This is an occasional series about some of the missing people I have found.

A 300 pound Canadian veteran of the Great War was last seen in New York’s Grand Central Station on Saturday, February 10th, 1923.

Until that day Allan Wallis Derrom had been living with his wife and baby daughter on Regent Avenue in Montreal.1 Another baby was on the way. It’s not clear when his family gave up looking for him.

There were two daily trains from Montreal. The Laurentian arrived in New York in the evening, but I prefer to imagine Allan made his escape on the overnight train, departing under cover of darkness and pulling into New York in time for breakfast. A short cab ride to Penn Station or a connection out of Grand Central could take him virtually anywhere in North America. A fresh start.

He headed west. It was not for the first time.

From the last years of World War I until well into the 1920s, there were many personal ads in the Star looking for old soldiers who’d gone missing. Most of them eventually returned home.

Then there was the story of Allan Wallis Derrom. A story about how a whiff of mustard gas could dissolve a man’s life.

We can begin our story with the person seeking Allan, who was not his wife, but his aunt, Mrs. Buck Chaffee. Mrs. Chaffee’s home at 290 Cote des Neiges Road was one of many Anglo-Protestant fortresses that once ringed the upper slopes of Montreal’s mountain.

Mrs. Chaffee, born Mary Beard, was the sister of Allan’s mother, Alice Beard. The Beard sisters were members of the Lyman family, Vermonters who had crossed the border in 1816 to establish a pharmaceutical company in Montreal.2

That first generation of Lymans were teetotalling Presbyterians. And from the Lyman family seat, Thornhill, on nearby McTavish Street they dedicated themselves to bible study and the gospel of getting rich. By the time of Allan’s birth, Lymans Limited was a national pharmaceutical and chemicals manufacturer.

Allan’s father, James Auckland Derrom, was the son of Andrew Hamilton Derrom, a Civil War colonel, and later an architect, civil engineer, and property developer in Paterson, New Jersey. At the time of Allan’s birth, James was the manager of the Intercontinental Telephone Co., a New Jersey company that built Venezuela’s first telecoms system. Allan’s older brother Donald was born in Venezuela. Allan was christened in Montreal more than six weeks after his birth on April 26 1888, suggesting that he may have been born there too.3

Allan’s father died in 1897 at the age of thirty-eight.4 Allan was eleven. Allan’s mother Alice had converted to Christian Science,5 so it’s not known whether Alice had relied on doctors or prayer. Alice herself died in Montreal in 1911 at the age of forty-nine6 when Allan was twenty-one.

When Allan finished high school he didn’t go to college or get a job but devoted himself full time to sports. He belonged to the M.A.A.A. club, that cracked leather bastion of English Protestant Montreal physical culture, where he played and managed its rugby team and was a competitive wrestler.7

Allan officiated sailing races at the Cartierville Boating Club and joined the Hussars volunteer militia, a likely excuse to horseback ride with his friends.8

By contrast his older brother Donald was a serious student at McGill, earning a degree in applied science. Donald went on to a distinguished international career as an engineer and corporate executive, which included the award of several patents.

In the spring of 1910 Allan took a trip out west to Alberta with his aunt Maude Beard Wright and his uncle, James A. Wright. They stayed at the luxurious Alberta Hotel in Edmonton. This trip to Western Canada must have fired Allan’s imagination, as the far west remained a fixed horizon for the rest of his life.

His mother passed away New Year’s Eve of 1910. The following June Allan, then twenty-three, was living in a rooming house on Eddy Street in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. He had just married an Oakland manicurist and model named Lily Matzek.9

There is no record of what happened between Lily and Allan, but Lily later married a salesman named John Carter and appeared in the local Oakland papers from time to time, either modeling or sharing personal drama.

Later that year Allan’s older brother Donald married Bertha Leishman, the daughter of a prominent Montreal businessman, and left Canada for the first of his overseas assignments. After that, the Lymans were Allan’s family, and their house on Côte des Neiges Road became his home.

In 1912 Allan was back in Canada and working as the night clerk of the Chateau Laurier hotel in Ottawa, a marbled Gothic Revival beauty built by the Grand Trunk Railroad to rival the great CPR hotels of the period.10 Allan likely joined the hotel staff when it opened that summer. His lack of experience in hospitality may have been offset by the cultivated speech and manners of his upbringing, which suited the hotel’s elite clientele.

The Chateau Laurier was across the street from the Grand Trunk station. Convenient to make his escape after stealing $265 from the hotel and fleeing the country.11 He got as far as Buffalo before he was captured and returned to Canada to face justice.

The next three years are a blank. Did Allan do time for his crime? He only reappears in the record again in 1915, when he signed up with the Canadian Expeditionary Force. At his enlistment he claimed to have served with the Northwest Mounted Police.12 Perhaps the Lymans had repaid the GTR and then sent their errant nephew out West to start over. Or had his visit to Alberta given him a taste for frontier life? Or was having been a Mountie a pure fabrication? On his CEF paperwork he is identified as a clerk.

The trenches of the Great War transformed Allan Derrom. The foolish, impulsive, unserious young man was replaced by a soldier promoted four times and decorated for bravery.

On November 5, 1917, the day before Canadian troops captured the town of Passchendaele, Allan rescued four wounded men from a burning ammunition lorry while under shell fire.

He then led the removal of other lorries, preventing a potentially catastrophic explosion. Still under bombardment, he ran messages until he collapsed from exhaustion. He was awarded the Military Medal for gallant conduct under fire.13

Then on July 8, 1918, near Arras, Allan was gassed.

The rats knew first, scurrying. Then the alarm bells and sirens, then the cloud, smelling faintly of garlic. It dispersed as a mist. It settled over the ground, the foliage, sank into the trenches, active and dangerous for days.

He had been wearing a gas mask but it slipped off for a moment. Even just a whiff of gas blistered a man’s face and made him go temporarily blind. Allan was hospitalized for weeks before he was deemed well enough to return to the front. 14

We can divide Allan’s life between before being gassed and after. That moment was followed by decades of seeking and hiding. And the random acts he committed explained by a single word: gassed.

On the face of it, Allan returned to civilian life a hero. He married his wartime sweetheart in Montreal, a girl named Lucy Paterson. It’s hard to guess how Allan knew Lucy, since they would not have met through his McGill chums or the Cartier Boating Club. She would not have attended the St. Andrew’s Ball. She was a Scottish immigrant, the daughter of a railroad signalman.15

Lucy and Allan married in June 1919, witnessed by Mrs. Chaffee and their cousin Art Lyman.16 In his CEF files Allan had claimed the Chaffee-Lyman family fortress on Côte des Neiges Road as his permanent address, but after he married he and Lucy lived with Lucy’s parents.17

When a son or nephew did not fit the mold, wealthy Anglo-Protestant families in Montreal generally arranged an undemanding position at a bank or brokerage firm, sent him out West to seek his fortune, or found him a role in the family business. A pedigreed war hero should have been easy to place. But the Lymans did none of these things. Allan did not work until the year he disappeared, when he was a building superintendent.

In the years following his disappearance he drifted alone through the Pacific Northwest working a succession of menial jobs. He became an American from Montana.18 It was such an easy slip of the tongue to replace “Montreal” with “Montana.” He lied on US censuses and government forms. As the years slipped by Allan Derrom continued to erase himself. He eventually became “Hal Derrom.”

Then, near Spokane, Washington, Hal Derrom stole a truck.

He’d been working for the Swannock brothers at their warehouse near Lamont, Washington, forty miles south of Spokane, in the sweltering hot summer of 1931. His employers testified that on his last day of work he had settled up with them and left for Spokane. Then on August 31st he returned to Lamont. At 11 o’clock that night he took a Swannock truck.

The Swannocks had heard the truck engine turn over and saw it go past their house. They gave chase for twenty miles as he headed south. Allan shot at them five times. The brothers finally overtook him and knocked him out with rifle butt and brought him to the police in Colfax. 19

All Allan said to the Colfax police at the time of his arrest was that he had served in the Great War and that he had been gassed.

The judge was not moved. Allan pled guilty and was sentenced to 1-5 years for Grand Larceny.

There was no reason given for the theft, or any explanation for what he planned to do with the truck. The testimony from the Swannock Brothers had a telling detail. They “settled up” with Allan that last day, they said, meaning he had been paid for his work.20 Perhaps they had stiffed him. Or perhaps he was imagining lorries at Passchendaele still in harms’ way.

He was released on good behavior the following year. He settled in Spokane, working as a bartender in a poolhall in Waterville, Washington. The proprietor of Walter’s Cafe and Billiards gave him a room above the bar. Allan was by now fifty-two and had been away from home for seventeen years.21

When war was declared, Allan found new purpose. He returned to Canada and joined the Pacific Coast Militia Rangers where he was named a Captain using his old name of Allan Wallis Derrom.22 The Rangers were volunteers too old for active service who patrolled and provided local defense of the coastline of British Columbia against the threat of Japanese invasion.

While in British Columbia he met and married a young woman named Alice Rogers, an English immigrant who had spent the Depression years doing mission work in the far north of Alberta and Yukon.23 Allan followed her into this work, and in 1944 they settled in Dawson City.

The last chapters of Allan’s life are the hardest to write about.

In Dawson City Allan and Alice became the overseers of St. Paul’s Hostel, an Indian School.

The residential schools represent one of the darkest chapters in Canada’s history. Beginning in the 19th century and continuing until the 1990s, the Canadian government funded and supported a network of schools, most operated by churches, that removed Indigenous children from their families. The purpose was explicitly assimilation and part of a broader Canadian policy to eradicate Indigenous culture.

Children were often forbidden to speak their own languages. Many experienced abuse and neglect. Thousands died at these schools and were buried in unmarked graves.24

St. Paul’s Hostel opened in 1920 as an Anglican boarding school for non-native children. By 1943, as native children were boarding there in increasing numbers, the government of Yukon took it over from the church.

Allan was principal of the school from 1944 to 1951.25 He had no prior experience administering a school, and no experience in mission work in the Canadian North. We can guess that he told them he served in the NWMP and was a decorated war veteran. His voice may have retained traces of that patrician honk. It was doubtful that anyone knew about his year in a Washington state penitentiary.

There were forty students at the school, most of mixed parentage and half of them wards of the state and “didn’t belong anywhere.” Some were as young as four. 26

The archives do not document any abuse or neglect of the children in the years Allan and Lucy ran the school. One surviving bit of correspondence paints a picture of a man trying to be kind. The Hostel regularly received Church-donated clothing. Allan wrote:

“...try and send us fawn or beige cotton and wool stockings instead of black as you sent this year for the girls, as you understand that our girls and boys go to the Dawson Public School and we don’t wish them to get the idea that they have to wear things that the white children don’t wear as it gives them an inferiority complex, which we have been compating [sic] hard since we have been here.”27

It is surprising to learn that Allan failed to maintain the school. Someone who had so much experience in the trades should have been handy, but it was reported in the year following his departure that the school buildings were in dire need of repair. This in spite of his demand in 1947 that families of the students surrender their government family allowance checks to pay for their childrens’ board. 28 There was no handyman to help him, however. He paid the older boys to help with chores, that included stoking the furnace overnight in 40 below weather.29

The school shut down shortly after Allan stepped down as Principal in 1951. Boarders had been dwindling following the conclusion that it was “inadvisable” to board white or mixed children with native children in the same school.

Months after he left St. Paul’s, Allan Derrom was found dead in an efficiency hotel room in Vancouver. The night clerk discovered him sitting upright in a chair in the kitchenette. All three gas jets had been turned on full blast.30

The hotel was called the Ritz. It should not be confused with the Ritz-Carleton luxury hotel chain. It was a modest residential hotel, just like the Hotel Ritz in San Francisco, the scene of his first misstep in life. That he was found by a night clerk also brings his story full circle.

I have always been fascinated by serial self-reinventors. That fascination is cut with sympathy for a person not content to live just one life, because the life assigned did not fit.

Allan chucked it all. National boundaries, social class, marriages, and even legal identities were not permanent reality. They were set decor he passed through on his way to something else.

It’s possible that each one of Allan’s lives could only survive as long as he didn’t get into trouble or caught in a lie. Then the whole edifice collapsed. I am left wondering what triggered his end in that Vancouver hotel room.

Gassed. Before the war, Allan had already suffered the consequences of disordered judgment. What future was he imagining, lying in his field hospital cot, struggling to breathe, seeing nothing but dark?

Research indicates that there is long term damage to emotional and cognitive networks in the brain from exposure to sulfur mustard. A range of conditions have been attributed to mustard gas, including impaired thinking and memory, low impulse control, and extreme responses to stress.31

And when he wanted to bring an end to it, he knew to seek out the gas again.

Amid the many sad versions of Allan Derrom there are Allans worth remembering.

The man who pulled four men out of a burning truck in Passchendaele.

Or the man stepping off the train at Grand Central Station, standing at the crossroads of the world, and heading west, anywhere west.

This is an occasional series about some of the missing people I have found.

On the night before Thanksgiving 1907, seventeen-year-old Joseph Stepina walked out of his family’s apartment on First Avenue and 97th Street in New York City and never came back.

Until that night Joe had lived with his mother Anna and step-father, Frank Vesely. Anna and Frank were Czech immigrants, from what was then called Bohemia.

Eighteen-year-old Anna Filip arrived in New York in 1886. She soon met a fellow Czech named John (Jan) Stepina. They married in December of 1889. Their first child, Joseph, was born in September 1890. In 1900 Anna was a widow living on the Lower East Side and supporting herself as a cigar roller.1 Anna didn’t speak English and so had even fewer options than other widows with three small children.

At one time almost every Czech in New York was in the cigar business.2 Cigars were made by hand, most often by women and children in sheds, attics, and tenement rooms. They were made by people like Anna, who likely enlisted the children to meet her quota.

It was around 1900 when Anna met a carpenter and wheelwright named Frank Vesely, who was also Czech. She and Frank soon followed their compatriots to the Upper East Side, where 40,000 Czechs lived in the early decades of the 20th century alongside Germans, Hungarians and Slovaks.

Birth certificates for Anna’s children with Frank have John Stepina listed as father.3 Either John refused to divorce Anna, or he disappeared. If John did die, Frank may not have been legally able to marry Anna. They nevertheless lived as husband and wife, raising their children together until Frank’s death in 1917. 4

We don’t know what precipitated the events of November 27th,1907 in the Vesely household. Nobody plans to leave home the night before Thanksgiving. Had there been a fight? Did Joe storm out, or was he kicked out?

Although just a teenager, Joe had apprenticed first as a carpenter, then as an electric and steam engineer, the job of managing the coal-fired boilers that provided heat and electricity to New York City buildings. If Joe had paying work when he left home, it must have nevertheless been an unhappy winter, because that January he enlisted in the U.S. Army.5

Joe was assigned to the Coastal Artillery Corps but didn’t last long. He was discharged eight months later and spent the next few years kicking around. He found his way to Canada, then to the Michigan Upper Peninsula, where he manned the industrial boilers at the massive tannery of the Munisinger Leather Company.6 Joseph Stepina became “Joe Stephens.”

Somewhere in his travels Joe met a girl. Sarah Sager was from a small town in Ontario. She set out for Michigan to marry Joe in 1910. After two days, five train rides, and a ferry crossing she arrived alone at Munising for her wedding, where she did not reveal the names of her parents to the marriage registrar. Sarah was eighteen and Joseph was nineteen.7

In 1911 they moved on to Edmonton, Alberta, where Joseph found work as an engineer in a power plant.8 That year they had a baby girl they named Anna, after Joe’s mother.9 Joe had not been in contact with his family since he walked out their apartment in New York that long-ago Thanksgiving. If he had written to Anna, his letters had been unanswered. Baby Anna was about 18 months old when Joe’s ad appeared in the Star.

What prompted Joe to do this? It seems unlikely that Sarah placed the ad.

Why did Joe choose “Missing Relatives” as the means to find his family? If he were looking for people last seen in New York City, why an ad in a Canadian newspaper?

Anna was still living in the place he had last seen her. If she had not answered a letter, why would Joe think she had gone missing? Joe grew up in the tight-knit “Little Bohemia” in the Yorkville section of the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Surely there were any number of people he knew in the old neighborhood who could confirm Anna’s whereabouts. He also had grown siblings still living in New York.

So many Missing Relatives ads have no practical information in them. Patrick Doyle left Ireland thirty years ago, believed to be in America. Sister inquires.

Some are so personal and cryptic that they can only be understood by the recipient. Come home, J.T., all is forgiven. No one reading the classifieds would know who J.T. is. But if J.T. happened to pick up the Montreal Star and browsed its back pages…

Such ads are simply cries into the void. Unless they serve a different purpose. Perhaps Joe wasn’t interested in finding Anna. At least, not this way. Perhaps he was doing something else.

A social historian looking at missing person ads can trace networks and migration patterns. Such ads can also be understood and analyzed as evidence of kinship and connection.

The ads are also perfect artifacts for a field of historical study known as “history of emotions,” which examines the varieties of emotional experience and expression in different cultures and eras. The starting assumption for historians of emotions is that feelings and the expression of feelings are not innate but culturally determined. For this reason, feelings and the way they are expressed have evolved throughout history.

The pioneer in this field was undoubtedly Lucien Febvre, whose 1941 essay “Sensibility and History” pointed out that historians had been ignoring a vast dimension of human experience, which was the emotional worlds of historical people. Reconstructing those worlds was essential to historical understanding.10

The missing person ad can be seen as one substrate in the history of emotions in which intensely private experiences are made public under the cover of another purpose. It’s also an emotional practice which the interlocutor is not only absent, but indeed must be absent. The ads often express feelings that must be shared, but cannot be shared directly with the person the feelings are about.

What can we infer about Joe’s feelings about Anna?

Joe identifies his mother by her former married name, Stepina, not her name for over a decade, found in censuses and directories, Mrs. Frank Vesely. He mentions his full siblings by name, not his half siblings, of which he mentions two, not three. There is a mention of an aunt.11 Classified ads charge by the word, even the character, but Joe spends extra money mentioning he left the night before Thanksgiving, an unnecessary detail for the apparent task of finding his mother.

Joe is sharing a memory. Possibly an expression of guilt and regret. Or nostalgia and homesickness. It could be an act of mourning. Did he forgive his mother, or wish to be forgiven? Joe’s ad could be a public declaration of loyalty. Anna had not been forgotten or abandoned. Her son was still searching for her.

Where does this ad fit into our culture’s emotional history? The impulse to share with strangers is not new. In the days before social media there were other means for airing personal feelings and public confession. Classified ads were only one such outlet.

Advice columns were another newsprint public square. Since the nineteenth century newspapers had “agony aunt” columns where readers could anonymously recount failed marriages, unwed pregnancies, alcoholism, personal feuds, and forbidden loves. The advice itself was often secondary. The column was the means for ordinary people to tell their story in public.

Not all of these public statements were anonymous. Editorials and letters to the editor were also personal soapboxes. Court proceedings and police court blotters were another way for people to accuse one another of wrongdoing or air grievances.

Religious testimony in revival meetings or other church settings encouraged public confession of sin for redemption. It was a socially acceptable way to share deeply personal experiences in public.

Late in the 20th century came call-in radio shows, daytime tabloid talk shows, 900 number party lines, and hotlines like 1-800-CONFESS.

All of this of course a mere prelude to the current unhinged nonstop exhibitionism of the internet.

If we think about emotions and their expression as having a history, the emergence of the novel and personal memoir in the modern age was a new way to represent interior life. The compressed memoir of the newspaper personal ad is its weird step- cousin: a mutation in the culture of self-expression. “Missing Relatives” ads are miniature narratives in which ordinary people condense a lifetime of love or grief into a few lines of print.

The rest of Joe’s life does not tell us whether he and his mother were ever reunited.

Joe had left the power plant and was working as a farmer in rural Alberta when he volunteered for the Canadian Expeditionary Force in the summer of 1916.12 Joe and Sarah were part of a homesteading boom in rural Alberta in these years, with a great number of settlers moving in. Joe’s motive for enlisting is not clear, but the hard climate and short growing season of northern Alberta discouraged all but the most skilled and fortunate farmers.

By this time, Joe and Sarah had three little girls under six. Sarah and the children could not survive on the $15 a month Joe sent home, so she returned to live with her family in Ontario.13 In January 1919 Sarah attempted to cross the border with the idea she would stay with her mother-in-law Anna in New York City.

Had she been invited? Or had Sarah outworn her welcome with her own family? Joe may have reconnected with his mother, or Sarah may have simply had a hunch Anna was still in the old neighborhood. Sarah did not have compelling proof she had a place to go, because she and her girls were turned away at the border at Buffalo with the initials “LPC.” Liable to be Public Charge.14

Joe was spared the trenches. No doubt because of his work clearing land in Alberta he was assigned to the Canadian Forestry Corps, logging trees in the far north of Scotland for trench flooring, dug-out shelters, and railway ties.15 It was not combat, but it was dangerous, grueling work.

