SOURCES

Here is a list of some of those who have contributed to this project:

Garth Hamilton, great great grandson of James Hamilton, and great grandson of Matthew Hamilton, and grandson of Hugh Hamilton, and I  started this project with two letters. One from my Aunt Miriam Stafford Hamilton, which contained a letter from my Grandmother Fanny Hamilton, and the second from my Mother, Phyllis Hamilton to my cousin Julie Hamilton daughter of my Aunt Miriam and Uncle Lyle Hamilton of Pitman, NJ. 

From this starting point in 1995 I addressed a letter in 1999 to Jack Wallace, a cousin of my Dad's and received a letter back from  Don Wallace, Jack's son, another great great grandson of James Hamilton, great grandson of Matthew,  and grandson of Justin Hamilton, Hugh's brother. Through Don's family contacts he collected information from his siblings Patricia, Myrna, Jim and John providing the most complete information on Justin Hamilton and his descendants mainly still living in western Canada. He also passed to me information from Elizabeth Hamilton wife of Graham Hamilton, and her granddaughter Tara Lynn Rewega. Graham is the son of Justin Hamilton.  I also received information from Kathleen Mohr and her daughter Margaret Rose all in Justin's line.  From John Ratcliffe came the Jackson Family line. Justin Hamilton's wife was Ella Jackson.

So the only son of Matthew that is not covered is Frank (Francis S. J.) and contact with that side of the family seems to have been lost. I did have an e-mail from a lady in Kitchener who said she was doing research for someone whom she believed was a descendant of Frank and had been put up for adoption at some point and was trying to find her family. No information was received back in exchange for the information provided. 

While I know something of the daughters of my great grandfather, Matthew Hamilton, Hattie Hamilton Greenlay, and Effie Hamilton Stanley, I do not have current information on their families and their descendants.

In the year 2000 My wife Dora and I visited Unity Saskatchewan, Lakefield in Gore Township Quebec, East Clifton and Randboro in Compton County Quebec and Bernardston MA. The only place we did not get to was Sidney Manitoba.

On the Quebec trip we met Mildred Waldron who is related to Eunice Randall of Bernardston Ma and through her we met Paul Montgomery another great great grandson of James. From these two I was able to gain a great deal of information on great grandfather Matthew's siblings and their descendants. Mildred also produced a book on the Cairns' and Waldron's which I saw in Bernardston and have since obtained a copy of my own from Mildred. 

I next visited the National Archives in Ottawa and spent a day in the Microfilm section of the library looking at census records and through this research found 12 of the 13 children that James and Mary were supposed to have brought into this world. Of those twelve, three boys I believe did not survive to maturity or make the move to Compton in 1865.

On our visit to Bernardston Ma., brief as it was, we spent the evening with Eunice Randall and her husband Bing. Her parents were relatives of my great grandmother, Irene Pierce Hamilton. Eunice's Father and Mother kept in touch with Irene, Matthew and his boys after they moved west from Compton along with Egbert Cairns, and from her Mother's collection of photo's she gave me many pictures of my great grandfather Matthew, his wife, and children. Some of these photos going back to at least 1886  or 7 as they show Lelia Rose who died in 1887.  Egbert Cairns married my great grandmother Irene's first daughter, Eva Mayo. Irene was a the widow of Edward Mayo and Eva was his daughter. Egbert and Eva did not go to Unity in 1911 when the rest of the family moved from Sydney, MB. but returned to Bernardston, MA. where Egbert's family were living.

In addition I received some help from a young lady researching the Hammond line named Crystal who lives in Dundas, Ontario, and a lady name Margaret related to another Hamilton Family from the Argenteuil County of Quebec who lives in Ottawa. A special mention to John Ratcliff, of Sherwood Park AB, who did the Jackson line back to 1749 and Virginia Wooley Andrus who lives in Bountiful Utah and added more information to what John and I had gathered. Then there is the Jackson Family Bible which Don Wallace has with many dates for births and deaths. Peter Fewson of Cornwall provided us with more Fewson Family information in the Jackson Line. 

