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ACCOMPANYING LETTER WITH BOOK
(Address currently withheld) February 20, 1987 Dear Cousins: Enclosed is your do-it-yourself genealogy of the Hoggarth family. You'll have to provide your own binder, which you can make as plain or as fancy as you like. It's done in loose-leaf form so you can add pages to it as information on more families comes to you, or as more are married and rnore children are born. (Also it's less expensive to mail -- and I am as much Scottish as English.) You may think it strange that I have allowed space for spouses and children of today's babies, but 20 years or so can go by awfully fast and those babies will be getting married -- in a new century! I am still hoping to get more information to fill in some of the blanks -- if and when I do, I'll send completed pages to owners of the genealogy for substitution or addition to your copy. If you would rather have your copy bound, you should be able to have it done rather inexpensively at an instant copy place. I know there are various numbering systems for genealogies, but have never taken the time to look into them and have done this by generations. Generation 1 is Joseph Hoggarth and Agness Bailiff. Their six sons and wives make up Generation 2, and I have separated them into six sections -- the oldest son being Section 1, second being Section 2, etc. Generation 3, the children of the six sons, are listed in order of birth in their respective sections. Generation 4 and following generations start with the oldest child of the oldest child and list in birth order all the children of the oldest, then all the children of the second oldest, etc. At the beginning of each of the six sections are family charts for three generations of the larger families, which I needed to keep the families straight. Maybe they'll help you determine in which generation and family you fit. The index of names towards the back of the genealogy will give the page number on which a person is listed as a child of a couple, giving birthdate, name of spouse, date of marriage if available, and given names of children. Each name will also appear earlier in the listing of children under the parents' names, and if married and also a parent, the name will appear as the parents of certain children further on in the genealogy. Female descendants are listed in the index by their maiden names. Spouses are not listed in the index, but their names appear in the listing for the family member to whom they are married. After the line "Generation - Children of Blank", there will be a page number, indicating the page on which Blank's parents and siblings are listed, which may be somewhat backward, but at least you will know the page you are looking for, rather than working your way bacirward through all the names and forgetting whom you were looking for. I'm sure there are errors in this -- typographical and otherwise. With tri-focals I have often caught myself copying from the wrong line. If there are serious errors you want corrected, please let me know so I can make the correction and send corrected pages to all those having the book. If I get enough orders for the genealogy and have a respectable surplus after printing and postage costs, I want to hire an English genealogist to trace the family in England (I think there were more brothers and sisters of the six). If the genealogist comes up with enough information, I'll do a supplement to this and send copies to you. I have names and addresses of Hoggarths in Canada whom I have not contacted yet and Hoggarths in Australia I'd like to try to contact. If I could establish a relationship with some of those, that could mean more pages to add or substitute in your genealogy. It's quite obvious that a job like this will never be finished. However, if someone from a younger generation than I has an interest in carrying this genealogy further and would like my research files when I'm gone, please let me know. I'll will them to you. I'd hate to see 20 years of my research thrown out when I go to meet the Hoggarths into whose lives I've been snooping. My thanks to all of you who have been so helpful in furnishing information on your families -- I couldn't have done it without you. To those who ignored my letters but who may see a copy of this, it's your loss, and your entries in the book are incomplete or non-existent. I have enjoyed meeting and corresponding with so many helpful people, but if I had known what a monster this genealogy would become, I seriously doubt if I'd have tackled it. I hope you will enjoy the results of my efforts, and will appreciate any comments you may have, good or bad. Sincerely, Floraine PREFACE My interest in my Hoggarth ancestry probably began in the 1950's when I saw