My family tree - life in the bush

Introduction

This was originally an essay written in early 1976. I tried to trace the family’s development from about 1800 through to the late 1900’s. My main source of information was my maternal grandmother, Nanny (1883 – 1978), who had her 92nd birthday on November 9th, 1975. She passed away after a stroke in LTC.

Family History

My Nanny’s name was Anne Butt. She was born in 1883 and she began by telling me all about her maternal grandparents. Her grandmother was English and her grandfather was Scottish. She does not know exactly how they ended up together but both of them came over to Canada on a sailboat. Eventually, they met and married. First, they lived in Portneuf, Quebec. Since the U.S.A. was so undeveloped, people were encouraged to settle there by granting them 60 acres of land to those who would farm it. My great-great grandparents took some land in Bay City, Michigan, in the middle of a forest, far away from any settlement. Bay City is about 100 miles northwest of Detroit, in the Saginaw Bay Area.

They built a log house with only holes in the wall for windows, which were covered with wooden slats. Needless to say, they used a fireplace for warmth and cooking. The fireplace must have been beautiful, made out of stones.

They had three boys at this time, but the children could not wander freely outside since there were Natives who would watch them from the forest and the parents were worried about what might happen. Since they were all alone in the wilderness, great-great-grandfather decided to do something to relieve the situation.

He took a clay pipe and some tobacco, and went outside, placed the pipe on the ground where the natives were watching, and put his hand in the air as in friendship. The Chief came out of the woods, went over to him, picked up the pipe and made some motions. After lighting it the Chief smoked for a bit, then my relative was motioned to do the same. At that point they shook hands as friends and it seemed the situation was remedied. It really did mean that they were friends because form then on the children could wander freely outside and if they ever became lost a Native would find them and bring them back to safety.

After making their peace in this incident, life must have carried on. I’m not sure how many children they had in total, but one of them was Mariah, who was born in 1848.
Their way of life was very typical of that day and age. It was survival on a very basic level. Their only food supply was what was grown, gathered, or hunted. The parents were the educators; the curriculum consisted of information necessary to run the farm: how to plow, when to plant, how to make clothing.

Moving on to my Nanny’s paternal grandparents, now, is a very different story. In the year 1842, they lived in Paris, France and had just had a child: William. The Mallettes had another child later, Julie. While in France, the children studied organ under a prominent organist. When William was 12, the Mallette family came to Canada. Both children kept up their organ studies and William studied bookkeeping, too.

When William was 25, he and his sister were playing the organ in Montreal in Notre Dame Cathedral. Eventually, the family moved to Bay City, Michigan, where William found a job as a bookkeeper in a grocery store.

This is where the sagas merge! Both William and Mariah were working in the same store. By this time, Bay City had grown into a town quite different form the way it was when Mariah was a child. It was large enough to have a store that could afford to hire a bookkeeper who had had training, and an apprenticeship. (Of course, we are talking about a ledger, ink and paper; no computers or calculators!) Progress was encroaching upon many places, changing lifestyles and values. Mariah now had what was a comparatively steady income in the store, whereas her parents farmed in a relatively unstable situation.

Mariah, who was engaged to be married, met William at the store one day. She was very good-looking young woman, you can judge by her photograph. The next day he approached Mariah and asked what the ring on her hand was for and, upon being told, he removed it! He immediately replaced it with a ring he had bought and told her they would get married. Mariah must have fallen in love because they were married three weeks later.

For two years they lived in Bay City, then they moved to Rigaud, Quebec, about 40 miles west of Montreal, where William’s parents first settled. They lived in Montreal and finally settled in Port Hope, which in on the north shore of Lake Ontario.

In the late 1860’s, they had three sons who died of diphtheria. In 1877, the Mallettes had another son, Harry, and in 1879, Mariah bore Fred, followed by Edward in 1880, and three years later, Anne, my grandmother. They lived happily in Port Hope until July 1884, when William died. In those days, Mariah was home with the four children. Now, she had to support them.

By this time Harry was 7, Fred was 4, Edward was three, and my grandmother was 9 months old. In a few years, the savings were gone and Mariah went into the catering business in order to support the family. When she had been in this business awhile, a memorable incident took place.

