Adelaide Hunter and her Far-Flung Relatives

As promised, here is the fourth of our “Adventures in Research,” previously published on the now-defunct CWRC project blog.

Adelaide Hunter Hoodless and Amelia Hunter Tennant

by Karyn Huenemann

Adelaide Hoodless, portrait hung at the Adelaide Hunter Hoodless Homestead

This is a bit of a shaggy dog story, so I hope you will bear with me; the way it weaves in and out of past and present peoples’ lives brings me back to one of my favourite epigraphs, E. M. Forster’s “Only connect…”

This year [the original post was published on 20 November 2012] marks the 200^th anniversary of the War of 1812, a moment in history that has always interested me greatly. Notable is that many of the battles between 1812 and 1814 took place in Brant County, Ontario, a location that has similarly always interested me greatly. At a Children’s Literature conference down in North Carolina in 2007, I met fellow academic Dr. Lisa Wood, now a close friend, who lives in Brantford and teaches at Wilfrid Laurier University. Putting these details together, it is not surprising that last September I pulled my history-loving daughter from school and travelled across to Brantford ostensibly to see a historical reenactment of the Battle of Malcolm’s Mill, the last battle of the war fought on Canadian soil.

My daughter was very patient with my concomitant design of visiting the homes and haunts of the myriad of, as she calls them, “dead women writers” who hailed from the Brantford area. My interest in Brantford began over 20 years ago when I discovered Sara Jeannette Duncan, but the more I learned about early Canadian women writers, the more fascinated I became with the seeming coincidence that so many Canadian “female first” achievers came from Brant County: not only Sara Jeannette Duncan, but also E. Pauline Johnson, Emily and Augusta Stowe, June Callwood, and Adelaide Hoodless. There are others, I know; I have not compiled a comprehensive list, although I would love to.

The evening after we arrived in Brantford, Lisa (whose historical period is the 18^th century) called in her early Canadian Literature expert and friend, Dr. Kate Carter, whose name many of you may know, as she worked on the Orlando Project. Over tea—or was it wine?—we drew up our game plan. During the discussion, Lisa casually mentioned: “oh, yes, Adelaide Hoodless: she’s a relative of mine…” and my spidey senses began to tingle…

Adelaide Sophia Hunter (1857-1910) was born at what is now the Adelaide Hunter Hoodless Homestead near St. George, Brant County, national headquarters for the Federated Women’s Institutes of Canada, the first branch of which Hoodless was instrumental in founding. Her father died shortly after her birth, and her mother struggled to keep the homestead running, while still managing to educate her children. Adelaide moved in with her older sister, Lizzie, while attending “Ladies’ College,” where she met John Hoodless, who became her husband. Their fourth child, John (1888-1889), died in infancy, apparently from tainted milk. Adelaide Hoodless took it upon herself to campaign for better attention to sanitation in the delivery of milk in urban settings; from there, her career as a domestic science educator and an activist for women’s education took off. In addition to a number of articles and government publications, she published Public School Domestic Science in 1898, “a compilation of recent scientific findings derived from the application of chemistry to the understanding of food values, preservation, and preparation” (DCB), aimed at prospective teachers.

Adelaide and John Hoodless

Lisa’s great-great-grandmother, it turns out, had been adopted by Adelaide Hoodless’s sister Amelia. Lisa had tried to discover more, but the records were sketchy and inconclusive. Even the Dictionary of Canadian Biography notes that Adelaide was the youngest of 12 children, a list (found in family records on ancestry.ca) that does not include an Amelia. When we visited the Adelaide Hunter Hoodless Homestead, the director remembered Lisa from their shared attempts at discovering more about the elusive Amelia, whom even the historians at this National Historical Site were not 100% sure was not apocryphal. Intrigued, and loving a mystery, as well as helping others, and of course playing on ancestry.ca, I promised to try to track down a real, documented connection between Adelaide Hoodless, the seemingly non-existent Amelia, and Lisa’s great-great-grandmother, Mary MacKay.

Late into the night, Lisa and I poured over ancestry.ca. We telephoned her mother to get all the details she could remember about who married whom in Mary MacKay’s more immediate circle, including the name of the adopting family (verified by the historian at the Adelaide Hoodless Homestead): Tennant. Eventually, we found what we were looking for: a Mary MacKay listed on the 1881 Census of Canada as living with James and Amelia Tennant and their 5 children, in Toronto. From there, we traced Mary MacKay’s line to her immigration to the United States, and virtually met her descendants searching back up their family tree into Canada. Mary married an American man named Solon Washington Barnes, and we even have photographs of her husband and son, as well as records of all of her other children. Significantly for my friend Lisa, Mary MacKay bore Gertrude Barnes in 1897; who bore Gertrude Buckle in 1916; who in turn bore Mary Kerpan in 1937; and Mary Kerpan is my friend Lisa’s mother.

