Tales from the shoebox
Tech executive from Hamilton discovers Irish roots and wants to help others do the same
St. Patrick’s Day has come and gone, but I have an Irish story that can’t wait till next year.
As most probably know, millions of Canadians descend from ancestors in Ireland, which explains much of the enthusiasm about celebrating March 17 each year.
But the details are often murky about exactly where the forebears came from, when they left and how they got here.
Yet, with some resourcefulness and a little luck, a family tree can be successfully recovered from the fog of time.
A particularly interesting example of this involves a fellow named Tom Jenkins who has done all that and more. He’s co-authored a new book called “Shoeboxes” — with Irish historian Kevin Lee — that’s part of a larger effort to help connect countless thousands of Canadians to their Irish roots in the same County Wicklow where his ancestors came from.
Jenkins is a wealthy businessperson who was born and raised in Hamilton. He went to Cathedral High School and McMaster University, among other universities. After graduating, he went into the tech sector where he achieved fantastic success in Waterloo as CEO and more recently as chair of OpenText, one of the biggest tech companies in Canada. He is a former chair of the National Research Council.
He’s been chancellor of the University of Waterloo and is also an Officer of the Order of Canada.
And even though the 63-year-old has lived in Waterloo for many years, he still thinks of himself as a Hamiltonian.
“You can take the boy out of Hamilton, but you can’t take the Hamilton out of the boy,” he says.
But what he’s discovered more recently is there is also a strong current of Irish that runs through his veins. He’s always known it was there to some extent. He just wasn’t sure where the headwaters were.
About five years ago he travelled to the Emerald Island to learn that his great-great-great grandparents, William and Anne Wall (nee Loughlin), and their three children, emigrated in 1849 from a place called Coollattin Estate in Wicklow. The 36,422-hectare estate, about 100 kilometres south of Dublin, was owned by Earl Fitzwilliam. The estate had thousands of tenants living on small farms.
Amid the great potato famine of the late 1840s, more than 500 families left the estate for southern Ontario.
In recent decades, historian Lee, in Ireland, has connected with descendants from 50 of the families that made the journey. Their stories are told in the book.
Now, Lee and Jenkins are on a quest to find kin from the remaining 450 families (about 6,000 people). They believe there could be more than 200,000 descendants in
Ontario from the families that left the estate 175 years ago.
The authors have been spreading the word through an eight-city southern Ontario book tour that included a stop in Hamilton on March 11. They’ve also created a website at shoeboxesbook.com where people can learn more about the project and purchase the book.
When Jenkins went to Ireland in 2018, he literally started by knocking on doors. He ended up meeting Lee in County Wicklow, “and Kevin took me right to the abandoned farmhouse that my family left. It was incredibly emotional to see.”
Jenkins also connected with a relative who had a shoebox with letters from Hamilton.
“I learned that many of my cousins had been carrying on a correspondence for 200 years with Wicklow. My family is a big family, and they don’t necessarily tell each other what they are doing,” he says.
That’s where the title for the book came from.
Items of family history — such as records of baptism, wedding certificates, letters, photographs and
other memorabilia — are often kept in shoeboxes. But the main reason for the book, he says, is “so all the families could learn about this. We wanted to tell the story of the 50 families in hopes that we could find the other 450.”
Lee says meticulous records were kept by the estate that provide a wealth of information for genealogical research. During the famine, the landlord Fitzwilliam financially assisted families in leaving Ireland and finding new lives in Canada.
Lee says as landowners go in Ireland in the 1800s, the Fitzwilliams were very benevolent. And while many of those emigrating from Ireland
found themselves on “coffin ships” that were horribly dangerous, the Coollattin refugees fared much better on ships such as The Bridgetown which was notable for quality and safety, he said.
But it was still a perilous journey that took about six weeks.
And there were dangers after the arrival.
There were requirements at Grosse Île, and other locaquarantine tions along the St. Lawrence that became notorious for spreading typhus or cholera.
That’s what Lee and Jenkins believe happened to three children of his Wall family ancestors. They died in Kingston of an infectious disease that, given the incubation period and the timing, must have been contracted after arriving in
Canada.
The names Ann, Abraham and Charles are remembered on a gravestone at a Wall family plot at Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Bur- lington, Jenkins says.
Another Hamilton family fea- tured in the book is the Ormonds, although they emigrated from Ire- land more than a half century after the famine.
Among the descendants are Peter Ormond, a local environmentalist who has run as a Green Party candi- date in numerous provincial and federal elections in the past. His late uncle, Jerry Ormond, was a long-time journalist at The Hamilton Spectator.
Between 1905 and 1911, a group of Ormonds — that included Mary (Mol), Jane, William, and Margaret
— made their way to Corktown in Hamilton after first landing at Ellis Island in New York.