The war left its mark on Joe in other ways. After the Armistice soldiers were mired in an endless wait to go home. Joe was transferred to the camp at Kinmel Park in Rhyl, Wales, which had become a miserable grey limbo for tens of thousands of Canadian soldiers: half rations and huts so crowded the men took turns sleeping on the floor. A few weeks after Joe’s arrival, frustration boiled over into violence. When the mutiny was over, twenty four men were dead. 16

Joe and Sarah had applied for a soldier’s land grant and after the war Joe was deeded 160 acres of uninhabited Crown Land twelve miles south of Athabaska, Alberta, in a place called Bleak Lake.17

Joe’s tract was thick with aspen and poplar broken only by muskeg that could suck a man up to his waist in cold, watery decay. When he saw it he knew he was condemned to many more years of cutting trees, burning brush, and pulling stumps.

Sarah stayed away from the house for extended periods. She had discovered she’d come home to a violent stranger. One day he tried to choke her. When Sarah pressed charges, Joe claimed she was the one who had changed; her assault charge was to extort money from him. He said he was through.18 Joe abandoned the homestead at Bleak Lake, left his family, and lived on his own farming in nearby Grosmont. 19

The Stepinas eventually reunited. We can only speculate whether Joe’s rage was wartime PTSD. They went on to have six more children.

In 1929 the family wrote off twenty years trying to make a go of it in Alberta and headed west. They had company: three quarters of a million farms were abandoned across the Canadian Prairies during the Depression, pushed out by drought and foreclosure.

The Stepinas settled in Vancouver, where Joe found work as a millwright. But Joe always wanted to be his own man. It wasn’t long before he decided to strike out on his own again, gold prospecting in Cariboo, British Columbia.

The Cariboo Gold Rush had been over for almost sixty years. In the 1930s unemployed desperate people flocked to its worked-out mountains to pan for phantom gold.

Joe was at his mining claim in the spring of 1940 near Hardscrabble Creek when a fallen boulder crushed his leg. He bled out on a remote hillside. He is buried in Cariboo.20

Why did Joe place this ad looking for his mother? We don’t know. Maybe, simply: he remembered her.

The person he remembered was not Anna Vesely, but Anna Stepina, the young impoverished cigar roller he didn’t have to share with anyone, except his little brother and sister, and maybe a beloved aunt.

Adult Joe remembers seven-year-old Joe, skipping school to meet his mother’s cigar quota, dreaming of the day he could get a job. He remembers when she called him “the man of the house.”

He remembers her tales of the mountains of Bohemia, and of the giant ocean vessel that brought her to New York, and how he told himself he would travel, too.

He remembers his family, his neighborhood, and the night he left the house. But above all, he remembers Anna.

She died in 1937, at the age of 68, still living on First Avenue, in the old neighborhood.

On Monday, in towns across Northern Ireland, streets will fill with orange sashes and the sound of the fife and drum. Orange marches are annual events celebrating Irish Protestant history and heritage. They are held on the public holiday commemorating the defeat in Ireland of the Catholic forces of James II by William of Orange.

While the parades in Ireland are expressions of Protestant community pride, they are still viewed by many Catholics as triumphalist displays rooted in Northern Ireland’s bitter past. At one time marches on “the Twelfth” were catalysts for sectarian violence.

They are largely peaceful events now. With each year that passes without incident there is fresh hope that sectarian strife is receding into history.

In the 19th century, the Orange Order in Canada was a powerful political machine defending the interests of the English Protestant majority against Irish and French Catholics. The Twelfth was once a public holiday in Toronto.1

As the Know-Nothing movement gained strength in the United States, Orange Lodges multiplied, defending the political and cultural dominance of native-born Protestants. Orange parades in the 1870s set off days of terror and violence in North American cities.2

The Orange Order in Canada has since become a community club like any other and it has experienced the same decline as other fraternal organizations. Local Orange Lodges still hold July parades, but they are generally quiet, orderly processions of middle-aged white men dressed in orange, with a few bagpipers and lambeg drummers.3 They carry Canadian flags and Union Jacks past halal meat markets, vape stores, and boba tea shops. The streets don’t close for them. There are no onlookers.

Then there is the story of July 12th, 1878, in Montreal. An Orange parade. A city on lockdown. And a brave mayor willing to confront the question of who has the right to public space.

As we witness more public demonstrations of hate by white nationalists, we are left asking: who can claim the streets, and on what terms?

Today the heat index here is 110 degrees (that’s 43 celsius). It’s a good day to stay home with the curtains drawn and read.

My “home” on Substack is among other family history accounts, but there are endless riches to discover. Here is another round up of some writers my subscribers may not yet know about.

The summer I was ten we took a family trip to Western Canada. Somewhere in our travels we stopped at a newsstand, and on the spinner rack were some cheap newsprint booklets with titles like Strange But True or Amazing Tales which were retellings of famous paranormal occurrences or unsolved mysteries. I don’t know the intended readership of such publications, but I bought a bunch with my remaining pocket money. There was no better entertainment for a ten-year-old on a cross-country train. These spooky stories burnt into my young brain. Some gave me nightmare fodder for the years that followed. Others made me wonder whether there may be an unseen supernatural world that lives parallel to ours.

brings me back to reading in bed with a flashlight, hoping you don’t you get caught awake past your bedtime. That same delightful shiver up the spine, but now with grownup historical perspective and insights, as well as some playful debunkings along the way.

Here’s a recent post about the mythical city of Ys.

Tales of Whoa

Taken by the flood

Not long ago, I was listening to one of my favorite pieces by Claude Debussy, The Drowned Cathedral, and I started to wonder what legend had given rise to the piece. After a little bit of digging, I found out that Debussy got his inspiration from the Breton legend of the mythical…

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2 months ago · 9 likes · 2 comments · Tales of Whoa

writes stunningly beautiful prose. Before We Leave is about place, history, community, family, and the story of small, unnoticed parts of our lives. We are made out of the accumulation of these small fragments of memory, and out of the places we live. This Substack will appeal to readers of one-place studies and anyone who enjoys nature writing.

This essay is one of my favorites. We travel back and forth through time, exploring the history of a single house as the past is simultaneously erased and restored. Its people come to life and speak to us through the artifacts they have left behind. We make this journey with Bee, who has in fact stayed in one place to live through the hardest days of being a parent.

Before We Leave with Bee Lilyjones and Friends

Distances Travelled While Confined

THE VIEW immediately south-west from our wee walled garden, or from our bathroom window, used to hold a derelict farmhouse. Boarded windows upon which our son and friends sprayed their graffiti tags over a decade ago. Rendered stone walls flecked with lichen, and scraped and gouged by ever-growing tillers, ploughs, combines. The violence of agricultural…

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7 months ago · 13 likes · 13 comments · Bee Lilyjones

AI is not necessarily the enemy of art. It can be a powerful creative tool. is a novelist, memoirist, and short story writer, and the author of six books, including the novel and National Book Award finalist Trance. His book Now Beacon, Now Sea is one of the best family memoirs I have ever read. His Substack Scarcely Human has been engaged in writing experiments using LLMs that trek into the workings of fictional narrative.

If you are curious about how generative AI can fit into your creative process, Chris’s Substack is worth exploring. I suggest that you start with the introduction linked below, which explains his perspective on AI in art and where his AI-assisted writing has led.

Scarcely Human

Not Quite a Manifesto

Welcome to Scarcely Human…

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a year ago · 7 likes · 1 comment · Christopher Sorrentino

I once worked as a credit analyst at a global investment bank. This was comical to anyone who knew me, since I am a French historian who counts on her fingers. Even now, if you were to ask me to calculate net present value I will panic. But the skills of the historian are extremely useful when analyzing companies. In fact thinking like an historian gave me a unique advantage, or what business nerds would call my value proposition.

Financial professionals look at a company’s financial statement and see relationships between the numbers. Metrics. I always saw a story. And I always wanted to know the same things about any company I was asked to lend money to. What was its origin story? Why did it continue to exist? I wanted to know about the management. Who were they? When faced with adversity, what did they do, and who did they protect first?

Unseen Billions tells the story about some of the world’s best known consumer and retail brands. I wish I’d had Suz to read when I was a corporate credit analyst covering some of these names, but there are lessons here that go far beyond an investment portfolio.

This piece on the downfall of Target is a good place to start.

Unseen Billions™

Target Fired Its Most Loyal Customers, Paid Its CEO $20 Million, and Lost $60 Billion.

Why would anyone go to Target for groceries? Start there, because the honest answer explains everything. Target has never been the cheapest place to shop. Costco beats it on price. Walmart beats it on size. Target sells the same eggs and milk as everyone else, usually for a little more. So when groceries turn out to be one of the only parts of the stor…

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2 months ago · 640 likes · 129 comments · Unseen Billions™

I am hooked on which digs into paper artifacts (primarily commercial correspondence) to understand the deeper currents of history. For me, this is the most exciting kind of historical research and writing. I’ve got the podcast episodes queued up in my phone as well!

For this Fourth of July, I recommend this brilliant piece about an event in the waters of Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island, in 1772 that I knew nothing about.

Paper Connections

The First Shot of the American Revolution

The Declaration of Independence we celebrate today, and the Revolutionary War that made it good, were the result of many forces, some of them famous and some of them lesser known but crucial to America’s independence. This audio deep dive goes back to one of the latter, on the dark water off Providence, Rhode Island, three years before the war openly be…

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2 months ago · 22 likes · Paper Connections

’s Substack Emerald Isle Gal combines so many of my favorite things-books, travel, animals, and the Irish countryside. Lucy offers peeks into her life on a farm in rural County Kerry. She lives near Listowel, home to Ireland’s oldest literary festival, so it’s perhaps not surprising she is also a bibliophile and posts round ups of whatever she’s been reading. Her book reviews feature many contemporary Irish writers. She also takes readers on occasional trips, allowing us to experience each place through her keen eye.

Here is a great piece that takes us on a hike in North Kerry.

Emerald Isle Gal

Scenes outside my Doorstep - Glorious Glanteenassig

“All nature has a feeling: woods, fields, brooks…” (John Clare…

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9 months ago · 23 likes · 20 comments · Lucy Hearne Keane

Finally, as both an historian and a former city equestrian whose best memories of New York were dawn canters around the Central Park Reservoir, I couldn’t be more excited about this brand-new Substack ‘Witching the World from .

Judith was the manager of Claremont Riding Stables, Manhattan’s last riding stable. She has written a book about the history of horse sports in New York City, which will be excerpted here on Substack.

Until well into the twentieth century, horses were an integral part of life in New York City. I am reminded of this fact as I observe the ongoing debate about the welfare of New York’s carriage horses. Whatever your position about carriage horses today, it’s undeniable that horses were at the center of our urban history.

Here’s Judith’s introduction, which invites you in past the carriage doors of Claremont riding school, a world all its own and one of the many eccentric pockets of New York City that have tragically disappeared in the “hyper gentrification” of the past twenty years.

'Witching The World

"A Secret Entrance Into A Different City"

The narrow streets of lower Manhattan are an immediate and palpable history lesson spanning centuries of indigenous life, Dutch and British colonial settlement, the birth of the nation, and the growth of the modern city. Churches, graveyards––some long known, others only recently discovered––modest buildings, skyscrapers, statues, and placards marking e…

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2 months ago · 1 like · Judith Martin Woodall

I have a single memory of my great-aunt Isabelle.

I am five or six. We are visiting her home on Montreal’s South Shore, one of many identical houses in a postwar subdivision. The living room sofa and chairs are encased in plastic slip covers that stick to the back of my legs.

I sense my mother does not want to be there. I never learn why. Years later she tells me her aunt was stingy with sweets. A kids’ party where Isabelle gave each child a single, paper-thin slice of cake. That’s all I get.

But there is one other thing I knew about Isabelle. A sole strange fact. For a long time I thought I’d imagined it.

Isabelle had been a guest of the Shah of Iran. She’d had tea with the Shah’s mother. She was thereafter a connaisseuse of caviar. Ossetra is the only kind worth serving.

Isabelle’s invitation to tea was the result of one improbable love story built on top of another. Just as mythical Camelot was built to music, Isabelle taking tea with the Queen Mother was built by fate.

It was Armistice Day in Mons, Belgium, November 11th, 1918. A sapper with the Canadian Signal Corps named Edouard Morin met a Belgian girl named Fernande Sace.

Edouard was born in Port Daniel, a remote fishing village on the coast of the Baie des Chaleurs, Gaspésie, one of seventeen children of Louis Morin and his wife Aurélie Gagnon. Edouard had been working as a lineman in British Columbia when he joined the Canadian Expeditionary Force in the spring of 1916. Edouard had no idea what he signed up for.

By that day in Mons, after the Somme, after Vimy, he had learned.

Canadian forces entered Mons early on the morning of November 11th, trading the very last shots of the Great War. It is easy to picture how Edouard and Fernande met: troops were flooding the streets to the sound of bagpipes. The liberated city erupted in celebration.

Edouard did not get to stay in Mons. The following week the Canadian Second Division began the 300 kilometer trek to the Rhine to begin the occupation of Germany, arriving in Bonn in December 13th.

Edouard had joined the CEF with a pair of clasped hands tattooed on his forearm. He left Fernande with a promise: they would be together again.

But when Edouard went home to Canada he could not simply send for Fernande. They weren’t married. Paperwork could take years. And no family would have allowed their daughter to travel alone across the world to a man she had known a week.

So Edouard returned to Belgium for Fernande. They married one year to the day they met, in November 1919. They settled in Mons. Edouard opened a tire shop, Pneus Morin, on rue d’Havré.

The Morins’ first child was a daughter, Imelda, named for Edouard’s little sister back in Port Daniel, lost to the Spanish flu, dead and buried on the same day, just as Edouard and his unit were heading east from Cambrai to Valenciennes. Just two weeks before Armistice, the day he met Fernande.

Imelda was followed by more children: Nelly, Josiane, Ludger, Yvon, and Annie.

As Europe once again drifted towards war, Imelda, now grown, was studying in Brussels. She met a young man named Yousef, the son of an Iranian diplomat.

Imelda married Yousef. They left for Iran, settling in the affluent Shemiran district of Tehran, nestled in the airy foothills of the Alborz Mountains.

How did Imelda find the courage to follow Yousef to a strange country on the other side of the world? Her father had shown her. He had returned to old battlefields for a girl he had known only a week.

Imelda grew up seeing the tattoo of the clasped hands on her father’s arm. She knew what was possible. Where you go, I will go.

Not long after Imelda and Yousef’s wedding, Germany invaded Belgium. Edouard, born Canadian, was an enemy national. The Morins fled Mons through collapsing France to an open port and got on a boat to England. The family sailed to Canada from Liverpool on the Duchess of Atholl, now converted to a troop ship.

The Morins found their way to Montreal. Edouard was fifty and had not lived in Canada for more than twenty years. The five children ranged in age from eighteen to six months. It would be six years before they could return to Mons.

When the war ended the Morins went home. Edouard reopened his business in Mons. Life continued. The Morins remained close to the Canadian family they had gotten to know in exile: Edouard and Fernande attended my parents’ wedding in 1962.

As the years went by the family legend of the Belgian Morins garbled and grew. Edouard had made a fortune in Europe, they said. Imelda had attended the Sorbonne. She had married a prince.

In 1965 Yousef’s cousin, Amir-Abbas Hoveyda, was named the Shah’s Prime Minister. Two years later the Shah crowned himself King of Kings. Presidents and emirs celebrated the 2,500th anniversary of the Achaemenid dynasty in luxury tents at Persepolis, feasting on dishes from Maxim’s of Paris, far from Iran’s mud shantytowns and barefoot children.

It was around this time that Isabelle would have visited Imelda in Tehran.

Things started breaking down. Protests, strikes, martial law. The family debate whether to leave ended. Imelda and Yousef and their grown children were on a plane for Belgium before the year was out.

A practical grief took hold as they packed up. Almost forty years of family life and memories were being left behind in Tehran. Imelda had exiled herself for love, as Edouard had, and now sought the shelter of home, as Edouard did.

People have always crossed oceans to be with the one they love. Love itself is a journey to an enchanted country. Many set out on the voyage, but few arrive. Fewer still are lucky enough to stay.

Twelve miles outside of Mons is a theme park called Pairi Daaiza. Pairi-daēza is the Persian word for a walled garden, a fragrant, shady retreat. It is the origin of the English word paradise.

Yousef’s cousin was executed by Iran’s revolutionary government in April 1979.

Edouard did not live to see the return of his daughter to Belgium. He chose to be buried alongside his fallen comrades in the Commonwealth War Graves plot at the Mons Communal Cemetery.

My Aunt Isabelle died in 2004. I did not learn of her passing until many years later.

Thanks to Edward Walshe for recording Edouard and Fernande’s story, and for their granddaughter Annie Morin for sharing it.

Thanks also to Annie’s daughter Virginie for telling me the story of Imelda and Yousef.

The nearest past is the most easily lost.

You are already grown by the time you understand that your parents are people. You will never really know about their lives. Too much has sunk below the surface. It’s not for their children to see.

If you are lucky, one of them tells a story. It is a tide pool at the edge of that immense ocean of personal history. You are luckier still if you can remember it. Luckiest of all if you can write it down.

This family story from David Lane is a dispatch from the deep.

Photos are from his personal collection.

TW: this story includes dark themes and self-harm.

Nineteen year-old Ralph came home after a hot day of work on the docks during the Summer of Love to find his first wife dead on the floor. Half-lying, half-sitting. She had removed one of two square cushions from the orange sofa and had sat on the floor with it upright behind her back, propped up against the leg and arm of the sofa. Dark brown hair against an orange background. There was torn fabric that the cushion usually covered.

The splay of her legs told Ralph she was dead. She looked like she’d fallen through the ceiling from the sky and landed there in front of the broken TV with the Fab Four scotch taped on the dead screen. There are a lot of little details like that; I don’t want to get tied up in them. This is one true story I know with a beginning, middle and end. But details help make things real: TV was an emblem for them of stupidity and emptiness, and four smiling mop tops were just the perfect photo to stick there, something they could laugh at together.

Ralph was wearing a plaid shirt that day even though it was summer. Seattle is cool in the morning, plus long sleeves protect your forearms from scratches while you unload. Today was crates of lettuce. Around ten it got too hot so he took it off. Ralph was in good shape in those days and he liked to show off his body. When he realized people could spot the little needle bruises on his veins even among the red scratches he put it back on. Ralph wore blue jeans and the damp plaid shirt when he entered the room.

Ralph bent down to examine her. The TV and table hemmed him in. He kicked Ringo in the face to make room. The anger was gone instantly because her dead face filled in all the space for moods and thoughts. Smelly smoke came out of the cracked screen.

He didn’t need to bend down. He didn’t need to stand back up. The world stopped in Ralph. We’ve come to the existential moment of the story.

Facts make things real, but what really matters is how they get clustered together. Stars are grouped by myths. You can point to Orion’s Belt. What Could Have Beens and What Can Bes – those are the clusters, the pictures we draw around facts. It’s not so much that our imaginations sift through Life to come up with stories, like a Hollywood screenwriter, it’s more that the Real is plucked from the Possible, and the plucker isn’t really you, it’s the could have beens and can bes of your life. Could have beens and can bes.

Same with Ralph. Ralph believed he acted because of facts. But what’s important is how that moment was laid open to him. What acts fit?

‘Meaningful’ means for a long time nothing fits.

Ralph didn’t cry. Ralph hadn’t cried since he was ten, and that was a physical pain that would’ve made most men cry. A good, good cry could have prevented what he did next, but at that time Ralph didn’t have that as a possible response.

No, confronted with the death of the woman he loved, Ralph thought. Nineteen and calculating. Aware that neighbors could hear everything through the walls and ceiling and floor, Ralph undertook deciding what his reaction should be. That brand of insanity is never taught to actors, but the actor in each of us knows it instinctively: what do I do next? How am I to feel now? A corpse near his right boot.

Ralph told me there are four chambers of the heart, four chances at love. If you give your heart and it doesn’t work out, or she changes or you change or you fuck things up, one chamber shrivels. A man who does that four times dies, or has a raisin in his chest to pump blood. He wasn’t sure it was the same for women.

I think Ralph said this because he recognized in me the same tendency, to throw my life in a woman’s lap, and he wanted me to live a long time. The only form of advice he gave was allegorical. Or maybe it was literal: during his third marriage he had a triple bypass.

So this, according to his philosophy, was the feeling of a chamber shriveling.

Ralph felt something, a different consistency from the rest of his body, rise up from his stomach into his chest. This sap didn’t make it to his throat and face. Some valve shut off. He wouldn’t blubber, like a baby. But here’s the thought that almost got Ralph crying: only one thing can save him from hell, love, and all of his relationships were disasters.

