and buried his nearest and dearest without song or ritual in order that no superstition, no trust in the effects of magical and sacramental forces on salvation, should creep in.”

It struck me, as I read those lines, that I still hold those beliefs with me, in my body. I struggle to express and even feel my emotions, something I’d previously attributed to an unhealthy masculinity, but now I wonder how much might be explained by our ancestry. I often feel constrained and calculated in how I express myself. It might sound weird, but for a lot of my twenties, when I was tree-planting, travelling, and going to music festivals, part of what I was doing was learning how to dance and be relaxed and spontaneous in social settings (even though I still feel stiff and uncomfortable on a dance floor). Luckily I’ve never had to organise a funeral but if I did, what songs or rituals would I draw on? Where did Dad’s refrain of “work before play” come from? Why do I consider writing an essay fun? Could this be why we don’t believe in ghosts or magic?

David Turney — Lake Ontario Settler (1748–1817)

David Turney is our 6th great grandpa, and was born in the Puritan colony of Fairfield, Connecticut. He was born into a revolutionary fervour that was sweeping across and dividing the Thirteen Colonies, the town of Fairfield firmly positioned on the side of the separatists. By the time David was in his early twenties, the fervour had grown into a full-blown war. The next decade of his life saw near constant battles and naval skirmishes, fought across the sound which divided Connecticut from British controlled Long Island. The battles culminated in 1779 in what’s remembered as the Burning of Fairfield, when 2700 British troops marched into the town. The residents fled and, facing no resistance, the British troops went on a rampage — destroying 54 barns, 47 storehouses, 83 homes, two churches, and municipal buildings including a schoolhouse, courthouse, and the local jail.

*Burning of Fairfield — Connecticut Historical Society*

It’s not hard to imagine David, the right age to be a soldier, wrapped up in the violence. Maybe his family home was burned down, his friends killed, or the farm he worked at destroyed. Whatever the impact on his life, we know that ten years later David, along with his wife and two sons, would escape the violence and settle on the north shore of Lake Ontario. It was here, halfway between the established settlements of York (Toronto) and Kingston, that the British government granted them 200 acres of prime agricultural, lakefront property (Concession 1, Lot 23, Cramahe Township). They were given this land for free, as well as provisions and tools to help them settle, the only condition being that they build a house and occupy the lot. A few years later this requirement would be amended to include that settlers demonstrate “improvement” to the land, namely clearing it of forest.

This seems like a significant moment for our family — a moment where we can pinpoint the influx of considerable wealth. David is just 1 of 256 grandparents in this generation, a majority of them also fleeing post-revolution America to settle in the area around Lake Ontario. How many times does his story repeat? How much land was given to our ancestors in those years, for no reason other than their fealty to the British? It also begs other questions, like why did the British have so much land to give away? Who was living there before, and where did they go?

Prior to European contact, Cramahe township was Huron-Wendat territory, and the land was called Ouendake. Like the Pennacook in Connecticut, their population was dramatically impacted by small-pox and other infectious diseases introduced by European settlers. In 1615, French records show that there were between 20,000 to 30,000 Wendat living across 25 villages in the area between Lake Huron and Lake Ontario. By 1640 there were less than 10,000.

What happened next, and who came to control the land around Ouendake, can only be understood in the context of the fur trade and the extended, violent struggle between powerful European nations who were attempting to monopolise it. To simplify a complex history — south of the Great Lakes, in present day America, were the English who allied themselves with the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy). To the North, in present day Canada, were the French, who allied themselves with the Algonquin and Wendat. These two groups fought against each other in battles that continued throughout the seventeenth century, and are collectively remembered as the “Beaver Wars’’. It was in one of these battles that the Wendat lost control of their traditional territory when, in the winter of 1649, some 2,000 Haudenosaunee warriors raided, killing hundreds of Wendat. The survivors, down in numbers to just 6,000, fled to Christian Island, a small island in Georgian Bay. The following winter was exceptionally harsh, and thousands starved. Only 300 Wendat would eventually make it to New France, where they settled as refugees just north of Quebec at Ancienne and Jeune Lorette.

By the mid 1600s, with the aid of their English allies, Haudenosaunee territory had grown substantially and stretched from New York in the south, to Lake Huron in the north, and east to the mouth of the Saint Lawrence. After nearly a century of war, they were over extended. The Mississauga, an Anishinaabe speaking people immediately north of Ouendake, recognized an opportunity and, by the early 1700s, had pushed the Haudenosaunee out and established control of the area, with permanent villages around the north shores of Lake Ontario.

