Where everybody knows your name
From Smythe and Massey to the settlers of Willowdale, these descendants grew up in the shadow of fame
Anne Smythe, a Toronto artist, didn’t always appreciate her surname.
Her grandfather Conn Smythe fought in both world wars before taking up ownership of the Maple Leafs. He’s the namesake of the Stanley Cup’s top playoff performer trophy, he’s in the Canadian Horse Racing Hall of Fame and was known for his philanthropy.
“When I was growing up it was mortifying,” Anne, 61, said. “As soon as you said your last name, boys wanted to date me because they thought they could get hockey tickets. First thing they ever said was, ‘Oh, are you related to?’ ” Her stance has since changed. “It took a long time to be proud of it but I certainly am now,” she added. “But less and less people remember. It doesn’t mean anything to most people. You’ve got to be pretty old to go, ‘Oh, are you related to?’ ”
Her father, Hugh Smythe, was Conn’s youngest son and became the Leafs’ doctor. While she describes her kids as “rabid hockey fans,” Anne never fell in love with the sport.
“I wasn’t a great teenager, so they used to have to make me go,” she said, laughing.
Elizabeth Smythe Brinton, another of Conn’s granddaughters, grew up in Maple Leaf Gardens with her father Stafford — who became the team’s president.
“That was home,” she said of the Gardens. “I love being part of Leafs Nation. It means the world to me.”
Elizabeth describes Conn fondly: He was driven, obsessed with selfimprovement, compulsive about his farm and softened by his wife, Irene.
“He had such a pride in our military and his times serving with people shoulder to shoulder,” she said. “He thought Canada was just a fantastically wonderful country and that was rare in those times to hear that, but we heard it constantly.”
She credits him for giving to those in need and sending letters to religious leaders to ask for the names of people too proud to ask for a handout so that he could anonymously send them money.
But his good nature didn’t always show.
“He was, um, in control,” Anne described. “He wasn’t particularly warm.”
Thomas Smythe, the eldest of Conn’s great-grandchildren, remembers him differently. He recalls visiting the Smythe farm in Caledon on weekends until he was 10 and playing with the accessible chair that ran up the stairwell.
“He was just a really lovely old dude,” Thomas said, laughing and remembering his great-grandfather as someone who was youthful, had a great sense of humour and loved children, supporting charities like War Amps.
While Thomas — a television personality and designer — isn’t a huge hockey fan, his sister Christie is and they still have Conn’s season tickets to the Leafs.
Even three generations removed, he understands what it means to be a Smythe.
“The legacy of being Conn Smythe’s great-grandson is really actually one of service,” he said, pointing to Conn’s fortune left to his foundation — the board for which the Smythes now sit on — rather than to the family, in order to help support charities.
“He was a champion of the underdog,” Thomas said. “We were all raised with the sense of ‘you don’t get to be here if you don’t contribute to community and country.’ ”
“Maple Leafs stood for courage; they stood for being almost like heroes and gladiators in our midst. It stood for character. It stood for a lot. And we were all expected to live up to that as kids,” echoed Elizabeth. The Masseys have passed down their family names so often it can be hard to decipher Harts from Harts and Vincents from Vincents.
Raymond Massey’s grandfather (also Raymond) was the grandson of Hart Massey, one of Toronto’s builders and the man behind the agricultural equipment mammoth Massey Ferguson. Another of Hart’s grandsons, Vincent, was Canada’s first domestic-born governor general.
“I’m honoured to be named after the former governor general,” said Vincent Massey, great-nephew to Vincent Massey. “It makes me very proud.”
Their names live on through the historic Massey Hall, Massey St., Massey College, Hart House, and the hundreds of churches Raymond’s great-great-grandfather’s foundation helped build across the country.
The Massey Foundation took the money from Hart’s estate to “do things of social value, normally tied to education,” according to Raymond.
He recalls visiting Hart House as a teenager and flying from Vancouver, where his section of the family lives, to vote on the foundation’s board as his dad prepared to cede his seat to his children.
“It first served as a barracks in the war and now it’s a living, breathing institution that feels like a piece of Cambridge or Oxford,” he said of Hart House. “It’s such a cool place. I love it.”
Now 60, Raymond is the foundation’s co-chair and recently brought his niece on a visit to Toronto to tour through the family’s old mansion and its mausoleum at Mount Pleasant Cemetery.
“It is wonderful that there are institutions in the city that the family had a hand in developing,” echoed John, another of Hart’s descendants.
But Raymond admits his family’s history isn’t spotless. In The Massey Murder, author Charlotte Gray documented the story of an 18-year-old domestic servant shooting a Massey patriarch in 1915.
Once, at a party, someone also accused Raymond of being the descendant of an anti-Semite.