Ralph at that moment was the son of a mother he despised and a complete stranger father and the brother to a brother and sister he didn’t really talk to or feel comfortable around and he was a friend who had lied in big and little ways to everyone he knew and he was a resident who snuck around the landlord when rent was due and he was the father to a son whom he would not meet for another twenty years by a woman who refused to speak to him and an employee who resented his boss and his job and he didn’t even yet know about the wars he’d have with his daughters, or the devastating death of their mother, his second wife.

Ralph cast his mind wider, made a list, discarded, stayed focused. Facts. Ralph had unloaded lettuce crates and was body-tired. Ralph’s sweetheart was dead on the floor and he needed to act. A paperback on the radiator under the window had fanned, browned and curled, barely visible under the dirty sill. Ralph had just enough money for the rent this week. This continues indefinitely: slave life of work to pay debts accrued in the course of daily living. He was on the last chapter of that book when he misplaced it and now it was destroyed. Ralph was not one step closer to his childhood goal of narcissistic omnipotence in a world full of love. Ralph did not know how to break this cycle and go to law school, or become famous, change direction somehow. Ralph lacked an imagination capable of forecasting the unexpected arc of life, even with proof at his feet. The cover curled over, away from him, exposing a blank first page.

Ralph got impatient with turmoil.

Ralph had loved another woman, two years ago, in New York, and she was pregnant when he left. Maybe she would let him back in. There were two kids from her first marriage, they’d be about five now and she could use help, he thought. Ralph didn’t know she’d had a nervous breakdown after he left, or that she’d had his son once Ralph had wandered west. He had called her, tripping on acid at midnight, wrote her letters and poems, went to her job. A pang of shame came with the insight that he’d made himself intolerable and no reunion was possible. Another dead end thought.

What really caved in his sternum after each gong of conscience and bile was that his wife had reneged. She had backed out of their deal. Dead: what kind of shit was that? They committed themselves – out loud, formally - to life together and she backed out. She underlined each other condemnation and failure, and then repeated herself. She was the exclamation point at the end of his wrongly led life.

Talking to people was impossible. Ralph couldn’t answer questions. Ralph couldn’t talk to police or concerned people or doctors. Could he go to work on Monday? Could he eat dinner? Could he shoot up ever again? Could he sleep next door tonight? Could he drink at Luke’s and then cry? Could he dig a ditch for her under moonlight and leave town? Could he have a funeral parlor bury her for him? Could he walk to the bathroom and piss? Ralph couldn’t picture himself in any scenario. What could he do? You can see where this is going.

Ralph decided he wanted to be with her. A picture flashed in Ralph’s mind – the way they would be found, leaning on each other like books on a shelf.

First, Ralph needed money. He couldn’t risk survival. Ralph scoured the apartment for cash. It didn’t do much good because he regularly needed to attack all his secret stashes of cash and she had done the same just today to buy hers. Ralph checked behind the other orange sofa cushion and even went through her pockets, which were empty. Her pants were tight and it was awkward. An icy idea jumped up: I won’t have to do laundry; I can use the quarters. He took the five out of the Brubeck sleeve. He forgot about the ten in the Portable Emerson until 1989, while he died the second time, on an operating table.

Ralph changed his shirt and then put the plaid one back on because it looked better, authentic. Then he went to Mike in 2A and he told him that he owed some money to Luke, owner of the bar downstairs. Ralph even showed Matt the check he had from work to prove that he’d have money as soon as the bank opened Monday, at least by Monday night when he got home. Ralph was a good liar when he was nineteen.

He went to Pete, Walter, and Jenny, and Jay and told them all the same things, reworking the story each time, adding to his desperation when he believed the person had more money. Ralph gave them all the same line, “Borrowing from Peter to pay Paul,” even when he spoke to Pete. And he smiled. The last stop he made was at Luke’s where he convinced the bartender to cash his second party check out of the till. By the time they’d talk to each other and figure it out he’d be long gone.

The whole process took less than two hours. I don’t know where Ralph copped, there’s a fade out in the story. Next thing he was back in the apartment.

He talked to her now. He called her honey. Ralph explained it to her. It wasn’t only about her. For the first time in their relationship Ralph felt free to talk about his family and his past.

He put the other orange cushion against the base of the sofa, sat on the floor next to her and set up. Ralph told her we each get X amount of life and he was already used up by fears and frustrations and failures and fights and bad accidents. Ralph had his cutoff point wrong.

It must have been much more dope than he was used to by an order of magnitude. I also think that there was some greed along with the fear of all of that going into his arm.

Ralph had read Sor Juana’s Dream Poem and Dante and Kepler’s Somnium and he knew something really wild was about to happen.

He put his arms around her. He kissed her room temperature cheek.

What happens when we die? A man with a degree in evolutionary psychology told me that the brain releases natural opiates when the body gets mauled or dies suddenly. That explains hallucinations people have at the end of life. He hadn’t actually died ever, but he felt pretty confident that his explanation was more correct than the New Testament’s.

I avoid metaphysical commitments, but Ralph’s got good credentials to discuss this subject. Ralph told me Death is better than Shakespeare. And if there’s anything Ralph loved, it’s Shakespeare. Death, and opium. The two times he died and his opium experience in the Philippines with wife number three were, for Ralph, as good as it gets. Then comes Anthony & Cleopatra, Midsummer Night’s Dream, holding his first grandson, meeting me, and The Tempest. Hamlet, interestingly, doesn’t make the list.

Ralph also describes death in sensual terms, in terms of touch, not sights, or light, or sounds. “Pushing,” “pulling,” movement, like an example in a physics thought experiment (“a man in an elevator going through space is bouncing a ball…”). Ralph was also careful to separate drug sensations from the phenomena of dying. He’s a meticulous scientist of subjective feelings. With heroin, for example, hours flatten into minutes, while with dying, seconds become finite forevers.

He saw the plastic underside of the TV set on the oak floor. Not something you normally look at. His neck relaxed and he looked at the ceiling. The painters missed a spot by the ceiling fixture. That’s a stupid last thought, he thought, “the painters missed a spot,” and he hoped that wouldn’t be the final one but then it seemed comic that anyone would take issue with a man’s last thought and so it wasn’t really his last thought....

Ralph’s body was on the ground, but his spirit stood straight up. Stood up’s misleading, because it implies feet and lower legs and his body just tapered off to invisibility. No feet, but he did have a spine, a spine made of something like quartz or glass, and one strand of light ran down from heaven and lit up each vertebrae like deformed light bulbs going down his back. Gold bands of warm light encircled the interior of his head, neck, chest and middle, emanating from his lit spine. Light came out of his mouth, nostrils, ears, eyes, and from pores of his forehead. There once was a laugh track on tv but now all there was was roar of light

Christ had a long thin body that tapered off, too. Christ had his hands together in prayer and white robes. Christ resembled the bearded John Lennon from the back of Hey Jude, with wire granny glasses. Long white hair and a full white beard. Christ’s head tilted down a little to his left. Emanations.

Christ was undulating subtly under his aura but staying still, moving, in a mysterious way. Christ spoke and his voice was lutes and harps and bright brass and blossoming hyacinth.

Christ said: I’m going to the airport. Report back to me later.

Ralph got the message. Ralph stays on Earth.

Ralph didn’t see Christ go, but felt the heaven-vibe diminish and thought he sensed the original longing of Christ’s disciples for him to remain, a desire so strong they could convince themselves he came back, or was coming right back, or by definition couldn’t leave. There was a pull, down, like his body regained gravity, or he was filled with iron and the inert him on the floor was magnetized. Ralph grasped the early Christian belief that Revelations would occur in their lifetimes, that the world would end any day. Ralph wondered what kind of father, of son, of lover, of neighbor, what kind of casual acquaintance or stranger are you when you believe final judgment’s coming any minute?

More lucid, Ralph was surprised, then frankly relieved by death’s rejection. Descending more, Ralph was slightly dismayed at the prospect of facing life again. His body. Her body. He’d bet every penny. He’d probably get thrown out of the apartment. Waking further, embarrassment and elation and exhaustion blended into a brown film on his half-thoughts.

Saturday. Sun was breaking up the morning fog.

Ralph sat with the dead.

Ralph in time wiped the vomit off of his chin with his left hand. The word chagrin plopped into his head. Ralph felt he had aged. He took a look at her and he chuckled involuntarily, he doesn’t remember why.

Then Ralph did what any human animal does when the body and the mind refuse to break down. He got up off the floor. Rigor mortis was setting in, so he had to struggle to remove his arm from under her stiff back and sit up. He stood and spasmodically stretched. Calf and shoulder twitched. The thought balloon over his head had an infant’s scribble in it. There was a garbage smell in the apartment.

He took a shower. That helped.

Ralph sat on the arm of the orange sofa, facing away from her, and pulled the phone to him. He wondered what numbers to dial. Ralph needed a bureaucrat, not a friend. No one was more anonymous than an operator, so Ralph dialed zero, and told the operator that his wife had died of an overdose and he needed to be connected to someone. She expressed sympathy and they shared an awkward silent moment before she connected him.

Ralph, sitting naked on the orange arm, waited for people to come to the door, to give him specific tasks to perform (Sign this) and direct questions to answer.

A yawn forced his face open. His ears popped. The pitch of the air changed. In fact, at that second, everything changed. From the ground floor of his soul on up, and with no clear cause, everything changed. Ralph now knew his next move. He would locate his father. He would introduce himself. Of course.

It was easy to get dressed. He did push-ups on the linoleum floor in the kitchen. There was a timid knock and he went to answer the door.

Twenty years later, I introduced myself to my father, Ralph.

David Lane lives in the woods in Connecticut. He enjoys reading Talmud and has been trying to figure out the source of that buzzing sound in his kitchen since 2006.

Who was the first person in the history of your family granted the right to vote?

When was the last time someone in your family was legally denied that right, or, if eligible in principle, still barred from the polls? For my family, it was in Quebec in 1940. For my brother-in-law’s family, it was in Alabama in 1965.

Then there is a third history of voting: when ancestors could vote but were unable to choose freely.

For the Maguires, the first step came with Britain’s Great Reform Act of 1832, which extended the franchise to small landowners, tenant farmers, shopkeepers, and all male heads of households who paid a yearly rental of £10 or more.

As the holder of a lease worth £20 annually, even my Irish Catholic great-great grandfather John Maguire could vote in Ireland up until he emigrated in 1864.1 He continued to enjoy this right in Canada, which prior to Confederation followed British franchise law.

Britain’s Reform Bill of 1867, the “Great Leap in the Dark,” granted the vote to almost all male heads of households and lodgers. Since Canada followed Britain’s electoral regime, this broad extension of the franchise would have also been the law in Canada, except that earlier that year the British North America Act established Canada as a unified federal dominion with an independent Parliament and electoral code. Property qualifications swept away in Britain stayed on the books.

By the end of 1867, a working-class man in London was far more likely to vote than that same man in Montreal, where the $30 property hurdle remained in place.

That summer was John’s first chance to vote in a federal election in his new country. But being legally eligible to vote and actually voting are of course not the same thing. Nor is having the right to vote and being able to vote freely.

Let’s follow John Maguire to the hustings in that first national election.

As a male over twenty-one and not a government employee or a member of the judiciary, John met the first eligibility tests to vote.2 Next, he met the property test because of the rent he paid on his residence at 71 Common Street. He still faced a number of other potential obstacles.

First, a voter also had to live in a district for a set period, maintaining a stable, recognized address. The residents of working-class Griffintown moved every year, due to spring floods from the Saint Lawrence River that forced them from their homes. In addition, neighborhood landlords typically offered tenants only one-year leases, which they did not often renew. A new tenant meant they could raise the rent.3

A voter also had to be the official leaseholder. Many people who met the property qualification had either temporary or informal living arrangements. If John were simply the occupant of 71 Common Street, his rental payments wouldn’t count toward eligibility.

John was always the formal leaseholder of his residences. But since the Maguires moved frequently, it’s possible he may not have been recorded as the leaseholder of 71 Common Street by that summer.

John would also have to be current on his taxes. More than half of the eligible voters in his ward were struck off the voter rolls in 1867 for being in arrears on their municipal taxes.4

At the polling station, John was checked against the list of eligible voters in the poll book. His right to vote could have been challenged on the spot. His name was frequently misspelled as “McGuire,” a common enough mistake of enumerators and city clerks, but which could then be used to dispute his name as it appeared on an assessment or voter roll.

John’s identity would have had to be confirmed by people in the neighborhood who knew him. He may have been asked to swear an oath that he was indeed John Maguire. Of course, such an oath would only have teeth if another man claiming to be John Maguire came forward and he could be charged with perjury.

Finally, the polling officer asked John to swear an oath to the Queen, something deeply unpalatable to Quebec’s Irish and French voters.5 This process created inevitable delays. Voting often continued into a second day.

The secret ballot was not widely adopted in Canada until 1874. A voter had to appear in person and declare his vote aloud. John cast his ballot in front of the election officials of his riding, as well as party and candidate agents.

He also voted in front of a crowd of neighborhood onlookers. In that crowd were witnesses happy to report his vote to the parish priest. Or the neighborhood constable. Or John’s landlord. Or the butcher who always advanced his wife Catherine a bit of credit before payday. Or the neighbor women always willing to mind the baby on washday. Or the managers of the Grand Trunk Railroad, where John worked as a clerk.

Then there were the other, anonymous men in the crowd. But John knew who they were. He could feel their hard stares as his turn approached. He did not meet their eyes.

Fenianism was a 19th-century Irish nationalist movement dedicated to the violent overthrow of British rule and establishing an independent Irish republic. Because Irish immigrants in the United States and Canada enjoyed freedom of speech, assembly, and press, the Fenian Brotherhood could operate in the open and raise funds for the movement. Immigrants in both countries poured millions of dollars into Fenian coffers.

Tens of thousands of battle-hardened Irish-American veterans of the American civil war were eager to turn their military training against Britain, focusing on its most vulnerable overseas possession: Canada.

American-based Fenians launched a series of armed raids into Canada between 1866 and 1871 to seize a piece of territory valuable enough to force a negotiation for Irish independence. By launching these attacks from US soil the Fenians hoped they would provoke Britain to retaliate against the United States and escalate the conflict further.

Fear of Fenian raids furthered the cause of Canadian Confederation. British North America needed a united government and coordinated defense.

The enemy was, however, already inside the house.

Montreal was a hotbed of Fenianism, with its Irish community organizations heavily infiltrated by the Fenian Brotherhood. And there was no place in Montreal where Fenian sympathies ran thicker than Griffintown.

Every man in Griffintown had a hard decision to make.

The Conservative (bleu) candidate was Thomas D’Arcy McGee. Now venerated as one of the Fathers of Canadian Confederation, McGee had once been an Irish revolutionary who fled to the United States after the failed 1848 rebellion. McGee later settled in Montreal, having abandoned the goal of republican revolution in favor of constitutional monarchy. For McGee, a self-governing united Canada within the British Empire offered greater stability and protection from American expansionism.

McGee was a leader in the negotiation unifying the British North American provinces. He also contributed to the drafting of the British North America Act, which brought Confederation into law. In that founding document McGee had ensured protections for religious minorities.

McGee denounced Fenianism and militant Irish nationalism on the eve of the 1867 election. Fenian supporters branded McGee a traitor. Even the Irish in Griffintown who had no truck with Fenians still held the cause of Irish freedom close to their hearts and believed McGee had deserted them.

Running against McGee on the Liberal party (rouge) ticket was another Irishman, Bernard Devlin, an anti-establishment candidate who claimed the new federalism was a Tory plot to marginalize the Irish and the French. While not a Fenian, he was an Irish nationalist who made common cause with radical republican elements. Devlin invited Montreal's Fenians to join his campaign.

The Parti rouge supported democracy and independence for Quebec, but was also deeply anticlerical and pushed for secular education and civil marriage. For an Irish Catholic, they may as well have been promoting atheism and free love.

The campaign for the Montreal West riding was brutal and dirty. McGee exposed Fenians in Devlin’s camp. Devlin publicly denounced him as “a foul informer, a corrupt witness, a knave, and a hypocrite.”6

The election opened on September 5th.7 Devlin’s supporters physically threatened McGee supporters. Tories had hired “bludgeon men” armed with sticks and clubs and often supported by police, to block access to the polls. Voters were plied with alcohol.

The chaos continued into a second day of voting.

John may have tried to vote the first day only to be turned away, forcing him to return the second day. As he walked to the hustings he knew the decision lay in his hands, and it had nothing but sharp edges.

John’s party affiliation is unknown, but we know a few things about him. Throughout his short life, John took on richer, more powerful men whenever they tried to cheat him or push him around. He loathed unfairness of all kinds.8 A point for Devlin.

Back in Ireland, John had lived under the heavy thumb of a Protestant elite who monopolized civic power. He was almost certainly an Irish patriot. Another point for Devlin.

John was also a church-goer. Father Hogan, the Maguires’ parish priest who had baptized little Francis, John and Catherine’s first Canadian child, the winter before, no doubt reminded him that red was the color of hell.9 If Father Hogan weren’t on hand, other parishioners would have gleefully informed him how John voted. A point for McGee.

In Ireland John and Catherine had lived with a low, background hum of sectarian threat which sometimes became something more. The acrid smell of burning hayricks. A crude drawing of a coffin stuffed in a letterbox. Shots fired in the night. It hardly mattered whether one was Catholic or Protestant. That creeping fear spared no one.

In other parts of Canada Fenians created a surge of militant nativism organized around Protestant Orange Lodges.10 But in Quebec, where Catholicism was enshrined in law and the Orange Order was banned, the Maguires had found refuge from sectarian violence. Secularism? No, thank you. Another point for McGee.

Then there were men of the Brotherhood in the crowd, their faces arranged in a studied blandness. Also at the poll station was likely a wall of Tory bludgeon men keeping him out.

McGee won the election but he did not carry Griffintown. St. Ann’s was the only ward where Devlin prevailed. Devlin squeaked a majority the first day of voting but won by a margin of almost two to one on the second day across a lower turnout than the first. Either the Tories had focused their blockades and intimidation tactics on the first day, or perhaps Devlin had found a few ruffians of his own on the second day.

When the polls closed and the election called for McGee, a mob of hundreds of Devlin supporters stormed the Mechanics’ Hall where McGee’s party had gathered. They tore down the tote boards outside the Hall that confirmed his victory and smashed windows to gain entry to the building, where they brutally attacked Tory supporters. City police and volunteer cavalry were called to disperse the rioters.11

As an outspoken anti-Fenian, McGee remained a target.

They got him the following spring. McGee was shot in Ottawa by one of the Brotherhood. McGee’s funeral in Montreal was the largest public event in Canadian history per capita, with over 80,000 mourners lining the streets to watch the cortège pass by.12

McGee’s assassin, Patrick Whelan, was hanged in Canada's last public execution.

Devlin quickly denounced Fenianism. The Brotherhood called him a turncoat.

Two years later, Fenians launched one last raid from Vermont and were defeated by a Canadian Home Guard at Eccles Hill, in Saint-Armand, Quebec.

John Maguire did not live to vote in another federal election.

In the early decades of the twentieth century the Montreal Star featured a classified advertising section called “Missing Relatives” for people trying to locate lost loved ones.

This is an occasional series about some of the missing people I have found.

From the Montreal Star, Aug 6, 1907:

Three people with the same surname could have any family relationship. But if they were three siblings travelling to Canada in 1883 one thing was certain: the Wenmans did not go willingly.

Over the course of seventy years English charity organizations sent thousands of impoverished children to distant countries across the British Empire. The resettlement was deemed a ‘fresh start.”

Most of these children were sent to Canada and placed with farm families. Boys apprenticed in farm work while girls were domestic servants. Some were taught trades. Most were between the ages of eight and sixteen when they were shipped out. Few ever returned home.

Canadians believed these children were orphans. Some had been orphaned or abandoned, but many more were surrendered by their destitute parents. In many cases, parents gave their children to a shelter believing it was temporary, and when they returned to retrieve them discovered their children were gone. Not just out of their custody, but out of the country.

A heart breaking number of ads in the “Missing Relatives” featured people searching for English children sent to Canada.

Some UK charities participating in the child migration still exist today, including Barnardo’s. Thomas Barnardo was an Irish Christian philanthropist who established over a hundred orphanages and shelters for poor and deprived children in Victorian London. From the foundation of his first homes in 1867 to his death, it has been estimated that Barnardo saved almost 60,000 children from the streets.

Barnardo painted himself the protector of “nobody’s children.” But more often than not they were, in fact, somebody’s children. Barnardo was brought to court countless times for taking illegal custody of other people’s kids. He called it “philanthropic abduction.”

Between 1882 and 1939 Barnardo charities sent tens of thousands of children to Canada. Relocation relied on a network of receiving homes and schools, some run by Barnardo, some by other organizations, which served as distribution centers to place children on farms. The goal was permanent resettlement.

Another leading figure in child emigration was Annie MacPherson.

Born in Dunbarton, Scotland in 1833, Annie experienced "a divine revelation" at age nineteen and soon began evangelical mission work in London. Her first mission in the city’s East End made her aware of the evils of child slavery in the matchbox industry, inspiring a life’s work in child welfare.