The next shift in power would come at the end of the Seven Years war (1754–1763) when the British defeated the French on the Plains of Abraham, and nominally gained control over the majority of North America — including our area of interest, Ouendake. King George III, seeking to clarify the acquisition of Indigenous lands on his newly gained territories, issued The Royal Proclamation of 1763. In it, he outlawed the private purchase of Indigenous land, which had been a source of conflict in the past. Instead, all land purchases were to be made by the Crown “at some public Meeting or Assembly of the said Indians”. The Royal Proclamation was an acknowledgement of Indigenous sovereignty and jurisdiction over their lands, and a directive to colonial officials that the acquisition of Indigenous lands for colonial settlement could only legally occur on a nation-to-nation basis.

The British, worried about an American incursion into their new territories, were in a rush to acquire Indigenous lands as quickly as possible and populate the border with settlers loyal to the Crown. It was in this context, on September 23, 1787, that representatives of King George III met with representatives from the Mississauga Nation to negotiate rights to the lands around Lake Ontario. The negotiations took place across a gulf of cultural-linguistic differences. Individual ownership of land was a foreign concept to the Mississauga, and the “surrender” of their land title was understood in Anishinaabe as an agreement to share the land — a concept further reinforced by the treaty terms which retained the Mississauga’s right to hunt, fish, and travel undisturbed through their territories.

Payment from the British, in exchange for what they understood to be permanent ownership of the land, was meagre — a few “flintlock guns, powder and ball for winter hunting, and enough red cloth to make a dozen coats and as many laced hats”. The treaty boundaries were initially understood by both parties to extend as far as a gunshot could be heard on a clear day (it is remembered as the Gunshot Treaty) — however — the exact boundaries were never clarified, and the deed was literally left blank at the time of signing. The territory claimed by the British would eventually grow to cover 12,944,400 acres. Even the Governor General at the time, Lord Dorchester, thought the treaty was suspect. He’s worth quoting in full:

“Enquiry has been made relative to the purchase at Matchedash Bay, a Plan…has been found in the Surveyor General’s Office, to which is attached a blank deed, with the names or devices of three chiefs of the Mississauga Nation, on separate pieces of paper annexed thereto, and witnessed by Mr. Collins, Mr. Kotte, a Surveyor, since dead, and Mr. Lines, Indian Interpreter, but not being filled up, is of no validity, or may be applied to all the land they possess; no Fraud has been committed or seems to have been intended. It has, however an omission which will set aside the whole transaction, and throw us entirely on the good faith of the Indians for just so much land as they are willing to allow, and what may be further necessary must be purchased anew, but it will be best not to press that matter or shew any anxiety about it.”

Despite these issues, after signing the treaty, the Mississauga were removed to Grape Island, a tiny island on Lake Simcoe. Two years later, in 1789, David along with forty other white families, settled on the vacant land now known as Cramahe Township.

David and his family were industrious — within the first decade of settling they had two more children, cleared twenty acres, and “improved considerably” their lot. Situated on a waterway and transit route between the major settlements of York and Kingston, we can only imagine that they became prosperous. With at least two large fish-bearing creeks in its boundaries, Cramahe County saw a saw mill, grain mill, wool mill, oil well, and wharf go up within the first few years of settlement. More settlers, attracted by the promise of free land, continued to emigrate from America and the county’s population grew quickly. The only requirement was that new settlers clear the land, in order to maintain their grant. This colonial policy, coupled with an early boom industry of burning hardwood to create potash, meant that the landscape underwent a rapid transformation. Susan Greely, a young girl at the time, recounts “what splendid trees they were which fell before the axe and were speedily reduced to ashes.” As farms took the place of forests, the settlers built dams, drained the wetlands, and mnoomin (wild rice), once a staple crop to the Mississauga, all but disappeared.

Dr. William Young — Methodist Toronto (1874–1918)

*Portrait of William Young and wife Emeline, with their daughters: Marion, Isabel, Margaret, and Helen. Photo from Aunt Margaret*

Dr. William Young is Grandma’s Grandpa. He was born in Ottawa, but lived most of his life in Toronto — the same city as our parents, grandparents, and a majority of our great grandparents. It was there, out of his home in the Beach neighbourhood and only a block away from Lake Ontario, that he ran his medical practice. This family home was next door to, and literally in the shadows of, an imposing gothic-style brick monolith that was the Bellefair Methodist Church (it has since been turned into condos and a Shoppers Drug Mart). It’s not hard to imagine William, along with his wife and four daughters, dressed the same way they’re pictured above, walking the short distance across their yard on a Sunday morning.