Solon Barnes, Junior

But we had travelled a long way from Adelaide Hoodless, which is of course where my interest began and still lay. The shaggy dog has travelled all the way from a small homestead near St. George, Ontario, in the 1850s to Michigan, USA, and back to Brantford, Ontario, so close to where it all began. In tracing this web of relations, we discovered that—despite the Dictionary of Canadian Biography entry—Adelaide Sophia Hunter Hoodless was born on 27 February 1857, youngest of possibly 13 children* of David Hunter and Jane Hamilton of St. George, Brant County, Ontario. It feels satisfying to have solved a mystery that others have wondered about for years; I love ancestry.ca.

(*Two boys appear in family records, both born in 1853: Joseph (1863-1913) and George. We can find no record of George on ancestry.ca, so he either never existed or is a twin who didn’t survive until the 1861 census.)

 

“The Flight of Birds,” by Elizabeth Church

Church, Elizabeth. “The Flight of Birds.” Canadian Magazine 73 (1930): 3+. —Illustrated by E.J. Dinsmore

“My Forest Retreat,” by Joyce Boyle

Boyle, Joyce. “My Forest Retreat.” Creative Young Canada: Collection of Verse, Drawings and Musical Compositions by Young Canadians from Seven to Twenty Years of Age. Ed. Aletta E. Marty. Foreward “Agnes Delamoure” (Nancy Durham). Toronto: Dent, 1928. 92.

Harvest, by Lyn Cook

Earlier, I posted a digital edition of Lyn Cook’s Fragment, kindly sent to us by her son, Christopher Waddell. Here is the second of her three chapbooks, Harvest, likely published in 1944 when it was originally signed to the author’s mother: “To Mother, from Evelyn, Christmas 1944.” This copy was subsequently re-gifted to “Judy, from the poet who became her aunt, Lyn Cook, June 25, 1946.” Our copies of Fragment and Soliloquy, too, are signed to her niece Judy Misener at the same time, Soliloquy being initially signed to the author’s husband, Robb (1911-1988) for Christmas 1945.

As an aside, I’ve always wondered why people have a problem with re-gifting. If I had a copy of a chapbook by an author that had previously been signed for the author’s parent, I would treasure it more for that. As I suspect Judy did.

“Notes on the Indians of British Columbia,” by Alice Bodington, and “The Drummer’s Story”

In July 2010, my dear friend Giovanni sent me a copy of the July 3rd edition of the New Westminster Record: the front-page article featured a full-page, full-colour colour photo of him singing at the New West Canada Day celebration.

But why would you care, you ask? What mattered to our project is the smaller article on page A11: Archie and Dale Miller’s Our Past column, with a mention of a local author, Alice Bodington (1840-1897), “wife of a doctor at the asylum in New Westminster [who] was very prominent in her own rights as an author of scientific works.” This caused me, not surprisingly, to hunt her out.

She lived in Canada for only the last 10 years of her life, and appears to have been quite a strong character. She now has a Wikipedia page of her own, so I will not waste space repeating her biography here. Her Wikipedia page posts links to some articles she wrote, but at the time, all I found was a short story (on a now-defunct webpage) and an article she wrote in 1893 for The Field Club, a London “Magazine of General Natural History.”

Usually I post authors’ works without much critical analysis, trusting that readers will consider these works in context, forgiving the sometimes lower level of artistic merit as well as the occasional dated or parochial attitude. This time, though, I just can’t be that objective.

While the facts underlying “Notes on the Indians of British Columbia” correspond with what we know to have been more-or-less true about the day-to-day lifestyle of the Coast Salish nation, the language Alice Bodington uses reflects the worst of European bias against those perceived as socially and culturally inferior. The first few lines of the article exemplify the tone throughout.

I would like to think that Canadian society has gone beyond such thoughtless and damaging condescension, but am reminded daily that such a belief is either naïveté or hubris, or perhaps both. Bodington’s neo-Lamarckist ideals (look it up: fascinating and disturbing twist on Darwinism and eugenics) are appalling, and a shudder of horror runs through me when I think of her husband, who likely shared those ideals, in charge of anyone at Woodlands the “Provincial Hospital for the Insane” that opened in New Westminster in 1878 and closed its infamous doors in 1996.