In 1870 Annie established a "Home of Industry" for children in London, but she became convinced that the best solution was emigration. That same year Annie pulled a hundred children from London shelters and workhouses and sailed with them to Canada. She set up a home for them in rural Belleville, Ontario, called Marchmont, which was intended as a waystation until the children could be placed on farms or in domestic service.

It was the start of a massive operation that took 100,000 poor children to Canada over the next fifty years. Annie established two other homes, one in Galt, Ontario, a mill town in what is now the municipality of Waterloo, and another in the village of Knowlton, Quebec.

The work of Annie and Dr. Barnardo was not universally admired. Contemporaries criticized separating families without consent, and consigning children to hard labor in the “backwoods.” Newspapers published brutal first hand accounts of the lives of child migrants for British readers.

From the Cheshire Observer, March 19, 1887:

Let me briefly describe a scene of which I was an eye-witness, and which occurred a few years ago. A lady arrived in Woodville, North Ontario, with a number of little English children for ‘adoption.’ …the little boys and girls were placed ‘on view’ in the village schoolroom, ranged in a row, as slaves used to be down South, for inspection.

[…] Among the group of little ones were two little twin brothers, who did not seem to realize what was taking place. A farmer ‘adopted’ one of them, another farmer took the second, the homesteads of the two men being nearly a hundred miles apart. […] No one save an eye-witness can imagine the look of sorrowful amazement depicted on the little fellows’ faces when they realized, in their babyish fashion, what it all meant.

A mother, I think, would rather see her children taking the chances of the London streets than doomed to the soul-starving existence of a Canadian homestead.1

Since many of the children had been inmates of workhouses, facilities in Canada were subject to inspection by the Poor Law Board. In 1874 a Board Inspector, Andrew Doyle, went to Canada and filed a report rife with criticisms. The transports carelessly mixed “street arabs,” together with workhouse paupers and reformatory inmates. Travelling conditions were terrible, and the children were dirty and lice-infested on arrival. No sooner had the children set foot on Canadian soil than they were sent to strangers’ homes with no time to adjust. No one was monitoring the children’s wellbeing. Doyle accused the migrant organizations of profiting off the export of the children.2

The Select Committee on Immigration and Colonization ordered an inspection of all children brought to Canada by Annie and another migrant organizer, Maria Rye. The findings satisfied the Canadian government. 3

The child migration continued.

The first federal oversight did not arrive until the 1890s. Regular, standardized inspections with case files and follow up, as well as child labor regulation and required school attendance, did not follow until 1920.

Cousin Harry was not the only person looking for the Wenmans. Another ad had appeared in a paper in Manitoba a few years earlier.

Frances Wenman was thirty-eight when she placed this ad looking for her lost family. 4

The last possible time Frances would have last seen her little brother and sisters she would have been eighteen, Lottie fourteen, Tilly eleven, and Jim seven. But their last meeting may have been even earlier.

Frances and her siblings grew up in the East End of London, the children of Richard and Charlotte Wenman. Richard worked as a bill-sticker, climbing ladders to slap advertisements and notices on fences and walls with a brush dipped in wheat paste. Bill-stickers were part of the urban laboring “precariat.” While the work required some literacy (to ensure the bills weren’t upside down) bill-stickers worked independently and had no job security.

In April of 1881 Richard Wenman was living with his new wife Phyllis, and the three younger children at 3 Eagle Wharf Road in the poor and overcrowded district of Shoreditch. Frances was sixteen and no longer living at home. A Charlotte Wenman appears among the London deaths registered the previous winter.

Within six months disaster arrived for the Wenmans. On October 13th, Lottie, Tilly, and Jim were admitted to the Holborn City Road workhouse. Two days later, Richard was admitted to the pauper infirmary at Archway Road and Highgate Street.

The two day gap between the children and Richard’s admission tells us that Lottie, Tilly and Jim had been taken there, or abandoned there, first. Richard may have been brought to the infirmary after an investigation by a Relieving Officer to confirm there was no one to look after the children.

There was no trace of Phyllis. It’s possible that Phyllis and Richard were common-law spouses. Since Phyllis was not the children’s mother she may have had no claim on them, or chosen to take no responsibility. If Phyllis were healthy and able-bodied, the Board of Guardians could have refused her admission to the workhouse.

Frances also did not—could not—claim her siblings. A seventeen-year-old girl was rarely seen by the Poor Law authorities as a viable head of household. She was likely either living as a boarder or a servant with no practical way to house them. Moreover, a teenaged sister had no legal standing to claim custody as long as Richard remained alive.

The unraveling of the Wenman family happened at lightening speed.

The children remained at the City Road workhouse for two weeks before they were sent to the Holborn Union Industrial School. Richard was discharged from the infirmary in December. It’s not known whether he later died, recovered from his illness, or ever tried to reclaim his children.

There is no record of Phyllis and Richard living together again after he left the workhouse. The 1891 census finds a Phyllis Wenman living alone in Shoreditch, earning her living as an artificial flower maker, one of thousands of people in the East End employed in this type of garret work.

In 1870 the Holborn Union had purchased a wainscotted mansion in Mitcham, Surrey, called Eagle House and converted the house and property to the Holborn Union Industrial School for pauper children. The Industrial School housed four hundred children, who were attended by eighty adults providing education and vocational training.

It was from Mitcham that Annie MacPherson took the Wenman girls to Canada on one of her child-cargo trips. The girls departed on the S.S. Circassian in 1883, leaving seven-year-old Jim behind. They were however kept together and both arrived in Galt, Ontario, at a farm Annie had named Blair Athol.

It’s not surprising that Annie initially chose Galt as one of her Canadian locations. It was an industrial center surrounded by rich farmland. A place built on grey limestone and a rigid Scottish work ethic. A place desperate for cheap labor.

Grim, sober Presbyterian Galt would continue the moral education of the Wenmans begun at their Holborn school.

Once arrived in Galt, the girls were scrubbed, inspected, and then paraded to local employers. We know that Lottie and Tilly did not stay long at Blair Athol, as the facility was closed in November of that year. But the girls remained in the Waterloo area for years afterward. It is likely they worked as domestics for local families, or at one of Galt’s textile mills.

Eight-year-old Jim Wenman was sent to Canada in 1884 on the S.S. Sardinian. Jim likely apprenticed in a factory, not a farm, given he later worked in manufacture.

The siblings were reunited in Galt. By 1891 all three living together as lodgers of mill workers named Dunnett. This would have been about the time their cousin Harry had last heard from them.

In January 1893 Lottie married John Langham, a worker in one of the mills in Galt.

Tilly married another Galt millworker, Charles Augustus Green, in May of the same year. The sisters were each others' witnesses.

Lottie and her husband John stayed on in Galt and later ran a boarding house. They had no children.

In 1897 Jim married a girl named Minnie McCarty. The marriage took place at the Burnside Lying-In Hospital, the maternity wing of the Toronto General Hospital, suggesting that Minnie either just delivered, or was about to deliver, a baby.

Nothing is known about this baby but a daughter, Charlotte, was born the following year. Jim disappears from the record again. Jim’s absence from censuses and directories for decades at a time hints at a life of wandering. Minnie and baby Charlotte also disappear from his life.

Tilly and Charles had a daughter they named Blanche Violet. The next year, Charles left for the US in search of work. Tilly briefly made newspaper headlines when she discovered he had a second family in Philadelphia and sued him for bigamy.

Tilly divorced Charles and remarried a German immigrant from Buffalo named Hermann Amblen in 1902. Tilly left Blanche behind to live with Hermann in Buffalo and had another child, a boy named Clarence. This family didn’t stay together long. Within three years Tilly was gone and Herman was married to another woman.

Tilly had become sick with an unnamed illness, probably tuberculosis.5 She had once left Blanche behind to remarry. This time she left little Clarence in Buffalo with his father because she was going home to die.

In the end, Tilly wanted to be with her sister, Lottie, her sole constant through her unhappy odyssey. Tilly crossed back across the border in a final migration of her own free will. Tilly died at Lottie’s home in Galt in 1908. She was thirty-six.

In 1910 Jim was living on his own in Boston employed as either a spring maker or a carpenter. Jim drifted to Detroit where he worked as a spring maker, before disappearing from the record one final time.

After Tilly’s death, Lottie stayed on in Galt and continued to manage her boarding house. In 1910 she travelled to Boston alone to visit Jim. We can only wonder what they said to each other. Did they remember anything of Eagle Wharf Road in Shoreditch?

Lottie passed away in 1939.

It’s not known whether Frances ever made contact with her sisters and brother as a result of the Missing Relatives ads. Frances married a bricklayer named Albert Nicholls in 1886. Albert and Frances lived together in Woodgreen, North London, where they raised ten children.

All we know for sure is that Frances never saw her siblings again. She died in London in 1946, at the age of eighty-one.

It has been estimated that as many as one in ten Canadians is a descendant of a Home Child.6

and recently invited us to think about the books that shaped us. How are our libraries our own living archives? What books tell our story?

Most of my collection consists of history books. I had always wanted to be a historian. I realized this goal in the spring of 2003, when I completed a doctorate in Modern European History from NYU. (My son was born in June of that year, and I was hugely pregnant at graduation. There are photos of me in the velvet tam and doctoral hood, with a gown the size of a circus tent.)

Here, then, are six books that made me want to become a historian.

These are just my six. They aren't “the essential books,” and all were written decades ago. They are simply my personal favorites because of how they teach the craft of history.

These are books that will inspire family chroniclers. They invite us to sharpen our lens and think more deeply about the past. They provide tools to probe the silences and pressure-test the narratives.

These books are also masterclasses in writing.

They are old books. All six are written by men, which I think says more about who was writing books and getting on course syllabi back when I was a history student than anything else. I am sure if I were a graduate student now I would have a completely different list. But then, I probably would be studying another kind of history. I still stand by these six books as must-reads.

I’ve included their URLs from the Internet Archive where available.

https://archive.org/details/makingofenglishw0000epth_p1l9

E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963) is a people’s epic.

This book is perhaps the most influential work of modern social history, and the first comprehensive history of the British working class. It’s a sweeping chronicle of Britain’s industrial transformation between 1790 and 1832, detailing the disintegration of the pre-modern world and how British working people resisted. Thompson argues that radical action such as machine breaking was targeted and disciplined, and a principled defense of the ‘moral economy.’

For Thompson, the “working class” was not a Marxist theoretical category, something created by economic structures. Instead it was an identity that grew from shared experiences people lived through. “Class consciousness” was not new, but rather a continuity with traditional understanding of rights, fair prices, and fair wages.

The Making of the English Working Class is very much a book of its time. It romanticizes the labor movement and ignores the history of women, as well as the influence of religion. But it’s a thrilling read. It portrays ordinary people not as victims, but historical actors and makers of their own history.

Islands of History by Marshall Sahlins (1985) reconstructs the fatal final days of Captain Cook in Hawaii in 1779. It’s more than a historical whodunit. Two cultures collided in that fateful encounter. Cook’s initial landing coincided with the Makahiki festival, prompting Hawaiians to incorporate him into their cosmology as the god Lono. Cook departed then doubled back to Hawaii a week later due to storm damage to his ship. It was at the end of the ritual season, and his reappearance created a structural contradiction, as the continued presence of Lono now directly threatened the re-established political authority of the King. According to Sahlins Hawaiians had only one way to resolve it. 1

Captain Cook did not just land in Hawaii; he fell into a pre-existing story that had no room for his return. Sahlins uses this tragedy to dismantle any remaining structuralist notions of indigenous cultures as static or 'ahistorical.’ All culture is dynamic. Ancient myth and new events are in constant dialogue. Our myths give meaning to events, but those events in turn reshape our myths.

https://archive.org/details/fallofconstantin0000runc

The Fall of Constantinople 1453 by Steven Runciman (1957) is a classic narrative history of the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople.

The book opens with the last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI Palaiologos, facing a hard truth: his empire was doomed. Byzantium had endured for a thousand years, but was now reduced to the city of Constantinople, encircled by Ottoman forces under Mehmed II, who was preparing the final blow. The book recounts the events leading up to the final siege of the city in May 1453.

For Runciman, the fall of Constantinople was the inevitable end of a long decline, but also a tragic and heroic last stand against overwhelming odds.

The most moving passage comes at the end, when the emperor realizes that the Turks have breached the city’s land walls.

Constantine turned his horse and galloped back to the Lycus valley and the breaches in the stockade. With him was the gallant Spaniard who claimed to be his cousin, Don Francisco of Toledo, and his own cousin Theophilus Palaeologus and a faithful comrade-at-arms, John Dalmata. Together they tried to rally the Greeks, in vain; the slaughter had been too great. They dismounted and for a few minutes the four of them held the approach to the gate through which Giustiniani had been carried. But the defence was broken now. The gate was jammed with Christian soldiers trying to make their escape, as more and more Janissaries fell on them. Theophilus shouted that he would rather die than live and disappeared into the oncoming hordes. Constantine himself knew now that the Empire was lost, and he had no wish to survive it. He flung off his imperial insignia and, with Don Francisco and John Dalmata still at his side, he followed Theophilus. He was never seen again.

Runciman reminds us that good historical writing should have the power to move us. History is not just social science. It can—and should be—literature.

Alan Macfarlane’s The Origins of English Individualism (1978) challenged prevailing grand narratives about the rise of modern industrial capitalism as the result o a sudden, violent transition from a medieval peasant society, whether through the enclosures (Marx) or Protestant Reformation (Weber). MacFarlane rejects the idea that individualism was created by modern capitalism. He argues that England’s culture was already individualistic, market-oriented, and relatively egalitarian, long before the Industrial Revolution.

Medieval England, he claims, was already no longer a peasant society, in which land was held jointly by families and seldom sold. By the 12th century, English land was held by individuals (both men and women) and was often sold to nonfamily members. English people were not tied to the land. A good portion of them were wage workers and accustomed to moving as the market demanded.

MacFarlane’s proto-capitalist medieval England, with its cash market in land, suggests that England was “modern” much earlier than previously thought. MacFarlane does however have a vague definition of “individualism.” He also relies on legal records that may well misrepresent the extent of communal and feudal ties that still existed. But I loved this book, less for its thesis than that it challenges broad totalizing theories of history.

It’s a reminder that the history of ordinary people found in account books and property records can upend those grand sweeping narratives.

https://archive.org/details/isbn_039300371x

Strange Defeat by Marc Bloch (1946) is not really a history book since it was an analysis of the fall of France in 1940, just three months after the event. It’s a book by one of France’s greatest historians offering his eye-witness account.

As a historian of modern France, it’s hard to find words to express how much I admire Marc Bloch.

Bloch was a medieval historian and a founder of the Annales school. In 1939, already a veteran of the Great War and at an age when he would have been exempted from service, he was mobilized as a captain of a motorized unit. After the defeat, he returned to teaching at the University of Montpellier, where he required escorts to protect him against antisemitic right-wing violence.

Strange Defeat analyzes all the short and long term reasons for the French defeat, notably the tactical failures of the French military that Bloch knew firsthand from having served on the front line.

Bloch joined the Resistance. In 1944 he was captured, tortured, and killed by Klaus Barbie.2 Bloch did not give up a single name of a résistant who wasn’t already in custody or safe with de Gaulle. His last words were (allegedly) “vive la France.”

Strange Defeat was published posthumously in 1946. We can’t know what history Marc Bloch would have written had he survived, or what heights the Annales school may have reached had he lived to lead its research.

According to his instructions, on his grave was carved with the words dilexi veritatem.

I have loved the truth.

https://archive.org/details/cheesewormscosmo00ginz

I’ve written about this last book before. The Cheese and the Worms by Carlo Ginzburg, tells the story of Menocchio, a miller in 16th century Friuli, who was put on trial for heresy. Menocchio challenged church orthodoxy and had his own unique theory of the universe, which he believed originated from chaos, comparing it to cheese forming with worms inside it. The worms were the angels and God.

The inquisition investigated Menocchio’s books to identify the sources of his heresies. Menocchio did not get a hold of many books but he read widely, reflected on his readings, and grafted them onto his existing store of knowledge, much of which was based in folklore and oral culture. Reconstructing Menocchio’s library from trial transcripts, Ginzburg explored the intersection of oral and written culture in a world of growing literacy and the possibility of independent thinking in a repressive society.

It is a classic work of micro-history, and inspired many people like me to research and write about historical people whose inner lives have gone unexplored.

I have written more about the uses of micro history here:

I could probably recommend dozens of other books. Most of them are European history, though, because it was my area of study but now a fusty subject for young scholars.

Give one of these old books a try. Each one shows us a unique way to write history and to look at historical people with both rigor and empathy.

Another time I’ll post something about the inspiring history professors under whom I had the privilege to study.

(Thinking of you, Tony Judt, as I write this.)

This is one from the archive for Saint Patrick’s Day.

This story was first published in Medium in 2023.

No one will ever be able to see the green in the black-and-white photographs of the Montréal Saint Patrick’s Day Parade of 1959. Whatever the shade of green, it’s lost to history, along with most of the images from that day. Among them, the five beautiful Irish girls, identically dressed in green gowns, riding on a float bedecked with paper Shamrocks: the Parade Queen and Her Court. My mother was one of the girls on the float.

The Montréal parade still has a queen, but it is now a leadership/public speaking award. Back then it was a beauty contest. Mom told me there was the pre-parade selection night where guests voted for the Saint Patrick’s Queen with their applause. The girl with the most applause was selected, and four runners-up were the Court.

I am not sure what inspired my mother to enter this contest. Maybe a boy had dared her? Maybe it was my grandmother, who was so proud of her pretty daughter. My grandmother, a French Québécoise, married an Irishman and raised her family in an Irish neighborhood. She loved St. Patrick’s Day.

When I was growing up, if there was nothing to do, I sometimes looked at my mother’s scrapbooks, which included an album of pictures of the parade. I always carefully examined the photos of the parade float with the Queen and Her Court. In my kid’s opinion, no one was as pretty as my own mother, and certainly not the parade Queen. Whenever I said so, Mom insisted the Queen had that type of evanescent Irish beauty not readily captured in pictures.

That was the message for me, growing up.

Many years later, she told me that the Queen also had an especially large and rowdy family who generated deafening applause on selection night.

The parade included Irish clubs, teams, marching bands, parish churches, and representatives from Irish communities in Québec’s disappearing English-speaking rural towns. Some carried the green, white, and orange flags of the Republic of Ireland. Some the Québec fleur de lis.

And, at the very end of the parade, its pièce de résistance, the green float trimmed in crêpe paper, carrying the Queen and Her Court. They wore their little fur-trimmed capes high on their shoulders, almost at their ears: it was March in Canada, after all.

The parade passed a reviewing stand at the Ritz-Carleton Hotel. Montréal Mayor Sarto Fournier had his picture taken with the Queen and Her Court. He shook hands with each girl. When he got to Mom, he whispered in her ear: You are the most beautiful one.

She later wondered if he had said that to each of them.

Toward the end of her life, Mom thought of returning to Montréal and walking in the parade again, as one of the Court alumnae. Then she thought: what’s the point? She had asked that question of most of her possessions, too, by then. You can’t take any of it with you.

We emptied her apartment after she died. I went looking for her scrapbooks and photo albums. I was devastated to discover that she’d thrown out the memorabilia and news clippings of that day.

She’d probably decided they wouldn’t be of interest to anyone after she was gone. They were barely of any interest to her then. What was the point of hanging onto a black and white photos of herself from sixty years before, sitting on a parade float with a bunch of people she didn’t know?

Looking at her albums as a kid, I’d sometimes ask her about the parade, but it never came up in the decades that followed. One day in her later years we somehow got to talking about the parade, and she shared something I hadn’t heard before.

Mom told me that my grandmother had gone to the parade by herself that day, and waited all morning in the cold to watch her daughter go by on a float. In fact, my grandmother followed the entire parade route, staying ahead of the float, swimming against the human tide of onlookers, repeatedly stopping to turn around and wave.

As the float made its way down Sherbrooke Street, every time Mom looked into the throng of parade watchers, everywhere she looked, there was her mother, bobbing up in the crowd, beaming and waving.

That’s a memory more precious than any photo or news clipping. A memory to take into eternity.

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day.

My son was about four or five. At the Christmas tree lot, he met another little boy, and they immediately started a game of hide and seek in the magical way that children have of playing together instantly.

As the boys ran through the trees, my husband picked one out and had it wrapped in baling twine so he could tie to the roof of the car. He was assisted by a young woman with a Spanish accent. The little boy called her Mommy.

Most of the Christmas tree lots near us were run by young Québécois who drove the trees down from Canada and spent a month selling them before continuing on their way to Mexico for the winter. These men usually lived in RVs on the lot.

My husband had never seen a mother with a young child doing this work. He remembered her face.

A few days later at the grocery store, he picked up a supermarket circular. The back page had ads for Missing Persons. As he folded over the circular he caught sight of a familiar face. It was the mom from the Christmas tree lot. Her husband had reported her missing from their home in Florida three weeks before.

