Busted! - Glimpses of the Past with Karen Webster

In the quest of information in family research, one may find historical records to anchor the recollections of subsequent generations. The other side of the coin would be the family stories that have been passed down through the ages. How does the researcher separate fact from fiction?

 

Let us look at the case of William Watson, who, in 1848, was one of the earlier settlers in Wawanosh Township (now West Wawanosh). He had grown up in a fishing family in the village of Whitehills, Banffshire, Scotland. His trade was that of cooper or barrel maker, an asset to his family as the barrels he made held the salted fish meant for export. 

 

When he came to Canada, he brought with him two chests; one contained his tools and some clothing and the other, books. The preceding information has been confirmed by research. 

 

In the mid-1950s, his daughter, Eleanor, wrote about her father’s history in which she told of his attending the University of Glasgow at the same time as David Livingstone, of his being a secretary to a Lord Marr and of William falling in love with the Lord’s daughter, Jeane. When the Lord forbade the marriage of William and Jeane because of William’s lower social status, William set off for Canada then returned to Scotland later only to find that Jeane had died of a broken heart. 

 

William journeyed to Canada once more vowing to wed the first unmarried woman he met there. 

 

Quite the story. Was there truth in any of it? 

 

Eleanor was only four when her father died in 1879, and in her 80s when she wrote the family story for her nephew. Recent research has determined that there was a Lord Mar in Scotland, but that he and his wife had no children. As well, William married a young woman from Colborne Township, which is nowhere near any landing port in Canada and she was unlikely to be the first unmarried woman that he met. 

 

So, we are left to wonder. What is the truth? Did all these events take place or were they merely stories told around the fireplace half a continent and an ocean away from being verified or disputed? We can’t say for sure whether these stories were true or not, but we are skeptical.

 

Here is another case of fact or fiction. In the 1970s, an older woman passed away and members of the family were receiving friends and relatives at the visitation. One guest was quite advanced in age and, after he read the obituary card, he approached the deceased’s two daughters and said, “Girls, you have your mother’s birth year as 1891. That is wrong. I know because I was born in 1895 and we used to date. She told me she was younger than I was.” Oh, oh! Looks like that grandma got busted for lying about her age decades after the fact!

 

Kate Duff, one of the volunteers at the Blyth Repository of History, has uncovered a fascinating story of a former Blyth family. Here are her findings.

 

“We announce the death of Sir Wm. H.G. Colles,” proclaimed the newspapers in October of 1880. “The late Sir Colles was knighted in 1851 A.D.… he was Lord Mayor of Dublin,” said the Goderich Star. “Sir Colles; Conveyancer, Solicitor in Chancery, and Attorney of the Law and Equity Courts of Ireland, Genealogist, Land, Loan, and Estate Agent, Life and Fire Insurance, and General Agent” was, per the Huron Expositor, “Blyth’s nobility,” who, before his death, travelled to Washington, D.C., where he was “presented to the President of the White House [Rutherford B. Hayes].”

 

Far from being one of Blyth’s most illustrious earliest citizens, though, he was one of its earliest charlatans. He was never knighted, nor was he Lord Mayor of Dublin. An enquiry to Julie Mayle, Curator of Manuscripts at the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library, confirmed that Colles visited Washington and left his calling card with the receptionist at the White House, but she could not uncover any evidence that he actually met the president.

 

So, who was William H.G. Colles, and how did he come to be known as Sir Colles? He was born March 30, 1803, in Dublin, Ireland, to an upper middle-class family of lawyers, doctors and churchmen. 

 

His father, Richard Colles, was a barrister - that is, a high-status lawyer “called to the bar” - as was his elder brother, Edward. His uncle and first cousin were professors of surgery at Trinity College, Dublin; another uncle, brother of his father’s first wife, was a baronet. No doubt his family expected similar success from William, and indeed he became a lawyer too, but, by 1856, he was still toiling as an ordinary solicitor in Dublin. 

 

Then, around 1859, when he was 56 years old, William, his wife Jane, and their seven children immigrated to Canada. Was this a voluntary move? Or was he exiled abroad by a family embarrassed by his inventive approach to the truth?

 

The 1861 and 1871 census reports show that the family settled in Bentinck Township in Grey County, where William first declared himself to be a solicitor and later, with his eldest son Thomas, a farmer. 

 

William may have seen the move to Blyth as the perfect opportunity to knight himself; perhaps he thought “Sir” would benefit his return to the business of law more than a simple “Esq.” And we can imagine that Jane must have enjoyed being called Dame or Lady Colles. 

 

William opened a law office on Queen St, while Thomas ran a stage coach company, including the mail route between Clinton and Wingham. William and Jane, who died in 1886, are buried in Clinton Public Cemetery; their headstone, erected by Thomas, omits their self-appointed titles.

 

Consider yourselves busted, William and Jane Colles.

 

Perhaps, in the information age that we now live in, it would be more difficult to perpetrate such fictional lives without the fear of being found out. On the flip side, considering the content on the internet and artificial intelligence, can everything we see and hear be considered the truth?