Learning

What time was it in Wexford?

March 31, 2026 by Kathie Ross

With BC deciding to go to permanent summer time, there is a lot of interest, and a lot of discussion about time zones.

Part of my husband’s family comes from County Wexford in Ireland. If you lived in Wexford County in Ireland in the first half of the 20th century, you could have easily had four time zones to deal all within the same county. Large for an Irish County, but small compared to Canadian cities – according to Wikipedia, Wexford covers an area of 2,353 square kilometres, which is smaller than the metropolitan area of Vancouver at 2,878 square kilometres.

Up until the 19th century the clocks varied from place to place. However, as the railways and telegraph started coming into play, it was important to get everyone on the same schedule.

Dublin Mean Time

In 1880, Dublin mean time was created. Dublin mean time (DBT) was 25 minutes and 21 seconds later than Greenwich mean time (GMT)

Greenwich mean time

In 1916, that changed.

Great Britain decided to include “Summer Time”. In May 1916 when British Summer Time (BST) was introduced, At that time, Ireland was also being aligned with English time.

On Sunday, the first day of October 1916 the clocks changed. Britain at went back to GMT (when BST was ending), changing from 3:00 am to 2:00 am. Ireland changed its clocks to align with the rest of Britain. So, 25 minutes later, at 3 o’clock in the morning DMT the clocks in Ireland were to be set back 35 minutes to bring them to the same time as Great Britain (2:25 a.m.).

^{Meath Herald and Cavan Advertiser 12 Aug 1916}

Sort of…..

Many churches decided they would not change until Sunday night – so that nobody would be late for church.

Some people and places decided to stay on Dublin mean time.

Apparently, those in Wexford County (and likely many other areas of Ireland too – but this post is about Wexford) decided on a case-by-case basis whether or not they would be on the “new time”.

According to Mangan (as quoted in Morrison¹) Ireland now had four time zones.

Greenwich time
Greenwich time with summer time
Old Dublin time
Old Dublin time with summer time

To make matters more confusing, schools were advised to adopt the new time … but change the timings for everything by a half hour behind so that they were essentially working on the old time.

Generally towns moved to GMT, but not necessarily BST, and rural areas remained on DMT or GMT without BST.

And, even then, it wasn’t an easy transition for the towns. Enniscorthy decided, by a very close vote, to adhere to the old time (which is what they were now calling Greenwich time without summer time) in December 1916.

^{Free Press (Wexford) 09 December 1916.}

However, by April of the following year, Enniscorthy had embraced the new time with summer for businesses and factories. Churches were usually under the old time for Catholic churches and the new time for Protestant churches.

All of these new time / old time differences required newspapers to indicate whether something was taking place in old time or new time.

Some businesses took advantage of the confusion to increase the workload of their employees.

An ongoing issue

Problems with these different time zones did not end soon. In the 1930s there was an appeal on a football game as one team did not show up on time and forfeited the match.

And things continued to be different into the next decades. Time was still and issue in a 1954 court case where some witnesses provided their information as “old time”.

Eventually, 40 years after summer time was introduced, Castlebridge in Wexford decided to adopt it.

It seems eventually, everyone aligned with the new GMT and BST.

Morrison, Eve (2020). Fighting time : temporality, time reform and the Irish Revolutionary present. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:0d09613f-ccf3-4d80-aba2-bfcdf6340ac5/files/sj38607432 : accessed 30 March 2026. ↩︎

Picture Puzzle Solved

September 27, 2025 by Kathie Ross

More than a year and a half ago, in a previous post, I was attempting, without success, to determine whether this picture was of Rose Mary DALE and John YOUNG or her sister Martha Dale and Patrick McFAUL.

Although I was leaning towards Rose Mary and John, I could not be 100% sure. Particularly as the McFAUL family had published the picture in a newspaper article as “Buckingham’s first marriage”.

I left it with the thought that I would contact both sides of the family looking for another picture of either John YOUNG or Patrick McFAUL in order to make a comparison.

I contacted many relatives through Ancestry on both sides of the tree that had posted the picture. Both sides inevitably said the same thing. “I don’t have any other pictures, but I know we are right”.

Well, someone was sure to be right – but which side of the family was mistaken.

Finally, I managed to contact the the right person.

Denise WALKER, a third cousin through Rose Mary and John had this wonderful picture posted, of her grandfather as a small child with his grandfather. She has kindly given me permission to use it.

^{John Young and his grandson John Young}

Looking at the two pictures, there is no question that the couple in the first picture are Rose Mary and John. Puzzle solved!

So, we can take two genealogy research lessons to take from this:

Don’t believe what you see in the newspaper without other backup.
Keep looking and trying to find corroborating evidence. It may eventually happen, like it did here.