There was no way to know what she was running from. My husband didn’t say anything to anyone about it.

I still think about this young woman sometimes and wonder if she is all right. Many people go missing for good reasons.

For decades the Montreal Star featured a classified advertising section called “Missing Relatives” —personal ads in the back of the paper alongside Help Wanted and items lost and found.

Since colonial times newspapers across North America featured ads from people looking for loved ones. After Emancipation there was a surge of such notices from formerly enslaved people seeking lost family. Families of immigrants also placed ads, looking for people who had left them behind. People also used ads to find runaway husbands, wives, and children.

At its height, the Star had the largest circulation of any Canadian paper, and by 1913, almost half its readers were outside Montreal. “Missing Relatives” didn’t appear to be a syndicated feature, and rarely did an ad ask another paper to “please copy.” The paper boasted that the exceptional reach of its “Missing Relatives” feature was primarily from word of mouth, which does not seem like a compelling case for taking out an ad in a newspaper.1

I have no doubt that “Missing Relatives” was read by everyone. Even now, these items are as addicting as peanuts.

Some read like an entire novel.

Some have so little information they are cries into the void.

Because the Star was a Canadian paper, there are a heartbreaking number of ads from families searching for “Doctor Barnardo” boys2 or other Canadian Home Children.

After the Great War there were ads sought the whereabouts of men uprooted by their wartime service.

Whether these men were indeed displaced by the war, or using their deployment as a convenient way to start fresh somewhere else, isn’t clear.

I will be sharing some of the missing people I have found and telling their stories here on Substack. The first missing person has close parallels to my own family history.3

This particular item is from the pre-history of “Missing Relatives,” appearing in the Star as a letter addressed to the Mayor of Montreal. The story was carried in a number of Montreal papers, both French and English.

Olympus Champagne was a farmer in what is now Victoriaville, Quebec, searching for his sister. She had travelled to the big city and disappeared. At the time of publication she had been missing for four months.

Elise or Eloise or Eliza Champagne was born to a French farming family in 1857 in Lanoraie, in the Lanaudière region of Quebec, which abuts the stretch of the St. Lawrence river between Montreal and Trois Rivières. She was one of at least nine children born to Isidore Champagne and Marie Louise Desrosiers.4

There was widespread poverty in Lanoraie, from poor harvests in a place where the soil had become depleted, and from a growing season so short it left no room for error. In the rural interior of Quebec there was little opportunity for other work or even extra income, except as a farm hand or woodsman. Some farmers tried their luck in Montreal as laborers, some decided to strike out in undeveloped land in more remote places, trapping themselves into a hard life of subsistence farming.5

A million chose the mills of New England.

When Elise was a girl, her family caught la fièvre des Etats and joined the exodus of a quarter of the population of Quebec who, over a period of half a century, left their homes for New England factories, mills, and lumber camps.

The biggest consumers of Québécois labor were mill towns along the Merrimack and Blackstone rivers, and much of it came from Lanaudière. Elise’s parents moved the family to Manville, Rhode Island, where Isidore found work as a laborer and the rest of the family worked in one of the many cotton mills in the Blackstone Valley.

They told each other they were leaving for some quick cash. More than half of them would never go home again.

They found themselves living in tenements in hastily built company towns invariably known as “Little Canada.” Like other new arrivals, the Champagnes moved as a family. There it was difficult to get by without the wages of the children. The youngest of the Champagnes went to school while in Manville, but in many places, boys and girls as young as ten worked long days in the mills alongside the adults.6

Strike breakers, the Americans said. They have too many children. They cling to their priests. They won’t speak English.

We don’t want them here.

In a 1881 report by the Massachusetts Bureau of the Statistics of Labor, its bureau chief, Col. Carroll D. Wright, described the French migrants as “a horde of industrial invaders.” These foreign invaders “do not come to us to swell with us as citizens, but … merely to sojourn here for a few years as aliens.” They threatened the American way of life because “they care nothing for our institutions, civil, political, or educational.”7

The Champagnes eventually went home to Quebec. Elise had already returned and married a man from Lanoraie, a farmer named Onésime Bonin. They had three children before Onésime died in 1890 at the age of 36. Elise, a widow at 35, went to live with her in-laws, where it seems she was put in charge of caring for her nieces and nephews.

Elise’s and Onésime’s little boy, Anselme, died at age four in 1884. Her girls, Rosalma and Albina, soon grew up and left for the mills of Rhode Island. Unlike the girls of Elise’s generation, they arrived alone.

Both girls married other Quebec-born French mill hands while living in the US. Seventeen-year-old Rosalma, living in the mill town of Johnston, Rhode Island, married Joseph St. Onge, a weaver, in 1895. They settled in nearby Sciutate, Rhode Island, another mill town. The following year, Albina, also seventeen, wed weaver Denis Deloge. Albina and Denis were married in a Baptist church in the Olneyville neighborhood of Providence.

That they did not marry in a Catholic church is telling. Did their families know?

Back in Quebec, Elise had at some point left her Bonin in-laws and gone to live with her parents and brother, now in Arthabaska. Her mother died in the fall of 1897, shortly before Elise left for Montreal to work at the Arcade Hotel.

When her older brother Olympus wrote to the Mayor, she had been missing for some months and would not have known that her father Isidore had also died that winter.

The Bonins and Champagnes clearly had vast familial networks with many relatives on the move looking for work, some of whom must have found their way to Montreal. They would have been enlisted to find Elise, who for whatever reason must not have wanted to be found. Olympus must have been frantic to resort to writing to the Mayor.

In his letter, Olympus mentioned that with the death of their father he now had Elise’s daughter on his hands. At first read this would suggest that he had custody of a minor child, but we know that Elise’s two daughters were adults.

Which daughter was the dependent of Olympus and why? It was almost certainly Albina who had come home.

Albina’s husband in Rhode Island, Denis Deloge, had been married twice before; first at age eighteen in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1886, and then again in New Hampshire in 1893, just three years before he wed Albina. After Albina he married again, and fathered a little boy named Leo who died in 1904 of “malnutrition and exhaustion.”

Multiple divorces for a French Canadian in these years seems improbable. Denis must have left a trail of grass widows and hungry children across New England.

Albina and Denis lived for a time in Plainfield, Connecticut, another mill town just over the Rhode Island state line, where they had a baby, a little boy named Louis, who died a few months later of meningitis. It seems Albina decided to come home after that. Albina later identified herself on censuses as “divorced.”

The 1901 census tells us that Elise eventually returned to her brother’s home in Arthabaska. But why she disappeared when she did, leaving Albina alone, remains a mystery.

A later census tells us Albina departed for the US in 1898, the year of her mother’s disappearance. Did Olympus tell her he could not support her any longer? Or did she wait for her mother to come home?

In 1908, at age fifty, Elise left Canada again, this time to live with Albina, who was back in Olneyville working as a mill spinner and living in under her maiden name, presumably free of Denis. Albina most likely worked for the Atlantic Mills, whose towers dominated the horizon of Olneyville. Atlantic Mills had worker housing along Manton Avenue, where the women lived.

Albina and Elise lived together in Providence until 1915, when Albina died at age thirty-seven from a botched illegal abortion. Whether this was hidden from, or assisted by, Elise we will never know.

Elise went to live with her other daughter, Rosalma, until her own death in 1923 from a stroke.

We have found Elise. But why did she disappear? Which way was the flow of care between Elise and her adult daughters. Or between Elise and her brother. Or between her parents and their children. The spinning mills consumed them all, turning the raw fiber of their lives into fragile thread that somehow bound them to each other.

All we know is this: Elise travelled on the tide of a million missing people.

Elise and Albina are buried together in St. Ann’s cemetery in Cranston, Rhode Island.

In honor of Con Maguire’s birthday tomorrow, February 24th, here is one from the archives.

1864

Emigrants from Omagh leave from Derry. The Derry ships bound for America follow the shoreline around the tip of Inishowen and then into the open sea. Families left behind by the emigrants light bonfires along the beach, which can be seen from the ships.

Ten-year-old Con Maguire and his brothers run from one side of the ship’s deck to the other. The starboard side is the black unknown. From the port side, they see lights.

No one has journeyed from Omagh to see them off, but Con believes one of the fires is for him. Like his father, John, Con moves through the world believing he matters.

Con watches the shore and asks John which light is his.

There are four Maguire brothers: Con, Hugh, a year younger and inseparable from Con, and then Andrew, the odd one out, two years younger than Hugh. Their little brother, John, just five years old, runs along behind and does not yet register that he doesn’t count. Hugh is content to be Con’s follower. Not Andrew.

Andrew isn’t Con’s brother by blood. Andrew was born to Frank Maguire and Rose McGolrick. There is no church record to prove whether Frank and Rose were married or not. If they were not married, someone stayed the hand of the priest who did not add the word bastard next to Andrew’s name in the registry, as was the custom then.

After Andrew’s birth, the names of Frank and Rose will never appear together again. It is possible that Rose died and the Maguires have taken in the motherless child. But a woman named Rose McGolrick will marry another man in Omagh years later. There are a few men named Frank Maguire in and around Omagh. He could be the child of any of them.

In the year of Andrew’s birth, Con’s parents had a baby girl they named Catherine, who did not live very long. Andrew may be less an orphan than a gift child, a boy the same age who could try to replace the little girl they lost. All we know for certain is that Andrew is now about seven, John and Catherine are taking him to Canada with them, and will consider him their child ever after.

1865

John Maguire opens a grocery and a tavern on a busy street in Griffintown. In the spring, the St. Lawrence River overflows its banks, flooding the low lying streets and destroying his shop. John makes fruitless demands that the city compensate him for his losses.

John cannot pay his gas bill. He assaults an employee of the New City Gas Company who comes to turn off the gas. John is fined $50, levied by duress, meaning bailiffs come to their home and take furniture, clothes, the sheets off their beds.

Con was six the first time he saw his father go bankrupt, back in Omagh. Now, scarcely more than a year in Montreal, John must start over again. He sublets a smaller shop in a less desirable street. He offers poorer quality produce to poorer customers because he’s been cut off from the best wholesalers. That shop also fails.

1867

John gets a job as a clerk for the Grand Trunk Railway. John trades out of the family’s flat when he can get his hands on goods to sell. These goods are even worse. John sets sums for Con and has him count inventory, soft pears on a blanket. He tells Con he must always watch for fingers on a shop scale and never quit until he wins.

Hugh sits quietly next to Con and takes in the lesson. But ten-year-old Andrew never listens to these sermonettes. He is off running in the street and brought home by the ear by some shopkeeper for stealing an apple off a pushcart. He is caught drinking liquor with some big boys and beaten by his father with a belt.

Andrew tells John that he is not his father.

1868

Con Maguire can run faster than anyone in Griffintown. He can outrun friends and enemies, even his father with his belt.

As a little boy in Ireland he played a game called hurling. It’s the fastest and scrappiest game there is. In Canada, there is a game called lacrosse, so named for the stick that the French think looks like a bishop’s crosier. Lacrosse looks easier than hurling. The stick has a net. You don’t have to balance or bounce the ball off the hurley.

Lacrosse is a game for savages, they say. Englishmen have created new rules so civilized gentlemen may play. Con learns that the Englishmen ban native men from their teams. No Irish on their teams, either.

When native men form their own teams to play the Englishmen’s version of their own game, the Englishmen will form a league and ban them from the league. The native men don’t stop playing. It is, after all, their Creator’s Game.

The parish priest finds a field for the Griffintown boys to play lacrosse. Father O’Dowd believes in sports as a diversion from other, less wholesome activities. Con doesn’t have time for whatever is going on in the street. Apprenticed to a printer, he is already a working man at fourteen. He works in a basement in winter and his first job is to thaw the frozen ink and run with it to the press while it is still warm. His fingers are black and white from ink and grease. The ink under his fingernails cannot be scrubbed away.

The lure of lacrosse is too great for Con not to join in, if only to remind the other boys that he can run faster than them, throw farther and straighter. He reminds Hugh of this fact every match. Andrew doesn’t care to play.

Griffintown boys are on the lacrosse field every free day they get. The Englishmen say they play like the savages.

Father O’Dowd convinces a group of Irish-born businessmen to sponsor a lacrosse club. The team finds a field at Priest's Farm. They call themselves the Shamrocks. They start defeating the Englishmen’s teams.

Fifteen-year-old Con joins the Shamrocks as the goalkeeper. The adults soon realize how fast he is. He is moved to center field.

1872

Con’s little brother John dies at the age of twelve. A month later, his father is dead of a pulmonary embolism at the age of forty-two.

Con, now eighteen, becomes the family’s main wage-earner. Hugh follows him into the printer’s trade. Con, sharp-eyed and literate, gets promoted to typesetter, leaving younger Hugh to run the flywheel and work the treadle of the platen jobber, from which pours sheet after sheet of Con’s composing.

Con proofs the backwards typeset as fluidly as he reads. Con is as proud of his work as if he himself had written the editorials and the eye-catching advertising copy. He consumes all printed matter: books, newspapers, illustrated weeklies, labels on packing crates.

Con loves the calm of the Saint Patrick’s Institute reading room. He devours poetry and Irish history. His head is filled with printed language. He writes poems in his head as he arranges tiny metal letters on his composing stick. The ink stains fade.

The two youngest Maguire children, Frank and James, born in Canada, scarcely remember their father. Con has become the man of the house who metes out discipline and passes on John’s wisdom to the little boys.

Andrew is not an apprentice at anything, at least not for long. Paying work runs through his hands like water.

1875

The Shamrocks’ Griffintown fans are not genteel spectators. They don’t follow the custom of clapping politely when the opposing team scores a goal. They holler when their team does. They are not gracious when the Shamrocks lose. It’s not just a game to them. Victory could level the playing field, if just for a Saturday afternoon.

1879

From the Montreal Gazette, January 3rd:

HOW SOME CELEBRATED NEW YEARS
Excessively Demonstrative

Twenty five celebrants of the festive occasion of New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day paid their respects to his Honor the Recorder. The following is the record of names and the parts they respectively took in the festivities and the gifts they received from the Recorder:

…Andrew Maguire, drunk. 15 days hard labor, and $10 or 2 months besides for assaulting the police.

In April Con gets married. The other Maguire siblings are still living at home. All are wage earners, even sixteen-year-old Mary Agnes, who is learning to be a seamstress, even twelve-year-old Frank, who is working as a messenger boy. All except Andrew.

In July the Shamrocks play Toronto for Championship of the World. The Protestant press claims the Shamrocks lack the “science” and team spirit to win. When they win anyway, the Gazette accuses the Shamrocks of rough play.

1880

Con is a proofreader and compositor at the True Witness and Catholic Chronicle. His boss, editor Martin Kirwan, newly arrived from Ireland, has become a lacrosse enthusiast. Kirwan writes editorials defending the Shamrocks and their feral fans against the calumnies of the Protestant press.

The Montreal newspaper employees get lacrosse fever. All summer, the compositors and printers from the Star, the Gazette, the True Witness and other papers challenge each other to matches. As a member of the Shamrocks, Con cannot play.

The Shamrocks play exhibition games against native teams. It’s the only way they can play against one another. Fans love the suspense. Against the men of Kahnawake, the Irish don’t look so unstoppable. That winter, the Shamrocks will travel to Kahnawake as guests at the wedding of the star of their greatest rival team.

Andrew is charged with loitering and fined $10, or one month. Catherine has yet to reach her boiling point with her son.

1884

The Shamrocks defeat the Toronto Lacrosse club with “as fine an exhibition of real lacrosse playing as has been seen on any field for years” the Gazette reports.

From the Gazette, January 25th:

RECORDER’S COURT
Andrew McGuire was charged by his mother with vagrancy, he refusing to work to support himself. He was fined $5 and costs, with the alternative of three months’ imprisonment.

In July Andrew is arrested for being drunk and assaulting a police officer.

In October, the Daily Witness reports that an elderly man was knocked down, beaten and robbed by three men In the vicinity of the Canal Basin. Andrew and two companions are arrested as the usual suspects. La Presse refers to them as the “terrors of Griffintown.” They are later released when the true culprit is apprehended.

Next year, Andrew will again be arrested for stealing several barrels of flour from a Montreal warehouse.

1886

Con retires from lacrosse. He will be remembered by his opponents as one of the best and cleanest players of the game. To capitalize on his sports fame he has opened up a cigar parlor called Maguire’s Goal. The shop provides work for Con’s little brother Frank.

Con moves out of Griffintown. His family lives in a spacious flat above the cigar shop, which is located on the elegant Victoria Square. He referees Shamrock matches on the weekends.

Con is now working for the Gazette, the Protestant paper that once maligned the Shamrocks. Hand compositors have disappeared from the Gazette newsroom, once silent as a chapel and now busy with clacking hot type all night long. Con works until dawn editing and proofing news stories with a dozen Linotype operators under his watch.

The Shamrocks try to disassociate themselves from Griffintown and their rowdy and disruptive fans by moving to grounds far outside the city and raising ticket prices. The game slowly loses its mass appeal.

1887

Con’s brother Hugh, his shadow, dies at thirty-one.

1890

Andrew disappears from newspaper police blotters. He marries Mary Ryan. The next year they will have a little girl named Agnes.

1892

Con quits the Gazette and moves his family to Rutland, Vermont. After Con and his wife bury two of their children in Vermont they decide to return to Montreal, where Con picks up his life where he left off, working at the Gazette and co-managing the Shamrocks.

1894

Andrew dies of pneumonia at thirty-seven. He leaves behind little Agnes, who is taken in by Con and family. Agnes lives with them until she marries, through the deaths of Con’s own daughter, mother, and wife.

Andrew has given the grieving Con a gift child.

The story of Con’s father John Maguire is told here:

I am greatly indebted to the following sources:

Pinto, Barbara S., "Ain't Misbehavin': The Montreal Shamrock Lacrosse Club Fans, 1868 to 1884” (MA thesis, University of Western Ontario, 1990).

Barlow, John Matthew, "The House of the Irish: Irishness, History, and Memory in Griffintown, Montreal, 1868-2009,” Ph.D. thesis, Concordia University.

It’s September 1953. Patsy Casey is fourteen and starting her third year of high school. She skipped fourth grade and has a birthday in October. The other girls in her class at St. Augustine’s already look like young women. At fourteen, Patsy has not yet “filled out.” No one in school calls her baby as they did back in grade school, but the scar, while faded, is still there.

Patsy has some good friends, but to the school’s junior sophisticates she is invisible. Patsy doesn’t hike up her tunic to show off her legs on the walk home after school. She doesn’t know any boys. She is also known as a “brain.” Everyone somehow knows she was skipped a grade all those years ago. Many of the girls have boyfriends, and some of those boyfriends have cars. Some of the boyfriends are old enough to drink. Her parents do not let her date. She is not even old enough to go to the movies.1 Most weekends, Patsy stays home.

Patsy is the eldest of four and therefore must swim upstream to get her parents to agree to things for the first time: going out to a dance, wearing makeup, staying out with her friends after supper.

She begs her parents to let her host a party. She invites the older girls in her class at school. They instruct her which boys to invite. On the night of the party other, older, uninvited boys turn up. The house is swarming with people, many of whom Patsy doesn’t know.

Her father, who enjoyed a misspent youth in St. Catherine Street poolhalls and New York speakeasies, stops the boys walking straight to the punchbowl. He confiscates their flasks. “Do you think I was born yesterday?”

The guests mock Patsy’s bathroom, where the old fashioned toilet has an overhead tank and a pull-chain flush. There are numerous attempts to turn out the lights for necking. Patsy’s parents flick them back on. Patsy hosts no more parties after that.

Of all my mother’s stories I heard growing up, memories of her first years of high school are those I remember best, not because she told them more often, but because they were intensely felt. Getting through those early teen years was crossing a desert. She was always too young and never fit in.

I wish I could say that hearing her stories about being fourteen when I myself was fourteen drew us closer together, but my mother was a teenager in the early 1950s. The world she described seemed impossibly innocent, as corny as the novelty songs from the period she sang to my brother and me and made our eyes roll. Mairsie Doats. The Hut-Hut Song. Hers was the last cohort before rock n’ roll. Instead, it was Mario Lanza. The Tennessee Waltz. And the boy vocal groups, spreading across the hit parade like so much human mayonnaise. They always came in fours: The Four Lads. The Four Aces. The Four Bells.

That world had few edges. Peter Pan collars and circle skirts. Brylcreem. Peachy-keen. It was only when she relived with me harsher memories of growing up—mean girls, cruel nuns, perverts on streetcars—I was in a familiar landscape. Those tales felt true and confirmed to me that growing up had always been frustrating, when it was not terrifying.

In the spring of 1953 a door opens and Patsy steps through it. In a morning school assembly it is announced that a girl from St. Augustine’s would be picked to represent the school on Eaton’s Junior Council.

