1 Household, 8 Inhabitants, 4 Surnames

One household, eight inhabitants, four surnames…That’s one surname for every two inhabitants, or “inmates” as they were called in the 1861 Canadian census,¹ and not surprisingly, not atypically, all eight were related…

Here is the household of James Traynor/Treanor in the 1861 census of Kitley township, Co. Leeds, Ontario, Canada:²

The “UC” in the above, btw, stands for “Upper Canada” (for Place of Birth); and the “RC” (for Religion) for “Roman Catholic.” And the inhabitants/inmates listed above are as follows:

• James Traynor, son of Peter Traynor and Catherine McGinnis/Maginnis
• Mary [Murphy] [Donovan] Traynor, daughter of James Murphy and Catherine Hardin, widow of Lawrence Donovan, and wife of James Traynor
• Catherine [Traynor] McCarthy, daughter of James Traynor and Mary Murphy, and wife of Eugene McCarthy
• Bridget Traynor, daughter of James Traynor and Mary Murphy (later married John Carroll)
• Ellen [Traynor] Carey, daughter of James Traynor and Mary Murphy, and wife of John Carey
• Mary Traynor, daughter of James Traynor and Mary Murphy
• James Traynor, son of James Traynor and Mary Murphy (later married Catherine Jordan)
• Mary Donovan, aka “Little Mary,” daughter of Patrick Donovan and Margaret McGinnis, and granddaughter of Mary [Murphy] [Donovan] Traynor and of Lawrence Donovan (later married Daniel Fowler, whose brother John Fowler married Ellen McCarthy, daughter of the above-named Eugene McCarthy and his second wife Honora McDonald/McDonnell)

 Why were the recently-married Catherine and Ellen (tagged as “married during the year” in the 1861 Canadian census) found in the household of their father James Traynor and his wife/their mother Mary (Donovan, Traynor) Murphy; and where were their new husbands, Eugene McCarthy and John Carey? This I do not know. What, if any, was the relationship between, on the one hand, Margaret McGinnis, wife of Patrick Donovan and mother of “Little Mary” Donovan; and, on the other hand, Catherine McGinnis, wife of Peter Traynor and mother of the James Traynor who was “Little Mary” Donovan’s step-grandfather? This I also do not know (and indeed, there may be no relationship whatsoever, but the common surname does make me wonder…).

What I do know is that nineteenth-century family formation could be enormously complicated. “Blended families” are nothing new; and “boomerang children” are no recent innovation either. The expectation of one surname per family/household may well be a blip on the screen: an early- to mid-twentieth-century anomaly that not only no longer captures the complexity of the early-twenty-first-century family, but that also tends to obscure the (second marriage to the first cousin once removed of one’s first spouse, say) intricacies of nineteenth-century household organization, too.

In terms of 19th-century census returns,  you should always be on the lookout for widows and orphans; and for remarried spouses with step-children/step-grandchildren. If your peeps are Ottawa Valley Irish, there’s a decent chance these folks will all turn out to be related, in any case; but the relationships may involve a few steps more than the census will reveal (in which case: once again, to the parish registers!).