Happy New Year readers! It’s been awhile since I last posted, not because I haven’t been doing research, I have been, lots of it, I’m just not as good at getting it written down and shared. Since that part is as equally important as the research I’ll try to be a bit more consistent posting here on this blog for 2024. A fine new year’s resolution! The next few posts will be about the Moads on my mother’s side of the family. If you are related to me on my father’s side, I hope you’ll still read these posts. Thank you all for reading. ~ Kristine
I am fascinated with a branch of my family, the Moads, and have been doing a lot of research on them, which I will be sharing over a series of posts. They were the earliest of my ancestors who came to Canada. To me growing up, the Moads were a big unknown branch of the family that lived out west in Manitoba. However, like any family that immigrated to Canada before the west was settled, the Moads first landed in Ontario or Canada West as it was called before the 1867 Confederation, and Upper Canada before that[1]. William and Elizabeth Moad were early pioneers to Upper Canada. They were here by 1829 and may have come as early as 1822!
Who are the Moads? The Moad family comes from my maternal grandfather John Ashton Mayor’s mother’s line. Ida Violet, John’s mother, was a Moad before she met and married Harry Joseph Mayor in Manitoba; her parents were Alexander Moad and Jennie Govenlock. John’s middle name, Ashton, can be traced along his mother’s line, all the way back to the mid-eighteenth century to Ida’s great-great-great grandmother, Elizabeth Ashton who lived in the 18th century (1731-1786). Highlighted in red in the image below, Elizabeth married a Joseph Moad.
The story of the Ontario Moads begins with Ida’s great-grandparents, William Moad and Elizabeth Whitehawk (an adaptation of Whiteoak)[2]. William was born in South Cave, in Yorkshire England in 1783. Elizabeth was his third wife; his first two wives died young, most likely in childbirth. Elizabeth was born in 1801 in Carleton on Craven, also in Yorkshire. The couple’s first child was born in 1818, so they likely married the year prior, in 1817. William was eighteen years older than Elizabeth; she was sixteen when they married.
The above photographs are attached to the profiles of William and Elizabeth Moad on Ancestry.ca. I contacted the person who originally posted them, and unfortunately, he had done the research many years ago and could not remember where he got the photos. I typically do not use information with no source (unless it’s from a trusted family member), but I have kept these photos for William and Elizabeth. Even if it is not them; they are helpful when used as proxies in a family tree full of generic profile photos.
It is not clear when William and Elizabeth left England. As British subjects, they did not have to register upon arrival to Canada, therefore their entry date was not captured in the immigration records. Their names have also remained elusive on any records of ship passageways. It is possible that they came through the United States and spent some time living in upper New York state prior to coming to Ontario as there are unattributed records indicating that their daughters Margaret[3] and Maria were born in the United States in 1822 and 1826 respectively.
So far, little documentary evidence of their early lives in Yorkshire, England has been found, however, we can speculate about their lives before they came to Canada. We know that they were settled in Upper Canada by 1829, and possibly arrived earlier. This means that William and Elizabeth came near the beginning of what is called Britain’s Great Migration to Canada which began in 1815[4]. The impetus behind the exodus was multifactored as Britain was going through political, economic, and social upheaval. Of interest to us, are two interrelated macro forces that had implications at the village level and would have influenced the behaviours of individual families like William’s—enclosure and industrialization.
Enclosure was the process where communal lands used by peasants to grow their crops and graze their cattle for free, were privatized for the sole use of the landlord and his wealthy peers. This practice began in the 13th century and gradually escalated. In William’s generation, between 1760 and 1870, close to 4,000 enclosure acts were adopted by the British parliament, and the village where he was born was not spared—the South Cave Enclosure Act in 1785 was passed two years after William was born. As a tot, William would not have fully appreciated how his village was impacted by the large-scale transformation of land ownership, which saw peasants booted off the land where they had lived and worked for centuries and where long-established families, now homeless and unable to provide for themselves, left the village to seek work in cities or beyond Britain’s borders. By the time he was a young man and entered the world of work however, his employability would have been keenly affected by the depopulation of his and surrounding villages.
