Outside a typical suburban high school in Ohio sits a concrete bench with my name carved in it, alongside the names of my brother Matthias and sister Regan. The school engraved our names in memorial of the countless hours we spent sitting on that cold seat, waiting for our parents to remember to pick us up from school. You haven't experienced calculus until you've tried to integrate trigonometric functions by the dim glow of parking lot security lights.
As it turns out, forgetting one's children is a family tradition. A family line of my father's went years without progress because, though we had an Ontario marriage record for George Henry Sizeland (b. 1857), I could not corroborate his name with the Sizeland family listed in census records. The reason? George's family failed to list him with his siblings on the census. Twice. Since the census only happens every ten years, George only got two cracks (in 1861 and 1871) at verifying that he spent childhood with his natural parents. Only the original marriage record found by my sister Regan and corroboration with several other documents allowed me to make any progress on George's ancestry.
But a pattern of neglect haunts our family less than another revelation uncovered by this information: We descend from Canadians. No, not the French-Canadians we know and love, but the bearded, denim-laden, how-ya-doin'-eh-? Candians. The former, we can deal with. When you tell most Americans that you have Quebecois in your family tree, most are surprised to learn that anyone in Canada speaks French. You can easily segue that surprise into distance: "Yeah, they're not even really Candians. They don't like the rest of Canada and they want to be a separate country. They practically are." As long as they don't realize that Celine Dion originates there, you've got a decent chance at saving face.
But even though there's no denying that these citizens of the Great White North occupy our pedigree alongside those of the Grand Nord Blanc, another discovery I made may alleviate the shame of both historic child abuse and Canadianness: You see, in early-mid 1800s the British Crown was trying desperately to colonize the sparsely populated areas upstream of the St. Lawrence River. The growing populations and political strengths of the French Canadians to the West, as well as the United States to the South, demanded a stronger foothold than the Realm had. Until that time the Crown had only sent organized companies of immigrants to Ontario (then known as Upper Canada), and the population and colonization efforts stagnated.
The British government therefore decided to open immigration to less organized populations of subjects with lesser means. One Ontario historian recorded the there-goes-the-neighborhood sentiment of already established Canadians who felt that floods of Irish, Welsh, Londoner, and South American immigrants would ruin their society. Consequently, like a modern-day consumer gets hammered on interest rates for a poor credit score, the Crown kept these poorer subjects on a short financial leash: the land grants issued as incentives contained only a five-year mortgage. Since the immigrants received undeveloped land, that gave them one year to clear and another year to develop, leaving only three years of full crops to pay off the debt owed. Many failed, and they lost their farms.
The program did not exactly end in tragedy, since both parties got something they wanted: immigrants received payed passage to America, and the Brits cleared vast acres of farmland. The various townships of Ontario experienced an incidental, but not necessarily negative consequence: a transient population of immigrants who came, worked their own or neighbor's farms for a few years to pay their debts (or until they went bankrupt), and then moved on, either to other townships with better opportunities or to the U.S.A. In short, Canada became more like the American melting pot, an altogether positive affair.
And this explains George Henry Sizeland: his family came as one of these poor outsiders. They immigrated to Canada from the British Isles, worked a few different farms for no more than a generation or two, and then left. Since the five-year mortgage program ended during the period between the 1861 and 1871 censuses, the inflow of immigrants slowed, but not the outflow. This happened to so many families in George's native South Easthope that even though most families had a whole heap of children and Canada's population grew overall, the township's population hardly changed from 1861 to 1871. Censuses notoriously contain scant and incorrect information on immigrants and transients; it's entirely possible that the information on George's family came from a neighbor or knowledgeable local rather than the household. Ten years later, with so many of these same immigrants leaving, the census worker could easily have just copied the previous census, only adding names as necessary.
So George's family probably didn't forget about him for ten years, and they didn't stay Canadian for long. Only I, the man who married a Canadian citizen (and one who's quite proud of it) has no excuse. Although I really can't complain. There are much worse things in life than being tied to Canada, like waiting for your parents on a concrete bench.
No comments:
Post a Comment