Happy researching, I’m on to my next puzzle.

Cedarvale / Meanskinisht genealogy

June 7, 2025 by Kathie Ross

Sometimes I want to save stuff as a page rather than a blog post. Usually when it relates to my ancestors. So I have pages of ancestor histories. However, I also have pages of family history information when it pertains to more than one ancestor. Mostly this is so that I can find it easily rather than searching through my blog.

The page on Meanskinisht / Cedarvale is one of those pages.

The village of Meanskinisht, as it was first named when settled, and is now so named again, is unique in British Columbia (BC) and perhaps in Canada. During the latter half of the 19th century the BC government was in the process of establishing reserves for all Indigenous people. The purpose of these reserves was to set aside very small tracts of land for Indigenous and leave the majority of the land available for the settlers. Meanwhile, setters had started the process of pre-emption of land. Pre-emption of land is where a settler could gain ownership of the land from the federal/provincial government for agriculture purposes (it usually involved a requirement to improve and cultivate the land). Meanskinisht, established in 1888, is the only place in BC that was established as a combined village of both Indigenous and settlers with Indigenous leasing, then owing their land. It was also not the same as Hudson Bay Company’s establishment of the Red River Settlement where they purposely encouraged their lower-class trappers to inter-marry with the Indigenous for economic gain and diplomatic alliances, which resulted in the Métis.

I completed a review of the genealogical sources that are available for Meanskinisht from the establishment of the village to the latest census available for Canada (1888-1931). I did this as as part of my course work in the Post-Graduate Diploma in Genealogical, Palaeographic and Heraldic Studies. I thought the information was informative and decided to create a page with the information.

You can read all about it on this page on my website .

Published Genealogies are not always right

May 3, 2025 by Kathie Ross

You can’t always trust what you read. Especially with genealogy where new records and information are coming out all the time. In this case, I had to refute information that was published in more than one book – both genealogical books and history books of the area in Nova Scotia.

Because genealogy records are constantly becoming available even records that have been carefully researched may only be accurate to the time they were completed. My own work is included in this, so if you find more information, by all means let me know.

I was doing some research on the loyalist line of my 1C1R and ran into a problem. Samuel Meek Senior who died in 1846 had left a wonderful will listing all of his children that were alive and a few of his grandchildren. He left Samuel, son on William, three ewe lambs. He gave each of his other grandchildren named Samuel or Bathsheba one ewe lamb – telling us that he had more than one grandchild named Samuel. He also left Winnifred and Bathsheba, daughters of William, his bedding.

That was good news to me, as I was working on the hypothesis that our Samuel was the son of William.

Our Samuel was married to Eliza Mary Beach and the father of Richard Marshall Meek. I had no documents to establish his birth, death or marriage, except the death notice in the newspaper in 1898 confirming he was a United Empire Loyalist descendant. This put him to be born in approximately 1814.

The first wrong Samuel

The problem was that the published books had Samuel Meek, who married Bessie Dimock, was the son of William. I call him the Samuelx1.

First, I wanted to established that Samuelx1 had not lived in Canning, Kings County. Starting backwards from the 1891 census, we can see the age of our Samuel on the census approximately matches our Samuel. Samuelx1 would have been about 20 years younger.

Going back further through the censuses, the age was confirmed right back to the 1951 census still in Kings County.

As these all connected to our Samuel, it appears that Samuelx1 never lived in Kings County. I then checked the censuses for Rawdon County and found Samuelx1 living there in 1871 with his wife Bessie on the same farm as John and Eliza. This would give the impression that there was a strong family relationship with John and Eliza. This was confirmed by the 1891 census where Eliza was listed as John’s mother.

To be 100% sure I ordered Samelx1’s death certificate from Belmont, Massachusetts.

The second wrong Samuel

This confirmed that his father was John, not William. However, this lead to another problem as the published records had a different Samuel as being the son of John. That Samuel, we’ll call him Samuelx2, had married Clara Curtis.

With a child named “Bordman” that gave us a great place to start. Always have to love unusual names when your are doing genealogy reserach. Bordman died in 1930 and his parents are listed as Samuel E. and Caroline.

Checking on another of the listed children, Stephen Curtis was born in 1870 and his parents were Samuel Edmund Meek and Carrie E Curtis. The name of Samuelx3’s wife was most likely Caroline or Carrie, but she has definitely been referred to as Clara in some documents.

On the 1871 census, we can find Samuelx2 living with Clara, Bordman and Stephen, among others. They are living with Stephen Meek. As mentioned before, while not definitive, it is normally an indication of a close familial relationship.