So for a bit of local history, by all means look her up and add her name and works to a list of historical elements for some of us to be ashamed of.

In closing, I will share with you the story I found. It is more a report of someone else’s ghost story, and speaks to Bodington’s involvement with paranormal “research”—I use the term lightly. Interest in the paranormal was in vogue at the time, even more than eugenics and with far less historically damaging an effect.

Here. then, is “The Drummers’ Story,” printed in the Syracuse Herald (7 February 1892) and downloaded from http://www.bellaterreno.com, which is now a gardening URL.

 

Enid McGregor

In October 1920, Enid McGregor (b. 1889), the youngest sister of author Gertrude MacGregor Moffat (1884-1923), wrote a description of Wallingford Hall, the women’s residence at McMaster University, which had opened the previous month. Enid, who graduated from McMasters with a BA in 1912, was Librarian and a Reader in English there for many years, and had been part of the creation of Wallingford Hall; she is almost certainly one of the women in this photograph.

 

 

“The Old Red Shirt,” by Rebecca Gibbs

In continuing my investigations into the life of Rebecca Gibbs, one of Canada’s first Black poets, I have run across a little volume, Sawney’s Letters and Cariboo Rhymes (Toronto: W.S. Johnson & Co., 1895), that Early Canadiana Online (ECO) has digitized. Although the collection is “by James Anderson,” it includes the works of other poets as well; the final poem in the collection is “The Old Red Shirt,” by Rebecca Gibbs.

ECO also posts an earlier version (possibly 1869), in which the author of “The Old Red Shirt” is identified merely as “Rebecca.” The poem (in fact work by any other authors) is not included in the earliest version that ECO has posted, Sawney’s Letters or Cariboo Rhymes from 1864 to 1868. The title of this collection suggests that James Anderson may have published other collections of Sawney’s Letters, in other years. Also of note is that this edition appears to be printed much later than 1868: the paper it is printed on is embossed with “Victoria, BC ………… 191…” in the same way that official forms leave a space for the final digit of the year (thus allowing the same forms to be used for a full decade). Curiouser and curiouser.

In terms of Rebecca Gibbs’s biography, though, the text adds very little to our knowledge. I’m still hunting. Meanwhile, I will share with you this poem.

Beatrice Caroline Rowley (“R.H. Grenville”), 1917-2017

I did not post this last September, for personal reasons. Bea Rowley—R.H. Grenville—died on the 4th of September, 2017, in Victoria, BC. I received the news from her step-son, Charles, and daughter, Cathy, both of whom have been very helpful on our project. I have visited both Cathy in Toronto and Charles here in the Lower Mainland, and feel connected to their family through our work together. My sorrow was deepened in that Bea’s poetry spoke to me in a way that most of our poets’ works do not. So last year, I felt I could not write a encomium that appropriately expressed the complex combination of professional interest and personal appreciation that I have for Bea, her poetry, and her family. By October, it seemed too late, so here, on the first anniversary of her death, is my inadequate acknowledgement of Bea’s passing, and of our gratitude to her and her family.

* * * *

One of the interesting aspects of our project is that, because our dates of inclusion end at 1950, most of our authors are no longer with us. It is very special, then, to be able to speak to one of them on the telephone, as I have done with Beatrice Rowley back in the summer of 2011. At that time, she was rather flabbergasted that anyone would still be interested in her poetry. I like to think that over the past few years—as indeed emails with her step-son Charles and daughter Cathy have suggested—online interest in her poetry has helped her to understand the enduring legacy good poetry such as hers leaves.

“They say I’m a celebrity!” she grinningly told Cathy, who was with her on her 100th birthday in July. This was in response to letters from “the big shots,” as Cathy calls them, who wrote to congratulate her on reaching her centenary: the Queen, the Prime Minister, the Governor-General, the Lieutenant-Governor… As well as letters from these eminent people, Cathy read her mother poems from The Fountain in the Square, Bea’s only published book of poetry. It is not only in reaching 100 that Bea will be remembered, but for her contribution to Canadian literature, now made increasingly accessible

“I do not fear the dark, for what is night?
Only the shell that holds the pearl of light. (“Night Piece,” by RH Grenville)

Her work retains all those lovely qualities of genuine poetry that the moderns persist in rejecting: I mean poetry thought, clarity, imagery that we recognize as authentic, music, meaning, poignance, and a certain heart-breaking fathoming of the wonder and mystery of human life.” Archibald Rutledge, Foreword to Fountain in the Square