some correspondence my mother had with an attorney in Snohomish, WA, regarding the heirs of a Dan McKaig, a half-brother of my grandmother, Hannah Francis Hoggarth. There was a partial listing of the heirs, and there were several instances of Mckaig or Francis relatives marrying Hoggarths. Big Joe Hoggarth of Glenfield, ND was married to Mary Mckaig, sister of Dan McKaig. My grandfather was also Joe Hoggarth, a first cousin to Big Joe, and their wives were half-sisters. The daughter of Annie Mahaffy, another half-sister to Dan McKaig, in Ontario was married to a Rob Hoggarth. I was curious as to the relationships of the various Hoggarths to each other. In 1967 I took my first trip (and first plane ride) to Yakima, WA to attend the funeral of my mother's youngest brother, Ernie, and met my brown-eyed cousins for the first time. (I had always wondered where I got the hazel eyes, since all my family had blue eyes.) Ernie's wife, Dolly, and I went through a trunk of old pictures and found one of my Great Grandmother, Sarah Garnett Hoggarth, which showed where Uncle Ernie and my sister had gotten the thick, dark eyebrows. I asked Aunt Dolly what my great grandfather's first name was, and she said, "I suppose it was Joe like the rest of them." Ernie and Dolly's son, John, related a story his father had told him about Great Grandfather Hoggarth crushing his leg in the woods, taking a shot of whiskey and amputating the leg himself. I knew a niece of Great Grandpa Hoggarth had only one leg, but thought it a bit unlikely that there would be two members of one family with only one leg. In 1968 my husband and I drove to Yakima, stopping in Hannaford, ND to visit an uncle (who had been married to my mother's sister). It was the first time I had been to North Dakota since I was a baby, and there were no longer any Hoggarths of our branch living there. I had heard there were other Hoggarths living near Jamestown, but they pronounced the name "Huggarth", and I had no idea if there was a relationship or not. We visited in North Dakota for several summrs after that, seeing people who had known my mother's family and picking up bits of information and pictures here and there. In 1972 we made another trip to Yakima and attended a Hoggarth reunion in the mountains with descendants of Big Joe. About that time I started trying to figure out the different Hoggarth branches. In 1975 my husband and I took our first trip to Ontario, not knowing if there were any relatives there or not. I knev my grandmother had been born in or near Mitchell, Ontario, and thought there might be a record of her birth which would give her parents' names -- her death certificate had her father's first name wrong and her mother's name as unknown. We stayed overnight at a motel in London, Ontario and started for Mitchell at about 8:00 A.M. on a Monday. London is a pretty, clean city, and all the lamp-posts had baskets of flowers hanging from them. However, there were no people on the streets, and we wondered what time of day people there went to work. -1-
When we got to Mitchell, we found most businesses closed as they were having a Centennial celebration The court house was closed, so we wandered around looking in the shop windows and watched the parade. Then we started for Goderich, where I knew some of the Hoggarths had been born, and all the shops and businesses in the small towns we went through also seemed to be closed. I thought they were all closed because everyone was helping Mitchell celebrate its centennial. By the time we got to Goderich, it finally dawned on us that the date was July 1, which is Dominion Day and a legal holiday in Canada. So we got something to eat, found a motel south of Goderich, found one Hoggarth listed in the Goderich telephone directory and planned to see him the next day. John J. Hoggarth had a garage in Goderich, was 82 years old and said his father was Jim Hoggarth (a son of Joseph Hoggarth and Grace Williams, although I didn't know that at the time). He said the Hoggarths had all been big men and remembered one who would walk into a tavern and stop a fight by picking up the two fighters, knocking their heads together and dropping them. He said a man named Tom Graham had visited him some years before, working on a Hoggarth family tree. (I have since found that Tom Graham was actually a brother-in-law to John, having been married to John's sister, Violet Grace.) He also remembered the Clancy boys from North Dakota visiting in Goderich "8 or 10 years ago". He remembered when he was a child visiting Will and Maggie Hoggarth at Hensall, Ontario -- said he liked visiting them, even though Will seemed stern. As long as John had mentioned Hensall, we decided to go there to see if we could find any Hoggarth graves. I don't remember now