The death record for Edmund Samuel Meek in 1898 in Peabody, Massachusetts, confirmed that Samuelx2’s father was indeed Stephen.

The Samuel grandchildren

Other information, that I won’t go into here, confirmed that none of the others sons of Samuel Senior had children named Samuel. I am able to therefore confirm that there were three grandchildren named Samuel and that our Samuel is the son of William.

Published genealogy records are like any other genealogy records. They can be used, but must be verified by other sources.

For this project, I was happy, our Samuel could be connected where I thought he should be connected.

Tracing the United Empire Loyalist

September 3, 2024 by Kathie Ross

In general, the United Empire Loyalists were those who had been settled in the 13 colonies at the outbreak of the American Revolution, who remained loyal to the British crown and took up the Royal Standard, and who settled in what is now Canada at the end of the war.

The above quote comes from the United Empire Loyalist Association of Canada (UEL). As a genealogist, I was excited to learn that my grand daughters were possibly related to a United Empire Loyalist. Those that can prove they descend from a loyalist are entitled to use UE (for Unity of Empire) after their name. This is the only inherited post-nominal in Canada.

So, away I went to start my tracing of descendants backwards through time. It’s a little more work than accepting hints through Ancestry (which I would never do BTW), and it was a lot of fun. I wasn’t alone in my endeavour as the UEL Victoria branch genealogists were awesome in suggesting additional avenues to explore and helping me to find documents and fill out the forms.

The first three generations were easy – they are all alive. It meant that I (or actually they) could order the long form birth certificates from the BC Vital statistics. Of course, the BC government wants their pound of flesh for that.

Back one more generation and we were still spending money. That was because, in this case, we were able to get another long form birth certificate. This time for their great-grandfather. As he has not yet been deceased for 20 years nor born more than 100 years ago, I won’t show you that document here.

For the next generation we moved to his mother – Ida Bernice JACKMAN, I was able to locate a British Columbia Death Certificate which nicely showed both of Ida’s parents. This gave us the name of Ida’s mother Jessie. (For all women, I am referring to them using their birth names, not their married names.)

Jessie Eustace PRESTON is a nice, fairly unique, name. I was able to locate her Ontario birth record, which provided the names of both her parents including her mother Mary Jane BOYNTON.

To locate the parents of Mary Jane BOYNTON, I located another death record from BC and supplemented that information with a marriage record from Ontario. Her mother was Sarah GHENT.

Sarah GHENT was the only generation where I needed to provide a genealogy proof as the documents did not provide a direct link to her parents. Her marriage records did not indicate the name of her parents.

Her death record also lacked detail and no birth or baptism record could be located.

Therefore, I needed to establish who her parents were. So, I began a search in the place where they got married – the township of King in County York of what is now Ontatio. I searched for all the marriages with the last name GHENT in a 10 year time frame on either side of Sarah’s marriage [for those who think I wouldn’t have done this for the last name Smith, you are wrong, I would have, it just would have taken longer]. A few of those marriages included the parents named William GHENT and Mary FONGER.

From that, I looked for more possible children of William and Mary. The one thing that all of the children had in common is that they were either married or born in King.

Then I built a family tree of all of the suspected children of William and Mary GHENT to see if the birth dates of the children could all fit into one family tree.

Sarah GHENT in the middle of the family and fits quite nicely with the others.

Land records from Ontario showed that William GHENT had owned property in King Township since 1821.

Adding to that, the directories from 1837 and 1847, surrounding the year 1841 when Sarah married, indicated only one GHENT (William) living in King at the time.

Success, we have established that the most likely parents of Sarah GHENT were William GHENT and Mary FONGER.

To prove the connection from William GHENT to the next earlier generation we were lucky enough to find land records that explicitly spelled out the connection.

William GHENT … eldest son and heir of Thomas GHENT and Elizabeth GHENT his wife … the said Elizabeth GHENT being a daughter of William DAVIS Senior an U.E. Loyalist.

That pretty much also covered my last two generations, but wanting to be thorough, I found land records for Elizabeth and Thomas that included and affidavit by the Clerk of the Peace confirming their marriage. Elizabeth’s headstone (found on FindAGrave) also confirmed her maiden name as DAVIS.

^{Notice she doesn’t actually get a name – is only the “daughter of”}

The last step was to confirm that William Davis was indeed on the UEL lists, which he was.

And, just like that (don’t you wish it happened as fast as on the TV shows), we have 11 generations linked from my granddaughters to their eighth great-grandfather William Alexander Davis.

If you are interested in learning more about William Davis and his daughter Elizabeth and her husband Thomas, you can find a great article from the Hamilton Branch of the UEL.