Mariah was catering for a party in a large house. She was upstairs with the guests. Anne, since there was no day care, had to go along and stay in the kitchen. Apparently, Anne became curious so she, too, went upstairs. She was fascinated by these impressive people. She was noticed by a kindly gentleman who wondered who she was and motioned her to come to see him. He sat her upon his knee were she sat shyly chatting until she was noticed by her mother. Mariah became very agitated and tried to apologize. Children, in those days, did not speak except when spoken to, and Anne didn’t realize what she had done. The man was Sir John A. Macdonald, and very generously gave Anne a ten-dollar bill. During that time that was about half of what the Mallette’s were living on each week.

Eventually, Anne and the boys went to school. It wasn’t compulsory and Anne continued going until she was 14 years old. Harry, Fred and Edward all became molders and went into apprenticeships after grade eight. By the time Anne was 14 they had all married and moved out. The school was a typical one-roomed schoolhouse with 24 children of various ages. The strap was the main form of punishment, but Annie, as she was called, didn’t get the strap because she was a good child.

They studied the three R’s very carefully. Arithmetic was very important, as was spelling and penmanship. They also took geography in which they drew maps. They didn’t have history or other related subjects. Every day they had about an hour of homework. If they didn’t do their homework they had to write lines.

Nanny remembered that they always wore long dresses to school, no skirts at all, never mind pants. (My high school, Jarvis, only allowed girls to wear pants to school my first year of high school, in 1970.) Nanny remembers pretend tea parties at recess under the trees in the sunshine. They played with dolls, tops, dollhouses, and toy dishes.

When Nanny was 12, Mariah stopped catering and began to run a boarding house. Anne, when she quit school, helped her mother on a full-time basis. They had a large house, with 19 boarders, to whom they fed breakfast and dinner. Mariah gave them full-course meals, including juice and soup. They also packed a lunch for them.

Every day Annie would clean the rooms. She would sprinkle tea leaves on the carpets and then sweep them up into a dustpan. Linen was always used for the meals, plus there was bedding, so there was a great deal of washing, done by scrubbing. At that time, they were living on about $20 per week after doing all that cooking and cleaning for nineteen people.

One boarder moved into the house in Port Hope. He came from Surrey, England, where his grandfather was the Mayor of Winchester. He had begun his apprenticeship to be a butcher at age 10, and was now going to be a butcher in Port Hope. When nanny was 20, she married this man. His name was Fred Butt, and they moved to Toronto. They opened up a meat and grocery store. Nanny did her share in the store, carrying 150 pounds of meat upstairs from the freezer.

Nanny had lived in Toronto ever since her marriage in 1903. After a year, she gave birth to a boy named Edward (1904 - 1905), who died a year later. He’d had been given a strawberry, which had caused something similar to dysentery. In 1906, Lillian Anna May (D. 1981) was born, Fred Cecil (1908 - 1983), and in 1909, Marion. (They are in the photo on the left.) In 1925, Marion complained on a Thursday that her legs felt funny, and she had her mother rub them for her. Eventually, this continued up her legs, and went through her whole body until 3 days later she died. There is a beautiful picture of Marion, showing long, gorgeous hair.

During the time Marion was growing up, Nanny had two miscarriages. Then, in 1925, 16 years after her last child was born, and 21 years after her first child, Joan (right), my mother, was born.

Fred Butt, my grandfather (B. 1878), died in 1940. You can see his kindly disposition in this black and white photo, taken on their front steps on Cottingham Ave., in Toronto. My mother was 15 and had to go out and get a job. Nanny then worked for the Children’s Aid Society from 1940 until 1965, when she retired. She had 10 to 12 teenaged girls at a time and in total had about 400 girls, most of which left to get married.

Nanny was moved from her house on Cottingham Ave., in Toronto, to a small apartment, once all the girls had left. She lived there, when she became ill, too ill to live on her own. She was placed in a LTC home, which did not set well at all. She began believing that the nurses were spies, and that they were all out to get her. She had a stroke, and died in a Toronto hospital in 1978, one year before my daughter was born. She never knew her great-granddaughter.