Eaton’s was Canada’s premier department store, and its Junior Council was an after school program for high school girls to learn about fashion merchandising. Eaton’s had a parallel program for boys, called Eaton’s “Junior Executives.” 2

Teen councils for department stores was an early form of “cool hunting” in which buyers solicited feedback on clothes from a focus group of teens, who then were then invited to model the clothes in fashion shows and to represent the store in city wide events and social gatherings.

Patsy decides right away to apply. Imagine riding the street car downtown after school and walking into Montreal’s biggest department store, not as a customer, but a consultant. Patsy Casey, not even old enough to go to the movies, discussing fashions with Eaton’s apparel buyers and going to college parties. She would be working in public relations. Her picture would be in the paper.

Patsy knows there is competition for this spot. But the very things that make her less than popular are now to her advantage. The nuns want someone who will not go rogue and embarrass the school, and Patsy is a known goody-goody. Candidates have be well-rounded and well-spoken. Patsy braved her fear of public speaking and won a neighborhood speech competition. Only the most academically high achieving students are considered, and Patsy, who has nowhere to go most weekends, is a bit of a grind.

The application form asks her for address, clothing size, hobbies, and future goals. She has to list her favorite school subjects and her father’s occupation. She also needs to furnish her recent grades and letters of recommendation. The application is mildly worrying, since it’s clear Eaton’s is looking for a certain kind of girl.

The decision goes up on the notice board. Patsy is chosen! Thrilled, she reads through the materials for the new Junior Council members. And then her heart falls. Participants have to be 16. She won’t be 15 until October. She goes to Sister St. Imelda in tears. “I’m not old enough to do this.”

“Don’t worry dear,” says Sister St. Imelda. “If you don’t say anything about your age, we won’t. No one will be the wiser.”

The Junior Council is made up of students from all over the city. She meets upper crust Protestant girls from Trafalgar School. She meets Jewish girls from Baron Byng. The Junior Executives take part in many Council activities, so she meets boys from all over Montreal as well.

There are teens Patsy doesn’t meet. For instance, French ones.

More than half of Montreal was French-speaking, but students from French language high schools were not invited to take part in Eaton’s teen club. Much like old Hollywood movies in which the universe is made up only of white people, the Montreal of Eaton’s department store was entirely English-speaking.3 Selection for the Junior Council and Junior Executives was based on the target Eaton’s shopper, so the organizers sifted out anyone who wasn’t white, English-speaking, urban, and middle-class.

The year is a whirl of parties and fashion shows, many in Eaton’s glamorous Art Deco 9th floor dining room. There are makeup demonstrations, guest speakers, and ribbon-cuttings, all hosted by Eaton’s “young moderns” in their Eaton’s blazers. Patsy and her co-councilors model party dresses in the store, have their pictures taken, and even visit the children’s hospital to bring patients Christmas toys.

She becomes friends with the other girls, who call her Pat and have no idea she she isn’t sixteen like them.

Eaton’s was among the first retailers to target the teen market. In 1939 Eaton’s began inviting groups high school girls into its Toronto store on a weekly basis to give opinions of the merchandise. Eaton’s idea was not original. A number of American department stores also established youth “advisory” groups in the late 1930s. Neither was Eaton’s unique among the Canadian department stores. Simpson’s soon had its own “Collegiate Club” for teens. Eaton’s however had the most intense focus on developing retail knowledge of this market, and, as the biggest department store chain in Canada, had the greatest reach.

Eaton’s and Simpsons, like their American counterparts, recognized the emergence of a peer-focused adolescent culture that was urban or suburban, centered on high school, and, most importantly, produced teen shoppers who made their own purchasing decisions.4 When these focus groups began generating useful tips on teen preferences, Eaton’s expanded them to a year long program for both boys and girls. Students were nominated by their schools, which made the program seem more respectable, even educational. Making it selective also conferred prestige.

By the 1950s, Eaton’s had branded itself as the store for “Young Canada” promoting its “young point of view.” Clothes featured in the third floor “Teens About Town Shop” were advertised as “Junior Council approved.”

The word teen had been around for decades but teenager did not appear regularly in print until well into the 1950s, long after Patsy had hung up her Eaton’s blazer. The Young Canada Club was attempting to catch the first wave of youth culture that surged through marketing mid-century, in which adolescents were identified as a distinct subsociety with its own values, tastes, and customs.

While stores like Eaton’s claimed to be tapping into young tastes, the junior fashions of 1953 were anything but youthful. Girls wore calf length skirts and sweaters, or boxy skirt suits no different than those of adult women. The junior and misses pages of the Eaton’s catalogue of 1953 today are as strange as medieval paintings where children look like adults in miniature. Half a generation later, even before the mid-sixties “youthquake,” shops would be filled with a teen style clearly distinct from fashions for adults.

Eaton’s was one of many midcentury retailers just beginning to shape a distinct teen subculture, the very world my mother was so desperate to escape. She wanted to be older and yet she was a chosen guide to map the very wilderness she found so hard to navigate. Ironically, it was the same store busy harvesting her young fancies that was also showing her the way to be an adult, learning about the business world, moving through grown-up spaces.

I wonder whether she or Eaton’s ever saw the irony. A young girl looking for adulthood in adults looking for teen style. At the end of the year, Patsy was still too young for the movies and Eaton’s was still selling teenage girls matronly skirt suits.

When I was little I was fascinated by Eaton’s Junior Council. My mother made it sound glamorous and important. Even later, as a teenager who wouldn’t have been caught dead in a department store teen club, I still liked hearing stories about it. Meeting the Olympic skater Barbara Ann Scott. Being in a fashion show.

Many years passed. Then, while reading Margaret Atwood’s novel Cat’s Eye, I saw this:

“Hey, you look like a Simpsons Rep.” Simpsons reps were sucky kids who appear in high school year books wearing blazers with crests on the pockets, looking clean cut and advertising Simpsons.

I felt like I had just been slapped.

That passage told me Margaret Atwood had once been a teen sophisticate who clearly thought the department store clubs were lame. She couldn’t possibly have understood what Eaton’s Junior Council meant to fourteen-year-old Patsy crossing that adolescent desert, thirsting for the adult world, a thirst sharpened by never being part of the things of people her own age.

Teen years are like dog years. The difference between fourteen and sixteen or seventeen is an enormous gulf. No doubt there were older girls at St. Augustine’s who, like Margaret Atwood, were not impressed by an invitation to a department store after school. For Patsy, though, it meant everything.

She could imagine a grown-up life. And a place she belonged.

When I first met my husband, he said his grandfather was Greek. This surprised me, since the family I met were all Ashkenazi Jews. Not long after this, something— a conversation, a photograph, a drive past a familiar streetcorner— joggled the memory back into place. When he was a small boy, his mother befriended an older Greek man who hung around their apartment in the hopes of dating her. This was the man he remembered.

His grandfather was nothing but shadow. A chalk outline filled with the closest available body.

Chaim Gurman was born in 1912 in Ukraine or Lithuania, in May, or April, or June. He was vague about the essential facts. Easier to give us the slip.

His father, Isidore, left for America in the spring of 1913. Chaim and his mother stayed behind. They didn’t join Isidore in America until 1921, on the other side of war, pogroms, and famine. His mother arrived in New Jersey with Chaim and a baby sister, born a year after Isidore’s departure.

Chaim never shared a single story of his Ukrainian childhood. No one learned the story of Chaim’s mother in the years Isidore was gone, or of his sister, whose birth date was later slid improbably into the prior year. Chaim never uttered the name of his hometown. His own name was shed right away. Chaim became Hyman.

Isidore was a window washer, a trade he passed on to Hyman. Isidore was a pious man who taught Hyman the mitzvot. But Hyman didn’t want to be a window washer, or a Jew. Isidore beat Hyman and threw him out of the house.

Hyman went to live in Harlem. There were Jews in Harlem, but they didn’t know his father, didn’t care if he went to shul or not. And there were other people in Harlem, too—Black people, Italians. Pretty girls. On his own, he could live as he liked. He could drink, gamble, chase women, eat pork, and break the Sabbath. He could wash windows, or he could sing, write a hit song, cut a record, tell jokes, act in the movies. The future Hyman had no fixed outline.

Hyman met an older girl who was also living as she liked. Elsie’s parents came from Russia but Elsie had been to American high school and spoke English with no accent. By the time Elsie was seventeen she was a legal secretary earning more than both her parents combined. They couldn’t tell her what to do.

Elsie cut her hair, went out dancing, rode in cars, swam with boys. She stayed out as late as she wanted. If Elsie’s parents didn’t approve of her marrying an aspiring songwriter five years her junior, the memory left no trace. They married in 1934.

Hyman became Harry. Names shed like so many snakeskins.

Elsie and Harry moved to New Lots, Brooklyn. They had a baby girl named Phyllis then a boy named Wayne. Before America, children were named after departed loved ones. But no musty yiddische names for Elsie and Harry. American aliases only.

Harry tried on the costume of a working man. He opened his own window washing business, naming it after Wayne. But making Harry stick to any work was like harnessing a cat.

Harry needed a stage, or to be near one. There was no nightlife in New Lots, Brooklyn, so Harry moved the family to Manhattan. Not Harlem this time. They settled in Morningside Heights.

Harry blamed Elsie for all the children—six of them in a mouse-infested railroad flat on Amsterdam Avenue and Cathedral Parkway. Harry’s family didn’t visit them. The house wasn’t kosher, and it was dominated by a standing radio, giant as a jukebox, a monument to Isidore’s son’s life of candy floss. Nothing but bitul z’man.1

Harry came and went from the apartment like a cat. There were nightclubs, casinos, and racetracks. There were girls. Harry also came and went from the window washing business. No one got famous washing windows. He tried standup comedy, he put on shows. He bet on horses and lost. There were whispers of another woman, another child. He wrote a song, In Between Blues, and recorded a demo with Fats Greene. The song was never released. Elsie kicked him out.

In Manhattan Harry Gurman became Abby King. Sometimes Abbey King. Sometimes Harry Gurman again. Names like sliding doors, like the marriages, three of them, each under a different name. When you have the girl standing right there, impatient and lovestruck, it is easier to write down another name on a marriage license than wait for a divorce.

Harry Gurman married Edith in 1958. They moved to Bergen County, New Jersey, where he continued to live on his dreams. He wrote another song, a follow up to I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus called I Saw Mommy Singing Santa Claus (Again), a title far different from its original, cruder version. Then his singer was caught with an underage girl. The song was never released.

His favorite child, Jamie, came to live with him. Edith told Jamie that his father was nothing but a bum. The marriage lasted a year and a half.

Elsie returned to work as a legal secretary to pay bills. She had never said much and now said even less. Any remark ended with an uncertain chuckle. If asked about Abby she changed the subject.

Isidore grew old and moved to Monsey, Rockland County, where he was comforted by the sight of so many devout Jews dressed like the men of Isidore’s youth—the long black coats, and, on the Sabbath, extravagant fur shtreimels.

Abby came back to New York and married again. The bride was a Bronx divorcee named Muriel. Again, it didn’t last.

Elsie’s grandchildren went to visit her at work in the Empire State Building, switching elevators to go to the very top. They had heard that the Empire State Building had a secret floor, above the public observation deck, where there was a clean view of everything. Elsie didn’t know anything about the secret floor and grew angry when asked about it.

Jamie, the favorite, went to college, went to Paris. He was back in New York and an aspiring actor, driving a cab, when he was invited to do a ‘loop’ for a Times Square peep show. He was paid more for the loop than a week of driving the cab. He would soon become a star of pornographic films.2 Abby basked in his son’s fame. Jamie found him women.

Abby boasted that he once heckled Don Rickles at a nightclub in the Catskills. At his children’s holiday tables, when talk and eyes drifted away from him, he told Borscht Belt jokes. Doc, it hurts when I do this, swinging his arm over his head. Each year, at each telling, the gesture more exaggerated, more desperate, a lunatic wind up for a junk pitch. The doctor says, so don’t do that.

Abby invented a boardgame that would make his fortune. He carried around a thick sheet of oaktag drawn with the prototype of the board, a giant roulette wheel in the center of hopscotch squares. It was a riff on The Game of Life, but rigged so that the game would end with everyone broke and alone. Parker Brothers passed on it.

Elsie moved back to Brooklyn. She lived with her sister, brother-in-law, and other family in a multi-generational brownstone. She still worked as a secretary, and handed out twenty-dollar bills to grandchildren at the holidays.

Abby was living in a single room on West 86th Street. He had decorated it like a prison cell, with pictures of nude women from magazines, except that the heads of the models had been replaced with photos of ex-girlfriends.

He was hospitalized with depression, then went to a nursing home just two blocks from Cathedral Parkway. Jamie bought Abby prostitutes until the day he told his son not to bother. He died not long after. It was 1989 and he was seventy-seven.

The family went to collect his things at the hospital. They were given a small envelope with his remaining cash. Not enough for another pack of smokes. Just in time, cracked Elsie.

This week, my husband took out the envelope to show it to me and its thirty-seven- year-old seal broke open, scattering pennies everywhere. A look inside revealed that someone at St. Luke’s had pilfered the quarter.

His children did not want to bury the old man. All except for the soft-hearted Diane, who guilted everyone into attending a funeral from the Hebrew Free Burial.3

Forgiveness did not run in my husband’s family. It goes dry more often than we might think. I am reminded of a day in Montreal fifty years ago. My aunt was out taking the baby for a walk when she spotted her grandfather, her mother’s nemesis, coming toward her on the sidewalk. She had not seen him in over a decade, and didn’t know that he was still alive. She crossed the street.

If Chaim or Hyman or Harry or Abby had another family, they didn’t appear at his burial or the unveiling a year later.4 They are unfindable—what name would he have given them?

There is one more thing he left us. While at the hospital Abby had a page of what appear to be notes for a standup act. Ideas for jokes. The paper is yellow and crumbling, the handwriting tiny. Inscrutable as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

“I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended” - Joan Didion “Goodbye to All That”

In the work of collecting and preserving family stories, we shouldn’t forget our own. Here are three tales of Manhattan when I was young.

Realty

I arrived in New York in January 1989. Finding an affordable apartment then, as now, was bloodsport.

Newcomers couldn’t find a place through word of mouth and relied on the Village Voice. The Voice came out every Wednesday. Delivery trucks began their routes Tuesday night. The earliest truck stopped first at the Voice offices on Cooper Square and then made its first drop at a newstand on Astor Place. In front of the newstand was a bank of pay phones. Apartment seekers would wait on that corner for the truck, and pounce on the papers as they were dumped on the sidewalk. We ran to the payphones, flipped to apartment ads, and started dialing.

Cheap apartments were stalked and bagged so expertly it was essential to visit anything you liked immediately, references, three weeks of payroll stubs, and deposit check in hand. If you had to return with the money or paperwork, the place would be gone. It was therefore critical that the first apartments you selected to see were viable options. If you wasted your first visit on a dud, someone else got the jump on a good one.

I found a share for a decent price and called. The man who answered spoke slowly, as though confused. I didn’t expect a man to answer. The ad said it was a room in an apartment with two other girls. Maybe they asked a boyfriend or father to answer the phone and weed out weirdos. Maybe he had not remembered he’d volunteered to do this.

The man recovered himself and turned friendly. He proposed I come by the next afternoon. The address was off Seventh Avenue in Chelsea, a grim, low-rise building encased by fire escapes and made of that cheap brown brick that looked almost green.

The sun was going down as I arrived. He buzzed me in. I crossed the unlit courtyard and climbed the stairs. A man with the face of a basset hound opened the door. He invited me inside. “My daughter just left for college, so I thought I could rent out her room.”

The room was a storage area off the tiny kitchen. There was no evidence that anybody, much less a teenage girl, had ever lived in it. There were no other roommates. It would be me and this strange man.

I didn’t like that he stood in this narrow space between me and the front door. As I edged out of the room I saw a copy of that week’s Village Voice on the kitchen table. It lay open to the real estate page. The ad I had answered was circled in black felt tip marker.

Who circles their own classified ad?

Right away I knew. I had dialed the wrong number. There was no room, no ad. Just a lonely man who answered the phone.

I will let you know, I said, and backed out of the apartment.

I ran down the stairs and through the dark courtyard. I ran all the way to the mouth of the subway, all the while thinking that I was a dumb little girl who had no business living in New York.

I still wonder if anyone else misdialed.

Bande à part

Early one evening my first year in New York I walked past a revival movie theatre showing Stranger Than Paradise just as it was about to start. I bought a ticket and went inside.

Ten minutes in, two people entered bumping and stumbling in the dark, noisily removing coats as they sat down. They took seats directly behind me. They started whispering to each other. “Shhh,” I said.

They continued to whisper. They were speaking French. “Taisez-vous,” I hissed.

Elle parle français! One of them climbed over the back of the seat next to me and sat down. He said he did not know English and there were no subtitles. Could I please translate for him?

I caught him up on the plot and no more. I am nothing if not a failed people pleaser.

The movie ended. The lights came up. The pest turned out to be a cute boy about my age. He apologized for interrupting and introduced himself as Pascal. His friend Gauthier was also French. Gauthier had long curly hair and wore a striped antique boating blazer and a floppy bowtie.

Pascal was visiting Gauthier, who lived in New York and worked for Thierry Mugler. It was clear they were sick of each other’s company. Pascal invited me to join them for a drink. Gauthier’s girlfriend would meet us. Her name was Irma, she was Italian and worked at Dior.

It may have been Gauthier’s floppy tie, or simply that they were young like me, that convinced me they were harmless. I had never met fashion people or seen them up close.

We walked up Greenwich Street to the Peacock. Pascal asked for a piña colada. Gauthier rolled his eyes. “We don’t serve mixed drinks,” the waitress told him. She touched Gauthier’s shoulder. “Are you ‘Mr. G’? You have a phone call.”

Gauthier left us to take the call. I learned that Gauthier and Pascal had gone to school together. Pascal was someone from Gauthier’s past who was now in New York, sleeping on his sofa.

Gauthier returned frowning and said we should go. We wandered down Bleecker Street and stopped at Caffe Dante. When we sat down there was again a tap on the shoulder, “Mr. G?”

Gauthier stayed on the phone a long time. Pascal again asked for a piña colada “with a flexible straw,” and was again told there were no mixed drinks. Dejected, he drank a Coke.

We moved on to the Caffe Vivaldi. I offered to buy a round. The server asked for Mr. G. Who keeps calling, I asked Pascal. It’s Irma, he said. Whenever she wants to talk to Gauthier she phones all over the Village.

Pascal said Gauthier thought he was a rube. Look at me, do I look like a rube to you? No, I said, but maybe it’s the piña coladas—they’re a little ringard. But they have them in Florida, said Pascal. They come with little umbrellas.

He suggested we go somewhere just the two of us, and asked me where I lived. But I was determined to meet the mysterious Irma.

At eleven o’clock Irma appeared. She had black hair in a pixie cut with shorn bangs, like a doll a child had taken scissors to. She did not sit down. She said a few intense things to Gauthier, then vanished into the night.

The night of unbounded possibility and adventure which had formed in my mind hours earlier had not shown up. I said I must be going. They walked with me up Sixth Avenue. Gauthier stopped into a bank to get some cash for a taxi. As Pascal and I waited in the empty bank vestibule we heard a shriek. Gauthier was standing in front of a cash dispenser spewing banknotes. The screen blinked stupidly as a flume of twenty dollar bills poured out of the machine.

We stood back and watched as Gauthier slowly stuffed the cash in his pockets, spellbound. “I can go home,” he said to himself in English.

At last the ATM dispensing door shut with a small mechanical sigh. Pascal said the bank could trace the missing money. They would know who was here and when. Gauthier said let’s go.

We continued up Sixth Avenue. Gauthier, overheated from all the paper insulating him under his clothes, took off his coat. His striped blazer bulged.

He and Pascal tried to hail a cab. I left them standing on the corner of Sixth Avenue and 11th Street, Gauthier looking like a Christmas sock. It wasn’t that night when I stopped letting myself get borne along by events just to see what would happen, but probably not long after.

A few months later, curious, I called the Thierry Mugler showroom in Midtown and asked to speak to Gauthier. There is no one here by that name, they said.

Landmarks

Years ago I rode horseback in Central Park in the morning before work. I was often joined by an older man named Richard who was a fixture in the park. He had white hair and spoke with the devoiced consonants of old New York.

Richard rode the bridle path every day for decades. He remembered a time when the park was ringed with livery stables. By the time I was living in New York there was only one.

One day, as we trotted the path that encircled the Reservoir, Richard pointed out his favorite tree by the pump house. “I remember that tree from when I was a boy. I saw someone had carved their initials in it. You can still see them.”

He first noticed the tree when he started riding in the park. It was 1947 and he was ten.

When he was a little boy, Richard’s family went on holiday to a dude ranch. On the last day of their visit Richard locked himself in the closet. He didn’t want to leave the horses. His parents let him ride in the park after that.

I moved away from the city but sometimes returned to ride in the park on Sundays. One day in 2005 or so, Richard reported that the parks dept had cut down “his” tree.