By all accounts, William cared deeply about his community. He was generous in sharing what food and money he had, and as a doctor he wouldn’t charge any family that he knew couldn’t afford to pay for his services. When he died of the Spanish flu, at the young age of forty four, the community was moved to erect a monument in his honour. Their fundraising efforts were impressive. They divided the local area into 13 blocks, with a captain and 24 volunteers to each block, canvassed the neighbourhood and managed to raise $2,500 — enough to build an impressive limestone and bronze fountain in the Italian renaissance style. The Mayor was quoted in the newspaper as saying that “the city is proud to honor his name. Dr. Young devoted his whole time to the welfare of the sick and needy, and you residents of Kew Beach know how generously he administered to the physical and spiritual needs of poor families without hope of reward or thought of glory.”

*Dr. William Young’s memorial fountain in Kew Gardens (2006)*

I don’t want to go overboard in glorifying William, I’m sure that he suffered some of the same flaws as other men of his generation. I’m more interested in understanding the beliefs that motivated his care and commitment to community, the poor and sick in particular. I think that the key might lie in his faith — Methodism.

It’s difficult to overstate the impact Methodism had, not only on William’s life, but on the entire culture of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Toronto — even into our parent’s generation, the city was known as “Toronto the Good” and “Methodist Rome”. An intellectual descendent of Puritanism, the religion played an outsized role in the political and cultural affairs of the city — observance of the Sabbath was enforced by law, and severe limits were placed on the sale of alcohol. But, aside from a holy abstinence from fun, Methodism differentiated itself from other denominations in that it was, at its roots, a class-conscious and anti-capitalist faith. It drew membership from all levels of society and welcomed common labourers, criminals, and former slaves into its ranks. Its founder, John Wesley, preached the importance of care for those living on the margins of society, even requiring Methodist preachers to visit prisons as part of their regular round of duties. He believed it was the rich that caused the poor to suffer, and spurned their company. He wrote, “I love the poor; in many of them I find pure, genuine grace, unmixed with paint, folly, and affectation.” As a classical scholar, he was inspired by ancient Roman sumptuary laws that placed limits on excessive wealth, and advocated for the enactment of similar laws. In Britain, his teachings are intimately connected to the development of a socialist labour movement.

Wesley understood before Weber the ways in which a Protestant ethic can lead to the accumulation and even veneration of wealth. His solution was, make money if you want — but don’t hoard it. To quote directly, he wrote that “the Methodists in every place grow diligent and frugal; consequently they increase in goods. Hence, they proportionately increase in pride, in anger, in the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, and the pride of life. So, although the form of religion remains, the spirit is swiftly vanishing away… What way, then, (I ask again) can we take, that our money may not sink us to the nethermost hell? There is one way, and there is no other under heaven. If those who ‘gain all they can,’ and ‘save all they can,’ will likewise ‘give all they can;’ then, the more they gain, the more they will grow in grace, and the more treasure they will lay up in heaven.”

Some final thoughts

At university, when I first began to learn about, and grapple with, the full history of our ancestors and the devastating, continuing impacts they’ve had on the environment and Indigenous lives — I felt a lot of shame and guilt about our heritage. I didn’t want to identify as a white settler. When I asked Mom about what culture she identifies with, she expressed a similar kind of feeling and was reluctant to identify as a WASP, despite it being the conscious values that Mere and Pere raised her with. Dad didn’t say as much, but I’m curious if his Atheism might have a similar origin. After all, isn’t it a disbelief, rather than a belief itself?

Which leads to my bigger question. Could our reluctance to embrace an identity leave us vulnerable to doing things, not necessarily because we believe in them, but because it’s what others around us are doing? Could that be what it means to be Canadian — not believing in anything too strongly? Importantly, what does that look like when the cultural soup we swim in is dictated so thoroughly by those with money and power, and so clearly headed toward destruction?

Faith is something of a bad word in our family, but I wonder if it might be an important concept that we’ve discarded. The faith of our ancestors was more than just naïve superstition — it was deeply held convictions about how to live one’s life. For the Puritans, the best parts of their faith looked like a questioning of authority, and a boldness to assert what they thought was right regardless of personal consequences. The Methodists challenged inequality, redistributed wealth, and built strong communities that support the poor and disenfranchised. If we understand the ways in which our ancestors’ beliefs caused harm, see and account for their blindspots and shortcomings, could we then pick the best parts of their convictions and celebrate them as our own?