Through this web site I have met numerous people who have help along the way with this project. In December of 2000,  Terry Maunu of Vancouver BC provided the Maunu line and the Nissila Connection between the Maunu line and the MacIntyre line and its connection in Justin Hamilton's line. On the same evening I had an e-mail from Tom Brown of Greenfield Park QC with more information on the Hammond line and pointed out an error in the information I had put up on the site. In April 2001 I received information on the Parker Line from Donna Parker Webber of VT and Merle MacCallum Wilcox of CT, they are descendants of Joe Parker and Mary Jane Hamilton, daughter of James Hamilton. 

On Dora's side of the family Helen Fralick has provided us with more Hadley & Orser information. From notes left by her father Fred Savage she found the Savage line with some Cory's and Hadley's. From her grandfather she found an unpublished book on what life was like as an early pioneer in Saskatchewan for an immigrant homestead farmer.

In August of 2001 Dora and I traveled to Scugog Island, Mariposa township and Gooderham, all in Ontario to the east and north of Lindsay. Here on Scugog Island we found the first graves of Dora's ancestors from the Hadley's and Fralick's. Near Oakwood on highway 7 we found graves of the Cory's and even found the farm of John Cory and the family grave yard in an old cemetery that was on the former site of a Bible Christian Church that had at one time stood the southwest corner of John's farm. On the second day of the trip we visited the town of Gooderham and found a Hadley in the pioneer cemetery in the center of the village. Dora went into a service station near the cemetery to enquire if anyone knew any Hadley's still living in town and was introduced to one of her relatives in the service station. We visited with them and had lunch with four families that still come to the family home behind the post office in Gooderham for a family gathering every August long weekend. In the Municipal Cemetery to the east of town we found many of the Hadley ancestor's buried there.

In September of 2001 Dora and I again visited Sherbrooke, Randboro, Sawyerville, and East Clifton now called Clifton de St. Isadore, all in Quebec and Rochester NH, plus Bernardston, MA in the USA. On this trip we met Merle (MacCallum) Wilcox, and her husband Howard, in Sherbrooke, Donna (Parker) Weber in Rochester, Merle, Donna and I all share James as a great great grandfather. Merle and I with our spouses also visited Ferne Parker, and  Dora and I also visited Mildred Waldron. Ferne and Mildred are in Sawyerville. On the John Hamilton Farm, on parker Hill near Randboro, and also owned by the McCallums in the early 1910' & 20's,  Merle and I plus our spouses met the current owner Gerard Tetreault and his wife Rhodina Carroll, (In Quebec, married women do not take their husbands name by law) and saw the inside of the old house being finished off and modernized very nicely, The big fur trees to the west of the house were gone now as they had started to rot in the center of the trunk. In Bernardston I picked up a copy of the Streeter family lineage from Eunice (Streeter) Randall, which had been prepared by Rachel Parry Bell. In Sawyerville I received a volume of Cairns Family history, which was written by Mildred Waldron and contains Waldron, Streeter, Mayo and Hamilton family history as well. I also visited the National Archives in Ottawa and the Family History Section of the Sherbrooke Historical Library collecting photocopies of the various census records which contain contain records of family members in Gore/Lakefield in Argentuil County and East Clifton, Randboro, Johnville in Compton County Quebec.

On December 26th 2001, Dora found the link to an Oke family tree on the LDS site which linked her to Ancestors in her great great grandmother Christiana (Oke) Cory line. It had been prepared by Kimberly Fraser and is included here. It should be noted that Kimberly had Christian Oke Corey (Cory) and Thomas Corey (Cory) and John Corey (Cory), the dates and locations match other than the spelling. We knew Christian Corey as Christiana Cory as this is the spelling that appears on her head stone in Mariposa Township. From Verna McKinnon Dora received more information on the Cory's and solved the puzzle of how many children Christiana and Thomas Cory had and their names and birth dates and many connections to other Cory names we had seen in the Mariposa Township cemeteries near Oakwood.

There are more than 3910+ names in this database now.

My apologies to anyone who has been left out. If you contact me (Garth) at the e-mail address above, we will make amends on the web site and grovel appropriately.

I am always happy to receive information from other descendants or ancestors of the people you find here or any corrections to the information given here.