The last Manhattan stable closed in 2007. Richard passed away in 2018.

There are no more horses in Central Park.

I spend a lot of time paddling around in the family history/genealogy pool here on Substack, and often restack and share many of my favorite writers and essays that are part of this community. Today I wanted to share some other accounts that may not be known to my readers or fellow family history Substackers. These writers are so good I stop what I am doing to read their work whenever it’s posted.

So, in no particular order, here is my Substack holiday gift guide.

In Pigments, Colors and Other Stories writes the history of color. Along the way we not only learn about pigment, but also art, architecture, textiles, design, history, anthropology, and economics. Our relationship to color is something profoundly human. Each one of her essays about the origins and uses of color is a story about our collective humanity.

Pigments, Colors & Other Stories

Blue: the most elusive pigment

In 1969 an anthropologist and a professor of linguistics together published a book named Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. The authors, Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, affirmed that the vocabulary for colors followed a pattern in every language…

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a year ago · 95 likes · 21 comments · María Castro Jiménez

is a Swede who writes in English. His Bagatelles are a kind of flashfiction that startle and delight. Each one a beguiling mini-novel in the tradition of Borges and Calvino.

Here are some of his very shortest short stories:

The Bagatelles

28 tiny bagatelles from the edges of the unconscious

What do you think about when you go to bed? For those of us with busy minds, a strategy is sometimes required to make the thoughts stop spinning. You can breathe through body parts (good) or try sorting the players of football team IFK Norrköping into their different positions (bad…

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a year ago · 35 likes · 16 comments · Jörgen Löwenfeldt

I love taking walks in London with . I recommend her Substack The Ambient City if you love London, or love cities, or just love walking and looking. Her writing transforms the city landscape into something mysterious and magical. And it inspires me to look at New York streets more closely to find the places of enchantment in my own city.

This was one of my favorite walks, and a part of London I have never seen:

The Ambient City

Dereliction, Disappearing: A Walk Through Silvertown

Barrier Park, with a view towards Pontoon Dock DLR and Millennium Mills beyond…

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a year ago · 63 likes · 19 comments · Caroline Howard

Versailles Century is the ultimate one-place study. chronicles the extraordinary community that was Versailles and goes deep into the minds of its people through diary entries of eye-witnesses. The text is accompanied by little-seen portraits as well as David’s own photographs of the stunningly beautiful architecture of the Grand Siècle.

Here is a sample entry, a letter from Louis XV to his grandson, the Duke of Parma: 14 November 1768

Like many people, I have developed a late-life interest in birds. (Noticing backyard birds seems to coincide with getting glasses and waking up too early.) ’s Bird History has taught me so much social history as well as natural history of North America along the way.

Bird History

Dining with Robins

If anyone has the claim to being America’s best-loved bird, it’s the robin. These cheerful and universally recognized creatures love hanging out in the front lawn, pulling up earthworms and gorging themselves on berries. They’re joyfully welcomed as the first sign of spring, and their cheerful chirps brighten moods wherever they’re found, although they …

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2 years ago · 62 likes · 5 comments · Robert Francis

Background Noise Comic by and John Hazard is a relative newcomer to Substack. When I was a kid I used to love reading the funnies in the daily newspaper. I never get to do that anymore, but for a number of years now I have been enjoying this comic strip on Instagram about a quirky couple in Brooklyn navigating midlife and kids, staying creative while paying the rent, taming their backyard jungle and their sometimes “not-so-sweet feelings about each other.” The comics are little slices of life that are recognizable, funny, and moving.

Creative Love Stack, A Background Noise Comic Newsletter

🌺 “Bloom Where You Grow” 🍁

Lisa Burdige and John Hazard co-create the diary webcomic Background Noise . Creative Love Stack is inspired by how we work. It offers a behind-the-scenes peek at our craft, themes, and creative collaboration…

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10 months ago · 3 likes · 5 comments · Background Noise Comic

The Silent Sod is my favorite kind of history writing. Two sisters, and , explore their individual obsessions—ocean liners, US Presidents, cemeteries, centenarian true crime stories—and reflect on the meaning of the intersection of public and personal history.

This was a fascinating acccount of an Underground Railroad conductor who was also a Presidential valet.

The Silent Sod

In the arms of George DeBaptiste

Last week, Char and I wrote about the false claims of abolitionism that were lobbed against William Henry Harrison during his 1840 presidential campaign. In trying to get to the bottom of whether Harrison had any ties to abolitionists, I ran across the…

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a year ago · 4 likes · 8 comments · Sarah Zureick-Brown

Nothing to Declare is captivating travel writing. I am less interested in actual travel nowadays, but I am still curious. reminds us that the most rewarding experiences of travel comes not from documenting ourselves, or tracing the well-trod paths, but allowing the small unexpected moments and places transform our ways of seeing.

Here is one of my favorite essays about the transformative power of travel and what travel tells us about ourselves:

Nothing to Declare

You Can Never Return to the Same Place

“Let’s never come here again, because it would never be as much fun…

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a year ago · 59 likes · 29 comments · Scott Monaco

The Florida War is a gripping account of a conflict I knew nothing about. shares the story of the Florida Seminole War. Because I don’t know the history, I don’t know what will happen next, so it has me on the edge of my seat.

For this Substack, begin at the beginning:

The Florida War

The Florida War

In 1492, Columbus threw a lasso that cinched together the peoples of the Atlantic continents: Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans. In Florida, some 340 years later, the action was still unfolding like nowhere else. The year was 1835. A…

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2 years ago · 20 likes · 5 comments · John Lowndes

Book Stories-Histoires de livres is a journey through a life of reading that is part memoir, part literary salon, written by a bilingual Montrealer who publishes in both French and English. It’s the most Montreal thing you will read on Substack. reminds me of the uniqueness that is my hometown and its cultural heritage, as well as the many extraordinary people who live there.

This is a wonderful appreciation and personal memory of the works of Marguerite Duras, with some additional links.

Book Stories-Histoires de livres

Lire Duras et pleurer

(English translation follows…

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a year ago · 1 like · Lin.e Richer

In Paper Trails, shares recipes from Hadassah ladies in mid-century Canada. This is a wonderful time capsule of Jewish home cooking from women who were first or second generation immigrants from Europe.

I have yet to try Mrs. Levine’s Honey Cake, but it’s on my list. (Confession: I usually spike my high holiday honey cakes with a shot or two of Irish whiskey.)

Paper Trails with Kaye Prince-Hollenberg

Class in Cookery: 18 September 1964

Okay, I am definitely going to make this Honey Cake recipe! The ginger ale seems like an interesting addition, although I’m wary of beating the batter in the mixer for twenty-five minutes - wouldn’t this make the cake dense and tough? The exact opposite of the fluffiness that is supposedly achieved when adding ginger ale (or any other soda…

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a year ago · 1 like · 1 comment · Kaye Prince-Hollenberg

What are your favorite lesser known Substacks?

Also, what other baked goods are improved with a shot of whiskey?

February in Montreal was a long month. Winter had settled in months before and there were still months to go before spring. Everyone trudged through gritty snow, hunched against the wind in layers of clothing that were sooty and greasy because for months it had been too cold to wash them, or oneself.

Michael Maloney was an eighteen-year-old apprentice metal worker when he was arrested in Griffintown on February 1st, 1860, for attacking a street girl named Mary Ann Turner, giving her “three licks with a poker.” The poker was a tool he used for work. The girl said he had kicked her, too.1

Why?

Maybe: it was a just bit of fun, terrorizing and battering a vagabond. Perhaps some other boys put him up to it. Witnesses came to court to speak up for Michael, but these witnesses may have been friends, neighbors, or shop-mates who thought that boys sometimes got too rowdy by half, and a girl like Mary Ann was after all just rubbish of the town.

Or: Mary Ann was infamous in the neighborhood for her taunts and insults. For Michael, February 1st 1860 was another day of toothaches and frostbite and getting up in the frozen dark. A street girl wanted his attention and a few coins. Any attention, even negative attention, would do. Michael had no parents. He was five in Black ‘47. She may have asked him where his people were, even joked about them dead in the trenches under Wellington Basin.

Or: Michael Maloney grew up on thrashings—as a child, from adults, and then as an apprentice, from his master. He may have been a boy brimming with rage from no known place. In Griffintown people routinely brawled in the street over petty theft and minor displays of disrespect. This was normal life for Michael and Mary Ann, born into a brutal world of pillories and public whippings.

It could have been the first time she accosted him, or the twentieth.

But: When Michael Maloney beat Mary Ann Turner with a poker and kicked her, she was thirteen years old and heavily pregnant.

I keep reminding myself that historians are not supposed to judge the minds and acts of historical people.

We don’t know what would have happened after a fourth lick of the poker.

Michael Maloney was fined 25 shillings, plus court costs. He spent a week in custody but served no prison time. He became an iron moulder, married his landlord’s daughter, and became a father.2 We don’t know what kind of adult man he was, or whether his wife or daughter were also targets of his rage.

Michael Maloney beat Mary Ann Turner five years before he died suddenly on the day after Christmas, and two years before she embarked on a career as Montreal’s most notorious public alcoholic.

Michael received no obituary in the newspaper. Mary Ann went on to appear in the police blotter forty seven times.

We don’t know anything else about Michael Maloney, but there is more to know about Mary Ann Turner, and her story deserves to be told.

The only possible legal record of Mary Ann is that of a girl of the same name and age who appears in the 1861 census of Lower Canada as the daughter of John Turner, a hotel-later a tavern-keeper. John’s business was located at first at the port, on Commissioners’ Street (now rue de la Commune) and then on Vitre Street (now rue Viger), in a mixed commercial neighborhood with bars and brothels and a night market, which all contributed to a lively sex trade.3

It was likely at the tavern where Mary Ann was first introduced to alcohol and, possibly, prostitution. John Turner, along with the rest of Mary’s family, disappear from the record after that.

We don’t know how Mary Ann found herself on the street, but as an unwed mother, work was not an option for Mary Ann. Unskilled, impoverished girls like Mary could earn small sums as crossing sweepers, street peddlers, or rag-pickers. While many of these girls could have supported themselves or their families, middle class social welfare advocates believed unsupervised young women interacting with strangers was indecent. Charles Loring Brace, founder of New York’s Children’s Aid Society, wrote: “A girl street-rover is to my mind the most painful figure in all the unfortunate crowd of a large city.” 4

The city had outlawed begging in 1839.5 Montreal had a number of social reform organizations, but such places turned away women of loose morals. Mary Ann was also a drinker, and these shelters did not admit women who drank. They perhaps took her child, if her baby lived. Shelters for young girls, such as the orphan asylum run by the Sisters of the Good Shepherd (Bon Pasteur) did not keep girls indefinitely, even if they had nowhere to go. The Star reported the case of Caroline Prottier, an orphan discharged by the sisters at sixteen, who was then found on the street. She asked to return to the institution, but was instead given a month in jail for vagrancy.6

Barred from any form of benevolence, Mary Ann was on her own.

Sex work was most likely her only avenue for survival. Drinking and prostitution had a natural synergy, since Mary Ann would have found clients in taverns, where they would have also bought her alcohol. Drinking may well have been the way she coped with the sex work.

Mary Ann was rarely, if ever, arrested for prostitution, however. She was almost always arrested for being drunk in public, sometimes for being drunk and “loitering,” or drunk and breaking a window, or drunk and insulting someone. Only a few rare times was she not charged with being drunk and instead arrested for vagrancy.7

What constituted a vagrant? The majority of women arrested for vagrancy were prostitutes on the stroll, while the rest were guilty of petty larceny, using obscene language, making threats or attacking people, or being drunk or insane, even of cross-dressing, or a combination of any of the above.8 We can’t therefore know what other offenses Mary Ann may have committed when charged with vagrancy, only that they were generally accompanied by alcohol.

Mary Ann got into fights with both men and women. I believe this was from her innate talent for taking an adversary down a peg, her compelling need to have the last word.

Her rap sheet shows utter contempt for her betters. In August 1861 she was arrested and charged with insulting Col. Charles-Emanuel Belle, a Crown timber agent. She was arrested in 1864 for being drunk and assaulting another man named J.W. Webb. One might wonder how exactly these men crossed paths with a “girl street rover” like Mary Ann.

It was in her dealings with authority where we hear Mary Ann in all her saltiness. For women like Mary Ann, court records are the only place they can speak to us and share their assessment of the criminal justice system.

In April 1871, Mary Ann was brought into Montreal’s police court with Jacques Close, both arrested for drinking and public obscenity. L’Evenement reported that Close was “drunk as a Pole and swearing like a Cossack,” but that while Mary Ann Turner was not as drunk as Close, she “outdistanced him in swearing.”9

In February 1875 Mary Ann was brought in front of the Recorder10 and sentenced to two weeks. She saucily asked him for one month, “for my health.” He offered her two for her insolence. She thanked him and wished to see His Honor in “a warm place” upon her release. She got three. 11

“If she wants to award herself more, she can have as many as she likes,” His Honor said to himself, reported the Franc-parleur.12 Bailiffs hauled Mary Ann away from the dock as she continued to tell him what she thought of the verdict.

Historians have documented how prostitutes banded together for protection,13 but there is nothing to indicate Mary Ann had a friend or any companion with her on the streets. It’s not clear from police blotters whether Mary Ann was arrested together with other women or they were simply arrested the same night. The French press referred to them collectively as “street nymphs.”

When she was arrested Mary Ann was taken to the Common Gaol, or Pied-du-Courant, nicknamed “Hotel Payette,” after Louis Payette, Montreal’s Chief Gaoler. She was then brought to police court for sentencing. There are no reports of her ever being acquitted, although sometimes she was given the option to pay a fine which she could not afford.

Sentences for vagrancy and prostitution had been as much as six months earlier in the century, but as jails became overwhelmed, sentences dropped to two months or less. Mary Ann rarely served more than two months.14 The newspaper police blotters show a pattern of women getting longer sentences and bigger fines than men charged with similar offenses.

In Montreal, even in this period, prisons could be a safe place for the unhoused in the coldest winter months, and police apprehended women they believed in danger of freezing to death.15 Women turned to the prison when they needed refuge, food, and medical help for anything from infectious diseases to childbirth. But it doesn’t appear that Mary Ann was particularly strategic in her thinking, trying to get herself arrested as the cold weather set in. She was arrested all times of the year.

In the decades before Mary Ann was on the streets, women charged with petty crimes were incarcerated in the House of Correction with men. Inmates were put to work picking oakum, a mindless but painful task of pulling apart old ropes with one’s fingernails, separating them into loose fibers, which were used as caulking for ships.

By 1876, toward the end of Mary Ann’s time on the streets, overcrowding and unsanitary conditions of the Montreal correctional system led to the building of a new prison only for women on Fullum Street, run by the Bon Pasteur order, who already ran the orphan asylum and a nearby reform school for girls.

Fewer than 100 women were initially incarcerated, overseen by two dozen sisters. Inmates were segregated by religion, and French inmates separated from English speakers. Prisoners were put to work sewing. 16

If the Fullum Street Female Prison intended to rehabilitate women, Mary Ann’s short stints there probably had little effect. It was also inhospitable as any Victorian workhouse, with such poor conditions and overcrowding so severe that there was at least one riot, causing the sisters to flee and bring in police to “cope with the viragos” and restore order. 17

Mary Ann cycled in and out of jail for a dozen years. An account from Le Pays in 1871 gives us a picture of Mary Ann at one of her court appearances:

She was one of the court’s most frequent visitors. Let’s try, in a few lines, to paint a portrait of this unfortunate girl; it’s an easy thing, she has one of those faces that you can’t forget. Mary Ann Turner is twenty years old, tall, pale as a ghost. There is nothing more sinister than her stare. She is so thin that her dress, or rather rags, hang around her body like a flag wrapped around a pole. Nothing, except perhaps one of the tales of Hoffmann, can convey the likeness of such an incredible character.

There is nothing alive in the parchment-like mask that covers her face, except for two greenish-grey eyes, surrounded by red rings, which stare with cynical immobility. In the courtroom, His Honor sentences her to two months. She makes a gesture to speak, but is dragged out of the box by two police officers.18

In July 1878, Mary Ann fell into tracks of the Grand Trunk Railroad and was hit by a train about to cross Wellington Bridge to Pointe St. Charles. She did not die, but was taken to Montreal General Hospital where several fingers were amputated. She died the next day. The inquest concluded that she did not die from her injuries but due to kidney failure from her chronic alcoholism. She was thirty-one years old.

For eighteen years after Michael Maloney beat Mary Ann Turner with a poker, his family went about their business on the streets of Griffintown, walking by a tall, drunken, red-eyed wraith spitting barbs. I wonder if they felt her hot stare. I wonder if they ever thought about the fourth lick of that poker.

You never got an apology from anyone while you were living, Mary Ann, but I am sorry. I wish I could go back in time to buy you a meal and find you a warm place to stay. But I think you would just spit in my eye, call me a Lady Bountiful, and look for a window to break.

In memory of Mary Ann Turner, 1847-1878.

My family carries on in death the way they lived — in cramped quarters in the middle of a large city. Generations of Maguires have been laid to rest in Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, a Catholic cemetery that straddles Montreal’s mountain. Its neighborhood, Côte-des-Neiges, was a country village when a graveyard was established in 1854 by the Fabrique de la Paroisse de Notre-Dame-de-Montreal, the legal corporation that serves the city diocese. The cemetery is now prime real estate in the center of the city.

The tiny Maguire gravesite currently houses the remains of at least 25 people. There are a few reasons why the plot is as crammed as a New York subway car. First, it was never a single family plot. Like most Montreal housing, it’s multi-family property.

The plot may have been first purchased by an unrelated family, the Flannerys, a gang of rambunctious, hard-drinking Irish cobblers who, between appearances in police blotters, adopted my orphaned great-great grandfather, Michael Maloney. Michael’s daughter Mary married my great-grandfather Con Maguire in 1879. Con appears to have taken over management of the plot at some point before the turn of the last century. As the person paying for its upkeep he may well have put a stop to any free-loading Flannerys. Or else they moved on.

Con and Mary also had a big Irish family, and many of their children and spouses are buried with them. Mary’s parents and Con’s mother and siblings are also there. Then there is at least one entirely unrelated name in the plot: 11-month-old John Robert Mulgrue, the child of young woman named Bridget Parker who had been either a boarder or a servant for a time with the Maguires before her marriage to another newspaper printer, John Mulgrue. The Mulgrues must not have had a plot of their own.

There are two notable absences in this crowd: Con’s father, John, and his little brother, John Jr., who both died in Montreal in late summer 1872. Their graves have vanished.

For a while I had thought that, given father and son died so close in time, perhaps they were both victims of one of Montreal’s many epidemics and disposed of in a mass grave to control contagion. I then discovered that John Sr. died of a pulmonary embolism. I next wondered whether John Sr’s death had left his family so destitute that perhaps he and his young son had been dumped in a potter’s field, but the family had had the fifty cents for a newspaper obituary for their father, so I can only conclude that John Jr. and Sr. are buried somewhere else in Côte-des-Neiges. It’s just that no one knows where.

Côte-des-Neiges is the third largest cemetery in North America and the final resting place of over a million people. More than a few have no doubt been lost somewhere in its 300+ acres of parkland.

That the Fabrique, which manages the Côte-des-Neiges cemetery, would lose a person does not shock me. A strike in 2023 left the whole park abandoned for the better part of a year, its graves left to decay in the tall grass and blown over trees. The cemetery was already home to a large population of groundhogs, who have built elaborate tunnels through the park and routinely dig up human bones. Heavy rainstorms have washed teeth and vertebrae into Avenue Côte-des-Neiges where they are found by neighborhood residents.

There is an urban legend that in the 1980s French nationalist vandals were defacing and turning over tombstones with non-French names, but I not have found anything to confirm this. In any event, the Fabrique does not take responsibility for vandalism 1 nor, it would seem, for the groundhogs.

At the time of the deaths of John Sr. and Jr., the family may have opted for a less permanent marker, such as a wooden or iron cross, which has since disappeared. Their gravestone may have broken or fallen over. The cemetery left such broken stones where they fell, since their maintenance has long been the responsibility of the families of the deceased.2 Con may not have had the money to do this, especially in later years when the shared Flannery plot was also demanding upkeep.

The disappearance of John Sr.’s gravesite may have also reflected a certain lack of interest on Con’s part in maintaining it, revealing something about his feelings toward his father. We don’t know anything about their relationship, but Con was apparently tough on his own sons, and it is significant that he did not follow Irish custom by naming any of them John.

(You can read more about the irascible John Maguire here.)

The Fabrique made the unilateral decision in 1994 to convert all existing concessions in the Côte-des-Neiges cemetery previously sold “in perpetuity” to 99-year leases. This action was met with some outcry and at least one lawsuit.3 A 99-year lease is in fact a generous solution, given that in the 19th century the Fabrique sold graves for a period of 30 years, after which the plot could be resold.4 The Fabrique also sold more ‘ordinary’ graves for five-year lease terms.5 The Fabrique also reserved the right to repossess plots for unpaid fees, removing the markers and reselling them. Any of these scenarios may explain the fate of John Sr. and John Jr.

