William Massey Paid A Heavy Price

When I found out that the next topic for the Canadian Genealogy Carnival is Black Sheep Canadian Ancestors I thought to myself, "This is a Genealogy Carnival that I can take part in" For if there is one thing that I seem to have an abundance of it's Black Sheep Ancestors. The only hard part about participating in this Blog Carnival is deciding what ancestor to talk about. There is my great grandfather the hard drinking Sunday school teacher who wrote racist poetry as a hobby. Also my ancestor the railway worker who was arrested for stealing Winchester rifles from a boxcar. My bigamist ancestor. The Gambler. The rum runner and his wife who ended up in a penetentiary. And of course we can't forget my ancestors who were mixed up in the massacre of the Donnelly family. Canada's notorious family, the Black Donnellys, were massacred February 4th, 1880 by a vigilante committee.

However my favourite Black Sheep Ancestor is William Massey. William was my 4th Great Grandfather and he lived in the small town of St.Marys Ontario. The details are sketchy but it seams William worked for the Wells Fargo company in the early 1860s as a stage coach driver. One of the things that Wells Fargo did was transport money from place to place. One day for reasons we will never know William decided to help himself to over $888 dollars. This may not seem like much money to us today but back in 1863 it was a lot of cash.

Well I guess William was not the smartest criminal who ever lived as he soon found himself in front of the local magistrate on an indictment of larceny. I do not know much about the workings of the Canadian Justice system in the 1860s but it seems that this Court appearance was some kind of preliminary hearing to see if charges were warranted. Sort of like a Grand Jury in the United States. One interesting little side note is that one of the jurors was Timothy Eaton. Mr Eaton went on to found the Eaton department store chain. For you Americans out there, Eatons was Canada's equivalent of Sears.

Anyhow it would seem that the jury thought there was enough evidence to warrant charges so William was sent home to await his trial. However old William did not want to take his chances in court. He decided to get the heck out of Dodge and head south for the border, and a few weeks later he was in Massachusetts where he enlisted in the U.S. Army to fight in the Civil War.

Now it appears William being the crafty criminal mastermind that he was may have enlisted under the alias of John Smith. However William, or John Smith, did not much care for Army life for he soon deserted and made his way back to St.Marys just before his death in November 1865. It is hard to say what William's reasons for going back to St.Marys might have been. One can only speculate. His daughter claimed that he was so broken in body and spirt after the war that he died soon after returning. Whatever the reason it would seem he paid a heavy price for that $888.00 in stolen Wells Fargo money.

The Search For My Irish Roots, Part 5

The kindness of strangers.

The quest to find my Masseys would not have been possible without the kindness of strangers. Jenny had done all the work of getting me the records from Delgany and it should be remembered that this info was of no value to her, she is not a Massey, she did it for no return. And now Annie would do something equally nice. She got her fathers D.N.A. tested for me. I say she got it tested for me because there was little she could learn from the test. You have to rember that Annie already new her lines were from Delgany. If her father and I were a match it would only tell her she had a few more distant cousins out there, that’s it. But for me it had the potential to finally prove once and for all the question that I had been working on for so many years.

I am a Delgany Massey

So as you may have guessed Annie and I are a D.N.A. match. Not a perfect match as I had hoped but close enough to prove what I had suspected all these years - that Annie and I are related and that my William Massey was almost certainly born in the Parish of Delgany. As you can imagine I was ecstatic. To finally have the answer to a question that had plagued me for so long was a great feeling. I was so happy. For about 10 minutes. Then like a true genealogist I started to think about what I still did not know, and I realized my search will never be over. Because for me it is not just about the answer, it’s about the search itself.

The Search For My Irish Roots, Part 4

Sometimes you don’t find the next clue, it finds you.

I was contacted by a man who was researching the family of William Massey’s wife Ellen. I had never been able to find anything on Ellen, I did not even know her last name. As it turns out I probably would never have found her as I was looking in the wrong country. Anyway he had found a letter that Ellen’s father William had written to his brother Thomas in Etobicoke about 1860. The letter is now in a museum. The letter states among other things that William Massey was from a place just a few miles south of Dublin Ireland. And what is just a few miles south of Dublin. You guessed it, Delgany.