The second factor, which would have severe implications on conditions at the village level, was Britain’s industrial revolution. The hordes of available cheap labour—made up of those villagers who left rural areas due to enclosure—was a factor in the rapid expansion of industrialization. By the time William started employment, Britain was deep into its industrial revolution and its impacts had become apparent. It decimated the rural cottage textile industry where people traditionally weaved hand-crafted textiles at home. Their wares could not compete with the cheaper manufactured fabrics, leaving people without a way to support their families. Enclosure and industrialization were just two factors—albeit big ones—that were reorganizing British society. Conditions in the cities and the countryside were further aggravated by overpopulation, poor harvests, and fluctuating markets[5].
The effects of these factors likely played into why William and Elizabeth decided to leave England. William was a tailor, an occupation where he learned his trade over many years as an apprentice to a master tailor—the guilds were very powerful, and it was illegal to practice a craft in England without having served as an apprentice. If he entered into an apprenticeship agreement at the typical age of fourteen, he would have completed his training after seven years—in 1804—when he was 21 years old[6]. In 1804, it seems unlikely that William’s profession was threatened by industrialization itself. While the making of textiles was mechanized by this time, tailors would have still been in high demand as manufactured clothing did not take off until the 1840s. However, he faced a dwindling customer base and the villagers who did stay, faced unemployment and they would have curtailed their spending, thereby reducing William’s own income. Certainly, declining wages among all types of craftsmen was a hallmark consequence of industrialization, and it could be this economic factor alone that prompted them to leave England.
We know a little bit about South Cave, the village where William grew up. It is where his first two marriages were solemnized, and where we assume he was living and working when he married Elizabeth in about 1817. In 1821, around the time when they may have left England, the population of South Cave was 885. It was an important market village due to its proximity to the Humber River and it was larger than other villages in the neighbourhood, with more shopkeepers, traders, and craftsmen. Apart from the lord of the manor of South Cave, Mr. Banard who lived in the manor castle (today Cave Castle is a hotel), in 1823 there were “seven ‘persons of superior quality’, three teachers, two attorneys, five innkeepers, three blacksmiths, six shoemakers, two tailors, three wheelwrights, five butchers, two bricklayers, four shopkeepers, 14 miscellaneous traders, and 17 farmers”[7]. The two tailors in South Cave at this time were Matthew Moody and John Wandley. A third villager, Joseph Galland, was a shopkeeper and tea dealer who also provided tailoring services[8]. Interestingly, a witness to William’s parents’ marriage was Thomas Galland—could it be that one of the Galland family men took young William on as an apprentice? Assuming William completed his apprenticeship, he could have worked piecemeal from his own home, as an employee of Galland’s or in one of the other tailor establishments in the village, or possibly, he was a travelling journeyman who visited homes to complete a family’s seasonal clothing needs.
“South Cave, “12 <miles> from Hull; and 28 from York; situated in a hollow, from which probably it derives its name, is a small market and post-town, […]at the western foot of the Wolds, in a very pleasant tract of country, about three miles from the river Humber.” From the Directory & Gazetteer of Yorkshire, Vol. II East & North Ridings, 1823[9]. Image from Snazzymaps.com
By the 18th century, the making of clothing in Britain had specialized. A tailor or tailoress made men’s clothing (and also women’s outdoor wear, like cloaks and riding habits). Shirtmakers made men’s shirts, and dressmakers designed and made women’s clothing. Seamstresses sewed pre-cut cloth to make an item of clothing. There were separate craftspeople for gloves, stockings, and hats. Within tailoring, steps of the process were further specialized with sewers, pattern makers, cutters, and finishers.
A village or countryside tailor like William (or his employer) had a varied clientele. He might have been called upon by the wealthy estate landholder to make clothing, if not for the immediate family, then for his staff. His main business would have been making clothes at affordable prices for his middle- and working-class customers. The demand for tailoring was usually quite strong, considering that every single article of clothing—from one’s underlayers, shirts, and trousers, to outdoor wear like great coats and cloaks—was made by hand, using unforgiving textiles: cotton, linen, silk, velvet, or wool. The British wore tight fitting clothing, and much skill went into knowing how to mold wool into fashionable outfits that fit a person’s shape. Precise measurements were needed, and patterns had to be created before sewing even started. It could take weeks to complete a simple outfit. Clothing was a necessity, and its cost, whether the fees of a tailor or the materials to make homemade clothing, was not an insignificant household expense.