By the 1980s, long after my family had moved away from Montreal, the tombstone on the surviving Maguire plot was in sorry shape, either through disrepair or the above-mentioned vandalism. My cousin Michael paid to have it replaced with a simple, elegant stone commemorating his father and the rest of the family. I am grateful he did this.

John Sr. and John Jr.’s missing graves invite reflection on who gets to be remembered and why. In her study of Montreal’s cemeteries, Meredith Watkins coined the term erosion to describe the slow forgetting of people, a phenomenon different from outright erasure. Erosion is a slower process of removal. And, as Watkins notes, the erosion process is above all “an economic sifting of people that determines the conditions under which their remains are buried and their monuments maintained or recycled.”6

All people in common graves, graves without permanent markers, and graves left unkept have had their right to commemoration denied.

The summer of 1847 brought a disaster of Biblical proportions to Montreal. An estimated 75,000 sick and starving Irish descended on a city of barely 50,000 people. The Famine refugees brought “ship fever,” or typhus, which quickly spread. The sick arrivals were kept in unused “fever sheds,” quarantine barracks below Wellington Bridge that had been built for the cholera epidemic of 1832.

Over the course of that unbearably hot summer thousands of migrants poured into the city and soon overwhelmed these shelters. As they died, shallow graves were hastily dug around the sheds as the dead and the dying lay heaped together on planks in the heat and the stench.

The city ordered the construction of additional sheds on the other side of the bridge. This site, too, was soon overwhelmed.

The fever swept through the city, killing thousands, including the Mayor of Montreal, its Catholic Bishop, and at least seven of the Grey Nuns who tended the sick in the sheds. The city moved the fever sheds further away to what is today Pointe St. Charles.

It is estimated that as many as 6,000 people died. They were buried near the fever sheds. It is astonishing to learn that after that disaster, the sheds remained standing and vacant on the Pointe St. Charles site, and were repurposed just seven years later as housing for iron-workers building the Victoria Bridge.

Most of the crew building the bridge were Irish, and more than a few of them were Famine migrants themselves. When human remains were accidentally unearthed in the bridgeworks, the men insisted that that a monument be established for the ship fever dead buried there. A massive 30-ton boulder was pulled up from the riverbed and placed on the site of the mass grave.

The “Black Rock” still stands today. It is now in the middle of a traffic island on a highway approach to the bridge. In 1892, the Ancient Order of Hibernians organized a march to the site to commemorate the victims of “Black 47.” These processions have continued to this day.7

The Black Rock is not, however, the only site of ship fever graves.

In the 1870s, the Lachine Canal was upgraded to connect global ship traffic to the rail hub at Montreal. Projects included laying new railway track to the canal, and the enlargement of the existing Wellington Basin, as well as the construction of a new, wider basin for bigger ships at Peel Basin. These were the sites of the first fever sheds.

Workers were surprised to discover old coffins and skeletons in the excavation of the Wellington Basin site in the summer of 1875. The following summer, more remains were unearthed. Dug up coffins were crushed and the bodies inside them broken by dredgers and steam shovels.

Still more grisly discoveries were made into the fall and through the following summer. The city authorities took no responsibility for the remains and gave no direction for what to do with them, leaving construction companies to figure out where and how to dispose of the bodies. They were taken to the railway dumping ground.

The anti-Catholic and nativist Montreal Witness enjoyed relaying some of the more gruesome details, such as bodies discovered still dressed in their clothes, including a felt hat “in excellent condition,” and “stockings in a fair state of preservation” on legs.8 The paper reported the unearthing of silver shillings stamped with the likeness of George III, and a man was found buried with his faithful dog.9

The Witness also lingered needlessly on the destruction of coffins and dismembering of bodies by the digging crews, noting that barrels had been brought to the site to collect the skulls and bones, and the coffins burned.10 Then it was reported that workers at the site had been taking coffin pieces home for firewood. This raised alarm when the story appeared in the Montreal Star, given that people were convinced the burial sites were still infected with typhus, particularly when news of outbreaks followed.11

More remains were found scattered along the newly laid track of the Grand Trunk Railroad, which had been built on the excavated earth. “A large number of human bones were seen alongside children playing near the tracks, “inviting malignant disease to make its appearance.”12

Unearthed fever victims soon numbered in the hundreds. The ever-helpful Witness recommended that a trench be dug nearby to dispose of the bodies, with disinfectant poured over them.13

The St. Patrick’s Society, a charitable organization, arranged for any bodies that could be recovered to be taken away and reburied in a common grave in Catholic ground at the Côte-des-Neiges cemetery.

The Star observed: “This society is entitled to lasting gratitude for the stand it has taken to redeem the city from its stigma that was resting on it for the neglect of decency observed in regard to the remains of the poor people who were victims of the ship fever.” 14

The Côte-des-Neiges site is unmarked.

Remains of the ship fever dead continue to be disturbed and discovered. Unlike the Maguires, the fever dead did not have the privilege of that gentle erosion.

Their fate is more than an Irish story, or a Montreal story. The history of every city is written over the bones of the dead. It’s been done to numberless people whose resting places go unacknowledged, only to be bulldozed and forgotten.

In 1911, the Grand Trunk Railway obtained the right to the Irish burial ground next to the Victoria Bridge. The Black Rock remained in place, but the surrounding land was repurposed.

In 1942, road crew digging a tunnel near the foot of the Victoria Bridge hit a dozen coffins in a “trenchlike grave.”

In 2019, archaeologists found bone fragments of 12 to 15 people not far from the Black Rock while excavating a site for the REM light-rail system.

Last year a federal Crown corporation unveiled a plan to develop a new mixed-use neighborhood in the Wellington Basin area, complete with affordable housing, a recreation area including a public beach, and an “innovation cluster.”

The beach and park will need excavation of thousands of cubic meters of dirt.

A group of townspeople in Omagh, County Tyrone, took out a strange advertisement in the Derry Journal of October 4th, 1854.

My great-great grandfather, John Maguire, and his father-in-law, my third great-grandfather, Andrew McKinney, were among Omagh’s shopkeepers offering a £100 reward leading to the arrest of saboteurs who had derailed a train between Derry and Enniskillen.

£100 was not a small sum for anyone in Omagh in 1854.

The roots of this story go back to the night of July 12, 1691, near the village of Aughrim, Galway, where an army of Catholics loyal to King James broke ranks and fled before the forces of Protestant William of Orange. The disaster of “the Twelfth” marked the start of Protestant rule in Ireland. The Orange Order was later formed to defend the Protestant ascendancy against the Catholic majority.

Early in the 19th century, Irish Catholics founded the Ribbon Society, a clandestine organization determined to stop Protestant landlords from evicting tenants, often through threats or violent retaliation. Ribbonmen, named for the green ribbon worn in their hats or buttonholes, supported the political separation of Ireland from Great Britain. They also used violence to resist paying tithes to the Protestant Church of Ireland. The group instigated deadly riots against the Orange Order whenever Orangemen paraded to commemorate the Twelfth. ¹

As the movement for Catholic Emancipation grew, violence between Ribbonism and Orangeism increased. In 1850, British Parliament tried to quell the unrest by passing the Party Processions Act, which prohibited sectarian public displays, notably parades with music, flags, banners, firearms, and sectarian colors, anywhere in Ireland.

In August 1854 an extension of a railway line connecting Derry to Enniskillen opened to great fanfare. The inaugural train journey carried Derry dignitaries. The excursion became something of a Protestant public event, with spectators along the rail line cheering the travelers by waving orange handkerchiefs. While the Party Processions Act prohibited parading with orange banners and flags, this could hardly be called a parade.

Any spontaneous celebration of Orange pride would have provoked Catholic onlookers, but the Orange delight in the railway line rankled. The train connected two majority Protestant towns, islands in an impoverished Catholic countryside. The sight of the new-fangled iron horse ferrying a bunch of well-off Protestants from one town to another, rolling by Catholic townlands and blowing soot on them in its wake, must have inspired the deadly act of sabotage that followed.

The novelty and excitement had not yet worn off by the next trip the following week. A reciprocal train journey of Enniskilleners set out to Derry on September 15th. Several notables numbered among the passengers, including William Willoughby Cole, 3rd Earl of Enniskillen. The train was also filled with Protestant benevolent organizations and workmen’s clubs eager to take part in the historic event.

The train left Enniskillen early and arrived at Derry at ten o'clock, welcomed by a cheering crowd and a round of artillery from the ramparts. The group sat down to lunch, then toured the town before returning to the station to catch the train back to Enniskillen in the late afternoon.

At Trillick, about 15 miles south of Omagh, the train suddenly lurched with a grinding shriek. The carriages were pitched sideways, throwing passengers out of their seats. The train shuddered to a halt. Passengers were shocked and bruised, but largely unharmed.

But on the footplate the two stokers working near the open firebox were flung against the tender as the train jumped off its tracks. Both men were pulled from the wreck alive, but their burns and internal injuries proved fatal in the days that followed.

As soon as the train was brought up, the driver discovered three large stones on the tracks. Two of the smaller stones were coping stones that had been most likely used to build the nearby railway bridge.

Witnesses concluded that the stones had been deliberately placed there to derail the train. Authorities immediately arrested seven railway workers, six navvies and one mason, men who had done the backbreaking work of clearing the ground and laying the track. All of them were Catholics.

The mason was drunk on the day of the derailment, and had gone looking for a green flag. A witness claimed he had said of the train passengers “there were not two or three beggars in the carriages he could not kick.” Two of the navies were quoted as saying there “would be no harm in giving the excursionists an upset before they got home.”

Unionist newspapers immediately claimed it was an extremist Catholic plot. The presence of the anti-Catholic Lord Enniskillen on the train was enough to substantiate the theory that it was a plot by Catholic railway workers to assassinate him. The nationalist press claimed it was an accident.

Papers debated whether the railway trip was an official Orange excursion or just happened to be a train filled with Protestants. Omagh magistrates posted a £500 reward for information leading to the conviction of the criminals. As the investigation ground slowly on, the sectarian press supplied any number of new, compelling narratives:

It was an accident. The rail line was new and untried. The train carriages were too heavy.

The experimental choice of cast iron sleepers was a mistake. The railway company itself placed the stones after the fact to avoid liability.

There were six, not three, stones.

There were no stones at all.

It was a Ribbonist plot.

It was a Popish plot.

It was an Orange plot to frame Catholics.

The perpetrators fled on an emigrant ship that sank off the coast of Newfoundland.²

In the weeks that followed, the townspeople of Omagh posted an advertisement in the Derry Journal, offering a £100 reward leading to the arrest of the saboteurs. John Maguire pledged £20, the approximate value of his home, which he did not own.

Determined to prove the derailment was not a Catholic plot, his fellow shopkeepers and their parish priest, Father O'Kane, all staked similar sums. So much money to commit to set the record straight.

Similar newspaper advertisements from other people in other towns appeared throughout the autumn, offering as much as £500 or £1000 for any information leading to the capture of the perpetrators, but given that alleged sabotage happened near the only majority Catholic town in the region there must have been added pressure on the Catholics of Omagh to speak out. They condemned the miscreants who had laid the stones, but went on to denounce the “intolerant and unprincipled section of the public press” of the “uncharitable and libelous imputations.”

There must have been tense conversations around dinner tables and at the pub. If the story of a Catholic plot were false, how could it be stopped? And if it were true, and the men in custody convicted, what would be the consequences? Would there be reprisals, and more violence? They would not be able to live in peace as long as this threat was alive in the minds of their Protestant neighbors.

And how truly frightening this must have been for the Protestant minority in Omagh, who were being convinced daily of the possibility of more sabotage and violence.

We will never know whether the derailment was an accident, or sabotage. And if it were sabotage, by whom, or for what purpose.

In the end, we are left to think about the navvies imprisoned for ten months before a grand jury finally determined there was not enough evidence to convict them.

Contemporary accounts of the Omagh Gaol describe a dark, fetid place of Victorian nightmares, filled with sewage, where convicts lived on oatmeal and broke rocks, or walked on the treadmill, a pointless punishment in which convicts were forced to “grind the wind.” These men soon left Tyrone just like their guilty phantom counterparts. Given the notoriety surrounding this event, it would be hard to imagine they would have been able to find work again. And we can only imagine the sufferings of their families, trying to survive without their breadwinners for almost a year. It was not surprising they all emigrated, disappearing into the Irish diaspora after they were released.

The editors of the Ulsterman probably put it best: “But what account is to be rendered them for the treatment they have undergone? They are poor men, with humble families depending on them. For months, on a false suspicion they have been torn away from their families and immured in a prison among outlaws and felons…what restitution will be made to them for the suffering they have endured? …what a reproach is this to the miserable fanatics who raised such a howl about Popish conspiracy, and planted these stones in the leading towns of the Province, as memorials of sectarian discord?”³

The miserable fanatics of our own time should reflect on what stones they are planting.

A full account of the Trillick derailment may be found in these excellent articles, where I obtained the facts of this story:

Fitzgerald, Desmond. “The Trillick Derailment 1854” Clogher Record, Vol. 15, No. 1 (1994), pp. 31-47.

Farrell, Sean. “The Trillick Railway Outrage: The Politics of Atrocity in Post-Famine Ulster.” Catholics and Violence in the Nineteenth-Century Global World. ed. Eveline G. Bouwers. Routledge, 2023.

I am awaiting with great anticipation Sean Farrell’s forthcoming book on the Trillick Railway Outrage.

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My husband’s grandfather, Chaim Gurman, was born in Norinsk, Ukraine, in 1913. No one has ever heard of this town. It is famous for nothing. No celebrities have come from Norinsk, unless you count a few notable Chabad-Lubavitch rabbis.

At the time of Chaim’s birth, there were about 300 Jews in Norinsk. They were tradespeople and shopkeepers. All the grocery stores and hardware stores were Jewish-owned. The remaining Jewish residents were in the trades.1

There are no Jews in Norinsk today. Only a few hundred people now live in this town. The streets are not even paved, just packed dirt. While it was never a big place, it seems to be undergoing a slow dissolve. I can’t help think that this is what happens to places that rob, terrorize, and murder a third of their inhabitants, forcing them to flee, which is essentially the story of Norinsk in the first half of the twentieth century.

Soon after Chaim was born, his father Isidore left for America, leaving his young family behind in Ukraine. Chaim, his mother, and sister did not join Isidore in New Jersey until 1921. Shortly before their departure, the nationalist Ukrainian People’s Army led a pogrom in Norinsk that killed 13 Jews and destroyed all their businesses.2 The town had no shops after that.

In 1941, as the Wehrmacht entered Norinsk, most of its Jewish population fled east. Only a handful of families returned after the war, and were then subject to terror and arson. Eventually these few survivors left for Israel.

The last Jewish resident of Norinsk left in the 1980s. The cemetery is untended. Like so many Jewish cemeteries in these towns, there is no one left to tend it. The gravestones are in the process of being reclaimed by the natural world.3

The town does not even live on in family memory. My husband knows nothing about his grandfather’s Ukrainian childhood. His grandfather never mentioned the name of his hometown, or shared anything about his early life. Chaim, later Harry, was like other Jewish immigrants of his generation who did not care to reminisce and just got on with the business of being American.

The story of this town is no different than thousands of other little towns in Russia and Eastern Europe.

But there is something else to know about Norinsk.

In the 1920s and 1930s Ukrainian art historian Pavlo Zholtovsky travelled across Ukraine to visit and photograph hundreds of wooden churches and synagogues before Soviet authorities destroyed them.4

It’s hard to imagine the conditions under which he travelled to document this sacred architecture. During the Russian Civil War, some places in Ukraine had changed hands more than a dozen times. Villages were looted, and food taken by whatever army was passing through. Drought and Soviet grain “requisitions” created widespread hunger. Collectivization at the end of the decade was followed by more grain requisitions, creating one of the deadliest famines in human history.

Some decades earlier, ethnographer Fedir Vovk had also set out to document the cultural heritage of Ukraine’s ethnic minorities. Both Zholtovsky and Vovk visited Norinsk and photographed its shul, and it is to them we owe the treasure of these surviving photographs of its wall paintings.

The interior dome of the building is decorated with murals of mythical beasts with human features that almost dance in a floating landscape of trees and garlands. These animals each have a symbolic meaning in religious teachings.

The lion, eagle, leopard, and gazelle all appear in the Pirkei Avot, a collection of teachings and maxims in the Mishnah,5 and serve as analogies to encourage us to cultivate specific character traits to better serve God and live a good life. The leopard is bold, representing the courage to stand up for one's beliefs. The eagle’s swiftness embodies flying away from sin and towards good deeds. The gazelle’s swiftness represents the importance of translating good intentions into immediate positive action. The strength of the lion can overcome evil inclination and fulfill God's will.6

One wall of the Norinsk synagogue has lions and a double-headed eagle. Another has a leopard, but in place of the gazelle we have a unicorn, a mythical animal common to both Christian and Jewish iconography. The unicorn here symbolizes strength and grace, its single horn representing intention in prayer, like the donning of the phylactery.7

The animals perch on gigantic chalices, which look like kiddush cups, goblets used for blessing wine during Shabbat and holidays. The blessing over wine symbolizes gratitude and the sanctity of the occasion, and the wine itself the celebration of the covenant between God and the Jewish people.

The giant cups each have what appear to be a tree growing out of them, which we can assume is the Tree of Life, a symbol of eternal life and the connection between God and humanity. The Tree of Life also has a mystical meaning. It is the central metaphor of the Kabbalah, the tradition of Jewish mysticism in which the Tree of Life is a map of the connecting pathways of divine emanations.

The distortions of scale between the animals, cups, and trees create a sense of play and whimsy. The abundance of flowering plants and the star patterns on the top of the dome give the viewer the feeling of looking up into a heavenly garden. The dome must have been such a comforting, inviting place to rest one’s gaze during services in an unheated wooden shul in the middle of a long Ukrainian winter.

I wonder what congregants made of the eyes that lined the corners of the ceiling. Did they feel it was surveillance by God’s all-seeing eye, or the watchful eye of divine protection?

The third (and my favorite) of the three wall paintings is that of an elephant. Elephants do not figure in rabbinic teachings or in the Bible, but their presence alongside Torah texts in medieval manuscripts indicate they were an enduring symbol of the Torah and divine wisdom.8 This elephant has human eyes and ears. Its feet are human feet in peasant clogs.

The artist includes a disembodied human hand at the end of the elephant’s trunk, which appears to be lighting candles on a tree transforming into a menorah. To whom does this disembodied hand belong? Is it the invisible hand of God, or the unseen hand of the painter?

The human features on all of these animals, and their human expressions, may be the artist's attempt to circumvent the Second Commandment of Moses, "Thou shalt not make thyself a graven image," while still seeking to connect the sacred to human experience.9

The decor of Norinsk’s shul has compositional elements common to the wall paintings of many wooden synagogues in this period. Figures were framed within architected spaces or natural landscapes but at the same time appear to be free-floating in the flat expanse of the heavens, accompanied by text and signs of virtues or prophecies they serve to illustrate. The architecture and plant life depicted on the walls evoke an imagined Holy Land filtered through the real Ukrainian landscape surrounding the town.10

The artists who created the wall paintings in these wooden synagogues did not belong to professional guilds (to which Jews would have been denied access), they were independent craftspeople and painters who were members of the community.11 The folk art of Eastern European Jewry was later raised to high art in the works of Marc Chagall and other modern artists. The celestial visions of Chagall’s flying animals and people, and the dreamlike non-Euclidean spaces they inhabit, are clearly inspired by the wall paintings in the wooden synagogues of his childhood.

It’s not known when the Norinsk synagogue was built. There had been Jews in Norinsk in the seventeenth century, but the more recent settlement and, likely the shul, dated from the eighteenth century, which aligns with the time much of the wall art in wooden synagogues was created.

We also don’t know when the Norinsk synagogue was destroyed. It may have been the decision of the Soviet authorities, eager to requisition its lumber, as part of its anti-religion campaign of the 1920s. It may have been done by the Wehrmacht in 1941.

The synagogue of Norinsk may not figure among the greatest artistic achievements of Jewish art or architecture, but its painted walls are captivating. So much of what we know about the world of Eastern European Jewish life has been overshadowed by its destruction, and so little remains of the culture of regular people. The whimsically drawn animals roaming through enchanted gardens let us into the world of their dreams and sacred imaginations.

My husband inherited nothing from Norinsk. But his first sight of the place where his great-grandfather and great-great grandfather worshipped, seeing the synagogue walls they saw when they davened week after week, was meeting something unknown yet familiar.

In that brief uncanny glimpse of the painted shul of Norinsk, his family were for a moment part of the world of the living, its walls allowing us a look inside their heavenly kingdoms.