So I was now convinced that my Masseys were from Delgany but I of course had no real proof of this and I had run out of places that I could think of to look. Then again out of the blue another piece of the very circumstantial puzzle fell from the sky and landed in my lap. I made contact with a man by the name of Ron Mahone who was researching a Massey family that lived just a few miles from my Massey family in St. Marys Ontario back in the 1860s. The story handed down in Ron's family was that they were from a place called Redford or Redfoord. So I did a little diging and was able to confirm that they were indeed from Redfoord. And where is Redfoord? You guessed right again, Delgany. Now I had no proof that this new Massey family was connected in any way to mine but there were not a lot of Irish Massey’s in Ontario in the 1860s and knowing that the Irish would often settle in family groups I felt this was yet another small arrow pointing me to Delgany.

Then last year Jenny Selfe came to my aid again, albeit in a round about kind of way. She had received a letter from an Annie Massey about the Massey family. Jenny had put all the Delgany Massey data that she had on her website. Not having any more info than what was on her website she put Annie in touch with me. Now for Annie their was no question that she was a Delgany Massey. She had her lines well documented, for her there was no doubt about it. And with a little digging she was able to prove that she was related to the Massey family that had lived just a few miles from my Massey family in St. Marys Ontario. So everything kept pointing me to Delgany, it was like the place was calling me but I could not get that last little piece of the puzzle. The proof was always just out of reach. What to do?

The kindness of strangers.

To be continued.......

The Search For My Irish Roots, Part 2

We're Irish???

Now don't get me wrong, there is no anti-Irish sentiment in my family that I am aware of but some how this little tidbit of information had gotten lost or perhaps hidden somewhere along the way. My grandfather had told me we were English. There was no talk of Ireland in the family stories, no Irish names, no tombstones in the local cemetery with the words, Native Of County Blah Blah Ireland, Nothing. Thus began my quest for my new found Irish roots.

Now what???

I quickly learned that to do any meaningful genealogy in Ireland you need to have some idea of what County your Irish ancestors came from. Without this you are just flailing around in the dark.

The 1861 census had told me my GGG Grandfather William Massey was a native of Ireland. Where in Ireland I had no idea. So I did what any new genealogist would do, I started flailing around. However in my case my flailing around would one day pay off. It would just take about 30 years.

Fortunately for me Massey is not a common name in Ireland (this makes hunting a little easer) so I began to collect even the smallest mention of the Massey name anywhere in Ireland. Sort of like a one name study of Irish Masseys. At the same time I continued to research my Masseys in North America in the more conventional organized way, working on my direct lines. It was these 2 styles of research that would one day give me some of the answers I was looking for.
My somewhat haphazard one name study of Irish Massey’s soon began to paint an interesting picture. It told me that almost all the Masseys in Ireland are descended from a few men, most likely just 3 of 4 who came to Ireland in the 1600s. It also told me that the descendants of these men tended to stay in the same locations as their original immigrant ancestor. This has the effect of producing little pockets of Masseys located at a few different places in Ireland. This info was interesting but of course it did not tell me what little pocket of Masseys I belonged to.

Then I got lucky......

The Search For My Irish Roots, Part 1

The Beginning

My personal search for my Irish ancestors has taken over 30 years of digging, scrounging, reading, learning, traveling, and taking wild leaps of faith. I have talked to dozens or relatives, hundreds of people, and traveled from one coast to the other. I have spent hundreds of hours in little dark rooms with my head buried in microfilm machines. I have seen more libraries than I can remember, and have looked through (and yes in some cases read) so many books that I could not begin to count them. I have spent hundreds of hours online and hundreds or perhaps thousands of dollars in my never-ending quest. And best of all, I even managed to find a wife along the way. But that is another story.

My search started as a young boy listening to stories about the family told by my grandparents. They were not stories of brave deeds or fantastic exploits. They were just what I call the stories of life. I will not bore you with the details of my family stories, suffice it to say that if you changed the names and dates they could be any family's stories.

Now the stories told by my grandparents may not have been worthy of a Hollywood Blockbuster but as a child I was hooked. I could not get enough. I always wanted more. So being the strange kid that I was, I set off for the local museum.

I was fortunate as a budding genealogist that my family had lived in the same small town of St Marys Ontario, since about 1859. This made the search a little easer for a beginner as the museum had lots of newspapers and cemetery records to keep me happy, at least for a while. It was at the local Museum that I received my first of what would be many genealogical surprises. There in the 1861 census was my GGG Grandfather William Massey, a native of Ireland. Ireland? My family was Irish?

To be continued.........