how we found the cemetery, but we did, and found the graves for Ben Hoggarth (1830-1906), his wife, Margaret Elder, Will and Maggie and two of their children. The caretaker at the cemetery said the cemetery was part of the Ben Hoggarth farm. He also said there were Hoggarths living at Hensall and Cromarty, so we went on to Cromarty to find the cemetery there. The cemetery at Cromarty was the churchyard behind the church which I later learned my great grandfather and great great grandfather had helped build. One tall, narrow, four-sided grave marker had the names of my great grandparents, one on each side, and two of their children who had died fairly young, of whom I had never heard. Other Hoggarths buried there are James (1831-1917), his wife Mary Ann (1834-1902) and daughter, Mary Ann (1869-1960); Thomas Hoggarth (1821-1901), his daughter Mary Ann (1853-1950), sons John (1855-1945) and Thomas (1858-1948); Robert Hoggarth (1828-1918), his wife, Alexina (1826-1905) and son, George (1866-1892); William Hoggarth (1867-1937), his wife, Jane Davis (1870-1937) and their son, James Gordon, infant; also Agnes Hoggarth Hay (1862-1934). One marker, with the name and date illegible read, son of Joseph and Grace Hoggarth, 6 years, 9 months". We found other Hoggarth graves at the cemetery at Staffa. We found our way back to Mitchell and checked at the court house, but their records did not go back before 1895, so we got no help there. There was a Campbell insurance agency on Main Street who advertised in the Centennial brochure that they had been in business over 100 years, so I thought who would better know who the residents of an area were. The agency was closed, but a lady on the street said the Campbells lived upstairs. Mrs. Campbell answered the door and said Mr. Campbell was in bed with a heart condition brought on by the excitement of the Centennial, but "we're not related to you". (I hadn't mentioned having Campbell relatives.) I said, "I only want to know if there are any Francises or Mahaffys living in Mitchell. She said there was a Mrs. Mahaffy who lived up the street about six blocks. Wes Mahaffy answered the door and -2-
looked and talked just like my mother's brother, Frank Hoggarth. Wes was a grandson of Annie Mahaffy and therefore my second cousin. He said his aunt, Ollie Mahaffy Hoggarth, was still living in Mitchell and took us to meet her. Visiting her was a cousin, Annie Campbell Madill, who had been born in Hannaford, MD and had lived on the farm next to my grandparents until her father, Donald Campbell, had sold out in 1914 and moved back to Ontario. I asked them the name of my grandmother's mother and was told it was either Jean or Jane Campbell, and that she was buried at Roy's Cemetery at Russelldale, Ontario. We had seen Roy's Church (now a tearoom) from the road on our way to Mitchell, but didn't know there was a cemetery there. In Roy's Cemetery we found the graves of Jane Campbell Mckaig Francis, her second husband, James Francis, their daughter, Jennie, who had died at 19, and Jane's father, Donald Campbell, who had been born in Islay, Scotland in 1789. Both Jane and James Francis had been married previously and each had two children from their first marriages. I think their spouses must have died in Scotland and England, respectively, and the surviving spouses had taken their children to Canada. When we returned home I had a list of deceased Hoggarths and didn't know how they all fit together, although I thought that the older ones were brothers to my great grandfather. I wrote a letter to the newspaper in Mitchell, which had been in business for over 100 years, thinking to buy copies of old obituaries to find out how the various Hoggarths had been related. The paper did not answer my letter, but later that summer a Campbell cousin in Grand Forks, ND told me that the paper had printed my letter. A couple of months later I got a letter from Jennie Bray in Kirkton, Ontario, the daughter of "Black Bob" Hoggarth, my grandfather's youngest brother. (He was called "Black Bob" to distinguish him from "Red Bob", who was the son of Robert (1828-1918) and the father of Rob Hoggarth, husband of Ollie Mahaffy.) Jennie's brother, Jack Hoggarth, of Egmondville, Ont., had seen my letter in the paper and had taken it to Jennie, saying, "This must be Uncle Joe's granddaughter." Jennie gave me a rundown on Grandpa's brothers and sisters and later sent me a book entitled "A Hibbert Review, written by Isabelle Campbell (no relation), whose parents had owned the farm next to the one which the Hoggarths first settled when they moved to Perth County. Her book gave the names of the various families who had occupied each lot of the Concerssions of Hibbert Township, with a lot of anecdotes and stories about the various