William Jackson married Hannah Boothby December 5th 1824 in the parish of Welton With Milton[1] in Yorkshire's East Riding. Parish records show seven of their children christened there: John 13 March 1825; Thomas 21 January 1828; George 23 January 1831; James 28 July 1833; Emma 29 November 1835; Ellen 31 December 1837; and William 22 March 1840.
The seven Jackson children accompanied their parents to
Canada in 1842. Anecdotal history relates the family brought their own
livestock on a cattle boat. They settled for a few years in York County, near
Toronto, where Hannah delivered three or possibly four more children: Joseph,
Henry, and Elizabeth. The fourth, named Jane, who appears only in one census,
may have been merely a boarder.
A hand-written Land Registry "Memorial" found by
Gloria Murphy in the Ontario Archives, records that on 27 October 1855 William
paid 406 pounds to H. Ward for 50 acres at Concession V lot 11 in North
Dorchester Township about ten miles from London, Ontario. William signed this
and other documents with an x. The family moved to the new farm
just before completion of the railroad to the region. Land Registry records
show lot 11was sold by a grandson of William -- Oswald Jackson -- in 1904 for
$3,800.
The Jacksons in North Dorchester, Post Office at Gladstone Village, were within walking distance of Bratts in nearby Westminster Township, Post office in Belmont Village. Joseph Jackson married Rhoda Jodie Bratt in 1866. The Parish record of the ceremony (London City Library microfilm) confirms the names of Joseph's parents. Rhoda's father Samuel and brother Jessie witnessed. Henry Jackson subsequently married Rhoda's sister Sarah in 1869, and later became an executor of Samuel Bratt's will. In the census of 1871 William is living at Concession IV lot 16. His son Joseph farms Concession IV lot 17, son Henry Concession V lot 17. Sons James and William live nearby. The location of the other children is unknown.
A white obelisk marks the graves of William and Hannah in Dorchester Union Cemetery, located just south of Dorchester Village. The inscription reads:
William Jackson Native of
Yorkshire, England
died Mar. 15, 1875 aged 72 years.
Hannah wife of William Jackson
died Sep. 6, 1895 aged 92 years
"She died as she lived trusting in God."
At the time of William's death, his land holdings had
increased to at least 200 acres. His last will and testament left the
following: to his wife 14 acres of V 16 and the house thereon; to sons
John $200, George $100, Thomas $200; to son William 25 acres and a house; son
Joseph 14 acres; his daughter Emma $100; sons James and Henry each 50 acres;
daughter Ellen $200. A codicil gave Joseph another 50 acres. The executors
(James and Henry) were ordered to provide tombstones for himself and his wife.
He further arranged for James and Henry to maintain their mother for as long as
she lived after which they were authorized to divide the land and other
possessions he had left to her.
In the year 2000 more than 1,000 mainly Canadian descendants can be traced to William and Hannah Jackson.
The 1881 census records the families of Joseph and his
brother Henry still living in North Dorchester Township. Joseph already had
eight of his eventual 11 children, Henry six. Although still living on a farm,
Henry is recorded as being a merchant. This probably relates to the fact he
worked for many years as storekeeper in the insane
asylum as it was then called, which lay on the road between North
Dorchester and London. Henry also served as Dorchester Reeve – as did three of
his sons -- which may account for there being to this day a prominent Jackson Road in North Dorchester.
In 1911 Lucy Hannah Jackson (then living in Toronto)
attended a reunion in the London area of some four hundred Jacksons, not all
related but many of them, perhaps a majority, descendants of William.
The Dorchester Union Cemetery contains the
remains of William and Hannah, Henry and his wife Sarah Ann, Henry's children
Samuel, Thorne, Victor and Leslie, and many other Jacksons; as well as Enoch
and Hannah Bratt.
In the same year as the census, 1881, Joseph and Rhoda moved their children and livestock west to Pile O' Bones, North West Territory. The family journeyed by means of a Canadian train to Chicago, then an American train that ran north through Minnesota into Manitoba. From the vicinity of today's Winnipeg, they travelled to Pile O' Bones by covered wagon, driving livestock before them. Within four years the town had been renamed Regina and the Canadian Pacific Railway, which ran through Regina, was providing passenger service from Eastern Canada to the West Coast. Anecdotal history relates that the Jacksons lived in Regina's first plastered house, delivered the first milk door to door, provided the first undertaker service, and built in their front room the coffin of rebel Louis Riel hanged in 1885.
Anecdotal history also records Joseph being the owner of a
ranch near Regina, and that he sold meat. His ranch and a livery stable
prospered through the 1890s but apparently bad debts and a resultant inability
to meet his mortgage led him at the turn of the century to relocate his family
to Nelson, BC.
In Nelson Joseph reportedly operated a livery stable/feed
store on property now occupied by King’s Hotel. He and Rhoda lived for some
time on High Street in a pleasant house with a great view, a house proposed in
1997 as a heritage site. He died after a long illness and according to the
local newspaper was living at his death at 1713 Front Street, an address no longer
in existence.
Joseph,
Rhoda, a grandson Walter, and an unknown infant are buried in a Jackson family
plot in Nelson's Memorial Park. Daughter Olive and her husband Cyril Archibald
are buried nearby. The graves are located in a particularly attractive hillside
setting.
Joseph and Rhoda's eldest
son, George Alfred Bratt Jackson,
reached Pile o' Bones on horseback at the age of 13. While still a teenager he
hunted wild game to feed railroad construction gangs and may have scouted for
the army during the Riel Rebellion. Still not 20, George explored the west as
far south as Mexico, working here and there as a cowboy. Preferring Canada to
the United States, George returned to Regina to marry Lucy Hannah Symonds (1895). He subsequently worked for Pat Burns
the legendary Alberta rancher and founder of the Burns Meat Company. Burns sent
him (1897) to the, then, boomtown of Silverton in the mountains of southeastern
British Columbia to provide meat to miners[2].
