My brick wall is my great-great-grandfather -- my grandmother's grandfather. Maggie McGillivray, my grandmother, was born in Canada. Her father, Hugh McGillivray, emigrated from Scotland to Ontario, Canada, with his father, Donald. Her mother, Jane Irvine, was born in Canada; Jane's mother, Marion Orr, also emigrated from Scotland to Ontario with her entire family, including parents, grandparents, sister Catherine and brothers George (Geordie) and William. In about 1854, Marion married and had a daughter, Jane, in 1855.
And here's Mr. Brick Wall. Apparently Marion's husband died even before his child was born. All we know about him is the information entered on the marriage record of his and Marion's daughter, Jane, twenty-one years later. There are no photos or other records that I have been able to discover.
His name -- apparently -- was John Irvine, and he was -- apparently -- born in Ireland.
I have been able to discover no record of a single Irishman of this name in Canada in 1850-1855. There are older men named John Irvine, there is a young father named John Irvine in Quebec -- but no one the right age.
Of course, it's quite possible that, after more than 20 years, the older members of the family who filled out his daughter's marriage papers remembered his name wrong. It could have been Ervine, or Irving, and his first name might not have been John -- it might have been Ewan, Ian, or Owen. John could have been his middle name. His name could have been Jonathan. Or St. John.
The one thing I'm 90% sure of is that he was a Protestant, probably Presbyterian, as was the entire Orr family and the McGillivray family; they were very serious about these things in those days.
Of course, there are other ancestors that I haven't been able to identify -- but this is the closest one to me in time. I can see the faces of his contemporaries on both sides of the family; his widow, Marion, remarried and had several more children. The man his daughter Jane married, Hugh, immigrated to Canada from Scotland with his widowed father when he was a boy, and his father also remarried and had more children. On my father's side, I have found records of his grandparents, great-grandparents, and beyond. I know the names of their siblings, their spouses, and their children, where they lived, and what happened to them. Some lived what seem (seen through public records) to be placid lives -- of course, they weren't at all placid to the people who lived them. Others were involved in great public events, from the Mayflower to the Revolutionary War to World War 2, and revealed such exciting stories, not to mention throwing light on areas of history that I had no knowledge of. And I expect to find out more.
But this one ghost lingers, shrouded in mystery, barely visible.
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| Records of Ontario Marriages: |