occupants. The book contains a wealth of information about the Hoggarths which helped me to relate the names I had found in the cemeteries to the different Hoggarth families. There was a story about my great grandfather, John Hoggarth, helping a neighbor drive a herd of cattle from Seaforth to St. Mary's, Ont., saying "That was quite a feat for a man with an artificial leg". So there really were two family members missing one leg apiece. It was on that trip that Great Grandfather stopped at a farmhouse to ask for a drink of water and was told they had smallpox there. He got the drink and the smallpox, from which he died in May 1864 at the age of 46. We had driven by Jennie's farm a dozen times while in Ontario and I had seen the name Bray on the mailbox. In letters to my mother, Sarah Hoggarth Clancy had mentioned Jennie Bray, but I didn't know if there was a relationship, so was hesitant about stopping. The next summer we visited Jennie and her daughter, Agnes, at Kirkton. Jennie took us to visit Belle Campbell, who let me look at her workbook for A Hibbert Review. The names of all 12 children of Joseph Hoggarth and Grace Williams were listed, and I wondered how I'd ever run them all down. One of the 12 was Richard, who had died at 6, and whose illegible marker we had seen in the cemetery at Cromarty. -3-
Later that summer we went to Courtenay and Wimbledon, ND, seeking information from Clancy cousins. Frank Clancy had the bible that had belonged to Joseph and Grace, and in it were all the names, birthdates and dates of death of their 12 children. We visited Vern and Irene Hoggarth at Kensal, ND, and through them obtained information about those of the 12 who had moved to North Dakota in the 1880's. In 1977 Jennie, Agnes, Jennie's brother Gordon and Gordon's wife, Ada, drove to Minneapolis to visit us, and then the six of us drove to Jamestown, ND so the Canadian Hoggarths could meet the North Dakota Hoggarth relatives. I believe it was at that time we saw the Hoggarth family tree done by Tom Graham in the form of a wheel, with Joseph and Agness as the center of the wheel and Generation 1, and the names of their children, grandchildren and great grandchildren fanning out from the center. The wheel was a big help to me in adding names and dates I did not have to my tree. Tom Graham had visited in North Dakota to obtain a lot of his information and some of the Clancys had visited him in Ontario. He was supposed to be writing a book, but I don't know if he ever finished it Jennie sent me a clipping about his death in 1975 at age 90. (Tom's birthday was October 3, the same as mine, and I wonder if people born on that day are more curious than others about family relationships.) We left Jamestown and drove to Regina, Saskatchewan to visit Sadie Hoggarth Ford and her husband Charlie. Sadie's father was Jack Hoggarth, a brother to Jennie's father and my grandfather, who had moved to Saskatchewan in 1912 or so from Ontario. Prior to that trip, Jennie had been no farther from home than Toronto (about 100 miles) -- by the time they got back home, I think they had covered about 5,000 miles. As a result of that visit, Sadie and Charlie made a visit to Ontario the next summer -- the only time Sadie has been back since she left at about age 6. I don't know if I really intended to publish my findings. However, in mentioning my research to another cousin, Irene Hoggarth had said I had a book, and the other cousin was interested in obtaining a copy. What I had was a notebook in which I had names, dates, etc. The idea kind of grew, and when Irene pushed me to have a draft of it at the Hoggarth reunion and 75th birthday party for Vern in 1976, I decided maybe other Hoggarths would be interested in having a copy. At the reunion I obtained information from some, names and addresses of others from whom I could obtain information, and since July 1986, this genealogy is about twice the size of the July draft. It still lacks a lot of names, but if I wait to get more information, it may never get published. In the forward to his book, Roots, Alex Hailey told of events happening in his search for his roots that seemed to be more than coincidence, as though his deceased aunt who had encouraged him to start his search, were leading him to the right people at the right time. So many times I have felt that same way, especially on our first trip to Canada, when so many things seemed to happen just right. It wouldn't surprise me if the spirit of Aunt Dolly Hoggarth from Yakima were leading the way. Anyway, it has been a lot of fun, and I have had the pleasure of visiting and corresponding with so many nice, friendly, helpful people I might not otherwise have had an opportunity to meet or contact. -4-
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