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    In Search of My Father: One Woman's Search for the Father She Never Knew
    In Search of My Father: One Woman's Search for the Father She Never Knew
    In Search of My Father: One Woman's Search for the Father She Never Knew
    Ebook135 pages1 hour

    In Search of My Father: One Woman's Search for the Father She Never Knew

    By Marion Elizabeth Fawkes

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    About this ebook

    How did Florence Nightingale and Sir Alexander Mackenzie become part of the same family history? And how does Captain Booty Graves fit into the picture? Who was the well-respected doctor in London, Ontario, son of a Northwest partner and Metis mother, who married a grandniece of a British aristocrat? Who was the first Newfoundlander, the grandson of a merchant seaman, to become a member of the federal government?

    This is very much a Canadian story. What begins as research, by the daughter he would never see, into the life of a Boer War veteran who died in World War I expands to touch on many significant personalities and events in our nation’s history. Though this is Charles McKenzie Marten’s story, he doesn’t make an appearance until three-quarters of the way through the book. Discovering his history was a long and interesting process with all the makings of a detective drama.

    There are photos, letters, documents, maps, pages of reference and an index. As much detail as possible has been included in the charts and the text in order that readers who find a family name or a link with their own heritage can get in touch with the author to share information.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDundurn
    Release dateJun 30, 1994
    ISBN9781459714915
    In Search of My Father: One Woman's Search for the Father She Never Knew

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      Book preview

      In Search of My Father - Marion Elizabeth Fawkes

      Names

      Preface

      In Search of My Father has been compiled from various documents in the public realm: books on library shelves, census material, archival documents, and the IGI (The International Genealogical Index of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints); and from family papers and the remembrance of what was told to me by my mother, Muriel Elizabeth White Marten, and by others of her generation and the previous one.

      Writing down on paper what I have learned about my father has given me a sense of closeness to him that I did not entirely anticipate. It is my hope that, by putting those findings into book form, his grandchildren and great-grandchildren and their descendants will also come to know this man who lived for all too short a span of time, who died in France in World War I—in that war to end all wars. He, and the others who took part in that war, must not be forgotten.

      Acknowledgments

      I wish to express my gratitude to all those who came to my assistance in this Search, many of them referred to in the text. Among those, and to others not already mentioned, are a few to whom I wish to give special thanks.

      To my grandson Alex, James Alexander Mackenzie Lemon, who insisted I must have a computer, chose it, installed it, and explained to me, who had never conquered the typewriter, which keys I should press. To Marion Lyons, a long-time genealogist, a chance acquaintance, now a friend, who explained to me what OGS and IGI stand for, who accompanied me to the Canadiana Room at Toronto’s North York Public Library on more than one occasion.

      My family, all my family, were both interested and encouraging, but it was my dauther Peggy, Peggy Stewart, who insisted that what I had written must be published. It was her friend Katharine Kelly who converted my program discs to Word-Perfect, and who found it more of a challenge than she had anticipated. Hardy Shore’s The Shore Story, and the contributions of Marion Shore, a recently found second cousin, added greatly to the information re that branch of the family. Papers and photographs, saved by my fathers brother, Thomas Henry Marten, and passed along to me by his daughter, Margaret Murch, are very much a part of my fathers history. It was Dr. Jean Burnet of the Ontario Historical Society who emphasized the need for accurate references.

      But this book could not have been written without the help, and interest, of the staffs of the Canadiana Room of Toronto’s NorthYork Public Library, the Ontario Archives, the Metropolitan Toronto Reference Library, the City of Toronto Records and Archives Division, Queen’s University (Special Collections), the Anglican Church and the United Church Archives. It could not have been published without the assistance of Rosemary Tanner and Robin Brass, and the patience, assistance and encouragement of publisher Barry Penhale.

      MARION ELIZABETH FAWKES

      Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 1994

      SECTION ONE

      The Discovery of the Missing Links

      In the Beginning

      This is my father’s story, the story of Charles McKenzie Marten, the father I never knew, a Boer War veteran who went overseas in World War I before I was born and died in France in 1918. This is a Canadian story, the story of a boy born and raised in Ontario, whose predecessors were, in all but one instance, of British stock.

      That non-British segment of my father’s heritage reaches back into those distant mists of time when a bridge of land stretched across what is now the Bering Strait.¹ That bridge, perhaps first crossed by hunters following herds of deer or buffalo, led to a land of great forests and wide rivers. Those hunters brought with them their families, their knowledge and their skills. As the centuries passed, and the land bridge was swept away by ice and storm, the old land was forgotten. What was never forgotten were the tales handed down by the elders.

      By today’s standards, living was not easy in this new land across the bridge, but there was food, shelter, companionship, laughter and song. There was meat and fish, fruit for the gathering, wood and water in abundance. Old skills were remembered, new skills were developed. This was now home. The people came to believe they had sprung up in this new land, that their seed was planted here by the Lord of Creation. It was their version of the Garden of Eden, here in what would come to be known as America.

      Christopher Columbus was not the first European to discover this land beyond the ocean, but it was he who forever changed the lives of those who lived here. Welcoming the strangers to their shore, they little realized what lay ahead.

      Some two hundred and sixty years later, near Lake Athabaska in what is now Alberta in Western Canada, there lived a young girl whose name I will never know. She was my father s great-great-grandmother. Her people were native Canadian, believed to be Lake Athabasca area Cree.²

      Captain Booty Graves and the North West Company

      By the 1780s, the fur trade in Canada was dominated by the British-run Hudson’s Bay Company and by independent traders based in Montreal. Many of these traders were from the British Isles, some were French-Canadians, a few were from other countries, all looking for adventure, for new opportunities. Their names and the names of a very few women can be found in the histories of those earlier times, and in The Dictionary of Canadian Biography (DCB).³ From W Stewart Wallace’s The Pedlars from Quebec:

      ...following 1775...new names make their appearance...Captain Booty Graves, the partner of Peter Pond... As the pedlars from Quebec flocked into the Northwest it was only a matter of time until some of them should push forward into fresh fields and pastures green... Peter Pond, who first crossed the height of land into the Athabaska Country, and Peter Pangman and Booty Graves.⁴

      Arthur S. Morton gives an explanation of the word Pedlar as it pertains to the fur trade in Canada:

      That was the name given by the Hudson’s Bay Company’s servants, known as the Englishmen, to the French and English fur-traders from Montreal. The Englishmen waited for the Indians to bring them their furs, the Pedlars went to the natives

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