William would have been trained to make Regency style gentleman’s clothing what at the start of his career as a tailor. In the supposed photo of William above, he is wearing a topcoat, shirt and neck cloth.
The decision by William and Elizabeth to come to Canada (let’s face it, it was probably William’s decision alone) was probably a result of a few things. We know that the economic situation was not great in all of Britain but more so in the rural villages and there was the attractive pull of new opportunities from across the sea. William may have been struggling to make ends meet as a tailor in a small village where there were other prominent tailors. He had buried his first two wives and perhaps it was as simple as wanting a fresh start. Perhaps they were swept up in “America mania” that saw many families leaving their villages for greener pastures in Canada and the US. In South Cave, the number of families that emigrated peaked between 1829 and 1831—William and Elizabeth were at the outset of that wave. Buoyed by the positive reports by those who left earlier, emigrating to the Americas was seen as “a sure way to independence” with the promise of cheap land proving to be a strong incentive. Perhaps William and Elizabeth decided to join a few of her relations who also emigrated to Upper Canada around the same time—William Whiteoak and Robert and Hannah Whiteoak[10]. Whatever the reason, the couple left their home in Yorkshire to make a new start as an early pioneering family in Canada.
In the next blog post, we’ll follow the Moad family to where they settled in Kemptville, Ontario.
Current day Main Street in South Cave showing the town hall with the clock tower. Source: Paul Glazzard/Market Place, South Cave / CC BY-SA 2.0
[1] From 1791 to 1841 Ontario was known as Upper Canada and from 1841 to 1867 it was Canada West. The terms were used interchangeably. The earlies pioneers to Manitoba arrived in the early 1820s, but settlement of the west did not begin in earnest until the 1870s.
[2] In her publication, The Family of Sarah Jane Moad and Ralph Webster Burton, Margaret Aldridge writes, “Sarah Jane Moads’ parents appear to have eloped from England to come to the New World. Her mother (Bessie) Ashton was possibly the daughter of a Lord Ashton around Preston, England. Her father William was apparently, the gardener!!” Aldridge completed this genealogical research in 1989, prior to readily accessible records through genealogy sites like Ancestry and Family Search. She is mistaken in identifying Bessie Ashton as Sarah Jane’s mother and William’s wife. Sarah Jane’s marriage record to Ralph Burton identifies her mother as Elizabeth Whitaker (another adaptation of Whiteoak).
[3] Margaret was born in Ogdensburg, across the St. Lawrence River from Prescott, Ontario. Many couples living in the Upper Canada district of Johnstown went to Ogdensburg to marry rather than wait for the horseback circuit ministers to come through their village. Perhaps expectant mothers went to Ogdensburg for a similar reason, access to medical doctor or midwife.
[4] https://intriguing-history.com/great-migration-of-canada/#:~:text=Enclosure%20and%20mechanization%20of%20cottage,other%20areas%20to%20find%20work.
[5] Baehre, Rainer. “Pauper Emigration to Upper Canada in the 1830s” Histoire sociale / Social History Journal, Vol XIV, No 28, November 1981, p 340.
[6] While there are many master-apprenticeship agreements online (I found several for Moad’s, none so far, connected to our William Moad or his father), many agreements were informal and not registered with the guild.
[7] Crowther, Janice E and Peter A (ed.). The Diary of Robert Sharp of South Cave, Life in a Yorkshire Village 1812-1827, The British Academy, 1997, Introduction.
[8] Crowther, The Diary of Robert Sharp of South Cave, Map 5 South Cave Market Place, Introduction, p lvi.
[9] History, Directory & Gazetteer of Yorkshire, Vol. II East & North Ridings, 1823 fromUniversity of Leicester Special Collections Online https://specialcollections.le.ac.uk/digital/collection/p16445coll4/id/264138/rec/3
[10] I am trying to work out the relationship between Elizabeth (née Whiteoak) Moad and William Whiteoak and Robert and Hannah Whiteoak; there are many Whiteoaks in Yorkshire all with the same first names, making it difficult to untangle their web of a family tree.
Researching my Ancestors 