“I’d never met her before, she had figured out who I was and she came up to me and said, ‘Finally, I get to face a Massey. I just want to tell you that you ruined my family. My father was a Jew and he was fired from the Massey factory and our family went through extreme hardship afterwards.’ ” Raymond recalled. “And I said, ‘What, why, what’s going on?’
“I had no idea there might have been anything like that going on in the family.”
Still, while he now questions his family’s history, he’s proud.
“There may be some other things lurking in the background, I don’t know, but in general it’s a solid name that has done a lot of good things and some of that legacy is still continuing,” he finished.
And it will, he hopes, continue with his curious niece.
When Margot Rivers grew up in East York, her two older sisters went to school with two boys from around the corner.
And they were close, playing and fighting “all the time.”
What they didn’t know was that they were related, descendants of one of Toronto’s iconic names.
“It turned out it was my mom’s cousin’s two sons,” said Rivers. “All the time we were growing up, my mom’s aunt and her cousin would walk by our house. And they had no idea. It’s crazy.”
Decades later, Rivers was inspired by that coincidence — and her grandmother’s death in a mental institution before she was born — to look into her family history. Now she knows her story. She’s a Steele. Her great-great-grandfather was John Cussons Steele, whose name is on a street that runs more than 77 kilometres east-west across the top of the city she grew up in, dividing Toronto from York Region.
Steele was born in the Bond Lake area in 1837 and settled at the corner of what’s now Yonge St. and Steeles Ave., where he bought and ran the Green Bush Inn — meeting place for the Upper Canada Rebellion — and much of the land around it after his father Thomas died.
Rivers’ daughter now lives on Glass St. in Aurora, a few blocks from where Steele, her great-great-greatgrandfather passed away on Spruce St.
And Rivers wasn’t alone in her curiosity.
On Mortimer Ave. in the east end, Rivers grew up near another family namesake: Ferrier Ave.
Abigail Steele, J.C.’s granddaughter, married a Ferrier and settled much of what is now the Danforth (there was a ‘Ferrier Building’ before it became a Greek restaurant), Mimico and Islington.
Rivers, 55, and Deborah Ferrier, 65, have communicated online about their Steele ancestry.
Ferrier, too, has been doing research into their shared great-great grandfather.
“I’m Abigail Steele’s fifth-oldest grandchild,” Ferrier said proudly on a recent phone call before a family reunion. “We were here and helped build Toronto.”
Just south of Steeles Ave., descendants of the Cummer family have tracked their heritage to the founding of Cummer’s Settlement — later renamed Willowdale — and Cummer Ave., which starts on Yonge St., running east to Leslie St.
Tim Morris’s grandfather married Sarah Cummer, a descendant of Jacob Cummer, one of Toronto’s pioneers. Sarah’s father Samuel Cummer was the seventh child of David Cummer, who was the eighth of Jacob’s 14 kids.
Morris lived in Scarborough and Leaside before moving to the Beach. He has visited the various burial sites of his ancestors in Willowdale.
“They’re pioneers, those people,” Morris, 70, said.
The family’s history is enshrined in The Cummer Memoranda, a1911book that tracked how Jacob’s family arrived from Germany via Reading, Pa., in the fall of 1776 and built Willowdale, .
Jacob’s father, John, is said to have refused command of William Lyon Mackenzie’s forces in the Mackenzie Rebellion in 1837, according to the book. Written by Wellington and Clyde Cummer and published for private circulation, it stands as “a record of the progenitors and descendants of Jacob Cummer, a Canadian pioneer.”
Ian Cummer lives in Manitoba, where his grandfather Amos (another grandson of Samuel’s) moved. He too has a copy of the family book.
“It has been passed down for generations,” said Ian, 59, of his greatgreat-grandfather’s folklore.
One day, he hopes to visit the family’s two Heritage Toronto plaques at McKee Public School and on the northwest corner of Doris Ave. and McKee Ave., as well as the church Jacob donated land for.
Eunice Lucas, another of Jacob’s ancestors, has tracked her heritage through her grandmother Francis Cummer. Lucas got her copy of the memoranda from her father.
Now 62, Lucas was born in Toronto and moved to Windsor when she was 12.
She attended Meadowvale School and lived in a retrofitted two-room garage on Zaph Ave. with no plumbing. But she didn’t know of her family’s late-1700s roots in the area until she began her genealogy research.
“Everything he did was of the most substantial character, for he worked for good foundations,” the inside of The Cummer Memoranda’s first page reads.
For that, Lucas speaks fondly of Jacob, her “entrepreneurial” ancestor.
“My father was an entrepreneur, he had his own business. I . . . now have a couple of apartments that I rent out. My brother is an entrepreneur. It still runs in the lineage,” she said.
“Maple Leafs stood for courage; they stood for being almost like heroes and gladiators in our midst. It stood for character. It stood for a lot. And we were all expected to live up to that as kids.” ELIZABETH SMYTHE BRINTON ONE OF CONN SMYTHE’S GRANDDAUGHTERS