1902 saw him in the Rocky Mountain town of Frank, Alberta as Burns' district
manager. George, Lucy Hannah, and their two daughters, Wilma and Norma,
survived the historic slide of Turtle
Mountain (April 1903), which destroyed much of Frank, and moved to nearby
Blairmore, where the last child, Gertrude, was born. George acquired a ranch
near Pincher Creek, Alberta, and nearby found a valuable deposit of coal and
signs of oil. He formed a consortium to mine the coal but, by selling his share
of the coal deposit to a Chicago company for a substantial amount of money, was
able (1909) to take his youngest child, who had been crippled with infantile
paralysis, to Toronto's Sick Children's Hospital.
After Toronto, where he was an early owner of a motorcar,
George moved the family (1912) to Victoria, BC. There he acted as a commercial
fish buyer and invested in Alberta oil. It being too early for Western oil, he
lost most of his money. George subsequently served as a seaman on the
government lighthouse tender Estevan, fell in love with the west
coast of Vancouver Island, tried mink ranching on an island in Barkley Sound,
and then settled at Long Beach, BC where he kept cattle, tended a section of
telephone line, and acted as host and hunting guide to visitors from around the
world. George's visitor's book and diaries of this period are in the Provincial
Archives, Victoria.
Although George wanted to be buried at Long Beach, the law
required he be buried in the nearest cemetery, which was at Ucluelet. Having
already celebrated his death (George had provided beer for a village wake), the
inebriated gravediggers used explosives in lieu of shovels, thereby creating a
deep, vertical hole rather than a trench. As a result George stands upright in
his grave (facing west, one would like to think) to this day. The source for
this information was George’s wife Lucy who attended the burial, which took
place in pouring rain, and who claimed to be the only sober person present. His
location in the cemetery is plot 76.
George's eldest daughter, Wilma Jackson, married Tom
Grant who with his father had come to Victoria, BC from Leicester, England.
An engineer, Tom served in the Canadian Army in the First World War, and worked
in the pulp and paper industry in British Columbia until migrating to the
United States in 1926. The family lived in Oregon and Washington, and Tom rose
to become vice president of his company, Publisher's Paper. Wilma gave birth to
one son in Canada and another in the USA. Huntly
Grant, who served in the American
Army in the Second World War, married Huguette Julien, whom he met in Paris,
became an engineer (transportation), and enjoyed a lengthy career with the
Washington State highways department. Austin
Grant worked as a safety officer in the pulp and paper sector. The two
Grant boys had a total of eight (American) children.
After attending Provincial Normal School, George's
daughter Norma Merriel Jackson
taught school at the remote coastal settlements of Refuge Cove and Port Alice
before marrying Robert Thompson Murphy
in Victoria in 1925. Norma raised six healthy children[3],
was active in the United Church's Athena Club and the Liberal Party's Laurier
Club, and was for some years Regent of the Mathew Baillie Begbie Chapter of the
Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire. In 1952, aged 53, she returned to teaching
and subsequently taught in various Victoria schools for nearly 20 years. Norma
was in addition an avid gardener, a noted cook and homemaker, and an
enthusiastic amateur potter and painter. Details of her active life are
recorded in her autobiography published privately following her death.
George's daughter Gertrude
Irene Jackson, who was much loved by her nephews and niece, never married.
She wore a brace on one leg and used a cane from the time she was a girl. A
singularly brave person, she was employed variously as a features writer for
Victoria newspapers, telephone operator at Long Beach, companion of her widowed
mother, and knitter of children’s' clothes sold by a specialty shop in
Victoria. In her later years she lived in the house of a prominent Victoria
nursery operator and longtime friend, Ralph Snider, who was losing his
eyesight. She cared for Ralph and several other blind men, and contributed to
Braille books and tapes for the blind published in Canada. On Ralph's death
Gertrude inherited his house.
George Jackson's second child, the infant Berle,
was buried informally in a small box in the forest near Silverton. His other
daughters were cremated and their ashes dispersed: Wilma's by a gathering of all her descendants at sea off the Oregon
coast, Norma's by son Maurice at
Long Beach, Gertrude's by a daughter
of Ralph Snider at Metchosin near Victoria.
In the year 2000
fifty-seven living descendants of George Alfred Bratt Jackson and Lucy Hannah
Symonds prosper throughout the world, mainly in British Columbia, Washington
and Oregon.
Sources: Norma’s
Yesteryears, the autobiography of Norma (Jackson) Murphy; compilation
of Jackson births and marriages by Shirley (North) Simpson based on a record
book of her mother Hannah Eliza (Jackson) North; handwritten notes of Olive
Jackson; 1948 letter from Lucy H. Jackson to Harold Murphy; George A B
Jackson’s Journal and his letters; the London-Middlesex Land Atlas 1878;
cemetery records in BC, ON and Bonners Ferry, ID; Canada Census microfilms (1851
through 1881); Ontario Land Registry Archives; last will and testaments of
William and Henry Jackson from Weldon Library, U of Western Ontario; gravestone photographs by Robert Harold
Murphy; Middlesex parish and other records, London City Library; Yorkshire
births/marriage from International Genealogy Index (IGI) of the LDS; Jackson
press clippings and other documents collected by Vickie Feist, Rock Creek, BC;
interviews with interested relatives -- Huntly Grant, Huguette Grant, Amy
Bates, Nancy Hardy, Barrie Jackson, and Maureen Macken; data from Warren Alter,
Tucson, AZ; Dr. Marvin Bratt bratt.1@osu.edu
and his website; Vernon Jackson Shipley at vern@mrg.on.ca
.
Updated 7 June 2000