Tag Archive for Sloan

Canadian Records, Census Substitutes, Directories, Employment/Occupation, Oral History

Occupation: Married Woman (Canada Voters Lists, 1935-1980)

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During the 1930s Alex and Annie operated a small grocery shop in their home on Armstrong St. In the depths of the depression my father, who was a railroader, got very little work and we were often short of cash. At those times our credit was good and we could always get the essentials at the Morans. There were lots of card games and visits to and fro. Uncle Alex was also a fiddle player and he and Aunt Em Delaney played for dancing and entertainment.

— Emmett Patrick Sloan, Memories of the Morans (2007)

Ancestry.ca has an extremely useful database of voters lists: “Canada, Voters Lists, 1935-1980.” These lists can be used as a census substitute of sorts, although of course they only include adult citizens (age 21 and over until 1970, at which point the voting age was lowered to 18). They can help to discover and/or verify addresses, and they may also provide some useful information on occupations.

But as with the Canadian census (and the US federal census, for that matter, and the UK census too), these voters lists tend to erase evidence of occupation for married women. Well, perhaps “erase” is too strong a term? it suggests an act of commission, when what we are dealing with, arguably, is an act of omission.

My great-grandparents Alex (Alexander Michael) and Annie (Anna Maria Benton) Moran had a grocery store, a small “mom-and-pop” operation at the front of their  house on Armstrong St. Here they are in the 1935 List of Electors (Victoria Ward, City of Ottawa), with my grandparents Allan Jerome Moran and Mary Catherine Lahey (here listed as Mrs Allan [W] [= Wife], married woman) listed just below:

Alexander Moran, Carleton, Ontario, 1935. Ancestry.ca: database online. Original: Library and Archives Canada; Ottawa, Ontario, Canada; Voters Lists, Federal Elections, 1935-1980; Reel: M-4739.

Notice how Alex and Annie’s “mom-and-pop” operation has become a “pop” operation in this document: Moran, Alexander is listed as a “grocery store proprietor,” while his wife Annie (Mrs Alexander, [W] [= Wife]) is given the occupational designation of “married woman.”

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Military Records, Newspapers

‘Ottawa Flier Missing’ (Donald Michael Sloan)

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Ottawa Citizen, 26 January 1945

Last Remembrance Day I posted a brief remembrance of Emmett Patrick Sloan and Donald Michael Sloan. I’ve since come across a couple of brief but interesting newspaper notices relating to the two brothers. These I discovered through a search of the Google news archive (which is no longer easy to use and now seems like a bit of a hit-and-miss affair: see The Death of Google News Archivefor more information).

As per the article “Ottawa Flier Missing” (26 January 1945), his parents (John Percival Sloan and Mary Lillian Fagan) were informed by the RCAF casualty office (in late January 1945? or perhaps a bit earlier?) that Donald Michael Sloan was missing in action. No doubt they initially feared he was dead. In fact, he had been taken prisoner by the Germans. After spending time in a POW camp, he ended up in a military hospital in England, where his brother Emmett Patrick Sloan found him shortly after the war.

At findmypast.co.uk, there is this brief but tantalizing transcription:

Donald Michael Sloan survived the war, and returned to Ottawa with his brother. In 1947 he married Constance Ethel Renton, with whom he raised a family of five children.

Stories

Emmett and Donny: A Remembrance

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Emmett and his brother Donny served with the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War II. Donny’s plane was shot down; and he spent time as a POW in a camp in Germany.

[When my dad was a kid, he heard tales of cousin Donny having been forced to eat “black bread,” presumably pumpernickel or something like that, which my grandparents, in all innocence, took as the highest refinement of military torture.]

When the war was over, Emmett went from hospital to hospital in the UK, looking for his brother. He finally found Donny in a military hospital on the outskirts of London, and stayed with him until he was ready to travel (but from some of his war injuries, including a broken bone that did not heal properly, he never quite recovered).

When Donny was deemed fit to return home, the two brothers took the train up to Edinburgh for the weekend to celebrate, and then shipped out to Canada.

(As told to me by Emmett Patrick Sloan, Ottawa, January 2007).

 

Catholic Records, Civil Registration, Local History, Queries

Where was Patrick Killeen born?

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Different Sources, Different Birthplaces

In a history of Ottawa published in 1927, A.H.D. Ross wrote that “the first white child born in the Township of March was Patrick Killean, whose father, Denis Killean, was in Captain Monk’s employ, and the second was Benning Monk.”1 Perhaps Ross was relying on Mrs. M.H. Ahearn’s earlier “The Settlers of March Township,” which was first read before the Women’s Canadian Historical Society of Ottawa on 10 March 1899, and later published by the Ontario Historical Society. According to Mrs. Ahearn:
The first settler to locate [in March township] was Captain John Benning Monk, of H.M. 97th Regiment, who arrived in June, 1819, having been paddled and portaged in boats from Montreal, where he had the misfortune to lose his baby daughter. Leaving his wife in Hull, Captain Monk proceeded by river to March, where, with his soldier servants, he constructed a rude shanty, to which he brought Mrs. Monk, and which was aptly named ‘Mosquito Cove’ by the much-tormented occupants…
…Captain Monk had ten children, and among his numerous descendants are several prominent citizens of Ottawa. One son is G.W. Monk, ex-M.P.P. for Carleton County, and Mrs. Chas. McNab, a well-known member of our society, to whom the writer is indebted for many details of this sketch, is a daughter. The eldest son, the late Benning Monk, was the second child born in March; Patrick Killean, whose parents were servants of Captain Monk, and who afterwards took up land in South March, being the first.2
It’s not clear where Mrs. Ahearn got her information about Patrick Killean/Killeen’s birth, although it may have been part of the detail supplied to her by Mrs. Chas. McNab (Frances Amelia Monk, daughter of Captain John Benning Monk and Elizabeth Fitzgerald).

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Stories

Memories of the Morans

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Emmett Patrick Sloan (1920-2007) was the son of John Percival Sloan and Mary Lillian Fagan, and a descendant, through his mother’s side, of James Moran and Margaret Jamieson. He was also a family historian who spent years constructing a very detailed family tree, which involved tracing any number of Morans and Leavys across North America. A few months before he died, he sent me his memories of my great-grandparents Alexander (‘Alec,’ ‘Alex’) Michael Moran (1872-1939) and Anna Maria (‘Annie’) Benton (1871-1947). He also gave me a big, thick binder of his Moran family history research notes, for which I am extremely grateful.

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