The scene above is A settler’s hut on the frontier, by W. H.Bartlett and R. Sands, published in London in 1841.¹ Based on the known locations of some of Bartlett’s other, similar images, published at about the same time, it is almost certain that the scene depicted was drawn from life in Lower Canada (modern day Québec), and possibly in or near Stanstead, or one of the neighboring Eastern Townships of Lower Canada.

The landscape, dwelling, and people in this scene would have been very familiar to young Jonathan M. Clark. They are the physical and human landscape of his first three decades of life—from about 1812 to 1831—in the vast and sparsely settled north woods of Stanstead, Lower Canada, and nearby Derby, northern Vermont.

I have been searching Vermont and Lower Canada for Jonathan M. Clark’s parents, possible siblings, or other kin for over seven years, and have not yet been able to identify any. As it’s been a while since the blog focused on JMC’s roots, I thought it was time to organize our previous research, publish new sources and findings, and see if we can get closer to locating the family of the builder and first occupant of Mequon’s 1848 Jonathan Clark House.

Where to (re)start?

I’ve written quite a few posts about JMC and the search for his family and early life in Lower Canada and northern Vermont, but it’s been a while since we’ve focused on the topic. So before I present new (to us) documents, maps and images related to the search for JMC’s roots, I thought I’d make an organized, lightly-annotated list of relevant, previously published Clark House Historian posts.²

Something like a biography…

The first stop on our JMC journey is a (now almost 3 years old) recap on what we do know about JMC’s life, and what we’d still like to discover³: Now, where were we? – the search for JMC’s roots. If you don’t click on any of the other links, click on that one and read carefully for a good overview of JMC’s life.

I speculated whether rampant disease in Stanstead might have affected JMC’s family in “Distressing sickness” – 1811, Lower Canada edition. In Back to School, 1831: JMC in Stanstead? we investigated whether a 19- or 20-year-old JMC attended school in Stanstead in 1831. And we scratched our heads trying to figure out whether the younger, Vermont-born, Arthur Clark living with the family in Mequon in 1850 was related to JMC, or not.

And though it’s well outside the events of his youth, we covered JMC’s demise in 1857: Disaster. Years later, a biographical sketch of JMC’s daughter Caroline (Clark) Woodward included some unique clues regarding JMC’s Revolutionary-era American ancestors; see Caroline M. (Clark) Woodward: a closer look at that 1893 biography for the tantalizing details.

Maps

Regular readers of the blog know that I like maps. Maps are particularly helpful in the search for settlers living in the Eastern Townships of Lower Canada (now Québec), because the district, county, township and other boundaries (i.e., the judicial districts) changed many times during the years we are most interested in (c. 1790-1840). Here is a chronological list of the maps of Lower Canada and Vermont that we’ve discussed, along with a few books and images that supplement them.

• Monday: Map Day! – Vermont, 1796
• Monday: Map Day! – Lower Canada, 1802. Lower Canada’s political geography is complicated. This map helps untangle the mess, part 1 of 2.
• Monday: Map Day! – Lower Canada, 1802, part 2. And this is part 2 of 2.
• Monday: Map Day! – A very early map of Stanstead, LC, landowners. A very early map of Stanstead, and I had more to say about this map about a month later:
• Monday: Map Day! – Diagram of Stanstead Township, c. 1800-1809
• Stanstead, 1815 — a portrait in words. The surveyor general of Lower Canada, Joseph Bouchette, wrote a book to accompany his great 1815 map of the province. Includes interesting background on Stanstead around the time JMC was about 3 or 4 years old.
• Monday: Map Day! – Lower Canada, 1815. This is Bouchette’s masterpiece. One of the great maps of all time. Lots of details of the Eastern Townships, too.
• Monday: Map Day! – Lower Canada ranges and lots . Using Bouchette’s big map of 1815 to come to grips with Canada’s “ranges and lots” system of surveying in the Eastern Townships.
• A view of Stanstead, Lower Canada, 1827. A charming scene drawn by the surveyor general, himself.

I have many more interesting historic maps in the pipeline, featuring all or parts of Stanstead, Lower Canada; Derby and Orleans Co., Vermont; and Grafton Co., New Hampshire. We’ll look at those as we get a better grasp of who-lived-where, and when, before and during the first decades of Jonathan Clark’s life.

Land records & early settlers (LAC & BAnQ)

Québec is awash in records of land grants, land sales & purchases and early settlers, going back centuries to when the province was at the center of France’s colonies in North America. There are vast numbers of records, and many of them have been digitized and made available at no charge at Library and Archives Canada (LAC) and Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, (BAnQ), for which we are grateful. But they are not fully indexed, and Canada’s systems of land grants, land sales, and governmental record-keeping—especially the complexities of the Québec’s French-style notarial system—are very different from the corresponding systems in the United States. I began to understand and explore the notarial system and documents in the late 2010s. I wrote about some of those early efforts in these posts from 2020:

• Leaders and Associates – the unique land grant system of early Lower Canada featuring info from an important, and hard to find, index of Lower Canada land grants. (I have since found a more legible copy, and I’ll be posting that soon.)
• Deep in the Documents – Searching for Clarks in early Lower Canada
• Monday: Map Day! – A very early map of Stanstead, LC, landowners
• Monday: Map Day! – Diagram of Stanstead Township, c. 1800-1809
• Monday: Map Day! – Lower Canada ranges and lots (this helps illustrate some of the concepts found in the previous posts, using Bouchette’s big map of 1815.

I’m still working through the notarial records and I’ll have more to say about some discoveries there in a week or two.

Books & Newspapers

There are not many books that cover early Stansted and northern Vermont history in depth. Two that I’ve discussed so far are:

• Your Weekend Reading: Forests and Clearings. This is, I think, the essential source for early Stanstead history and genealogy. See the post for details, including a link to a free, online copy. I’ll be referring to this in quite a few future posts.

• And on a more specialized track, Back to School, 1831: JMC in Stanstead? has unique information from Kathleen H. Brown’s detailed and indispensible Schooling in the Clearings: Stanstead 1800-1850, Stanstead Historical Society, 2001. ISBN: 0-9689485-0-2

Since writing about those two books, I have spent hours finding and reading other relevant genealogy and history books, several of which have information on early Clark families in the Eastern Townships, Vermont, and northern New Hampshire, including info about related Morrill/Merrill, Rix and Fox families. More on those families in upcoming posts.

I have access to several online repositories of historic newspapers⁴, and I have been spending a great deal of time looking for Clark and related Stanstead and Derby area news for the period 1790-1840. The coverage is spotty; some of these papers were short-lived, and many issues are missing from the archives. But I have found some interesting bits and pieces of genealogical and historical interest, and we will look at those also.

Census schedules

Lower Canada enumerated its first census in 1825. Like the US decennial censuses from 1790-1840, this 1825 census was a “head of household” census, and not an “every name” census. There were a number of Clark families in Stanstead and the adjacent townships in 1825 and we will be taking a closer look at them all.

The next Lower Canada census was in 1831, the same year JMC migrated to New York state. This was an every name census and had a very informative and exhaustive list of questions to be answered. Unfortunately, the schedules for Stanstead and several other Eastern Townships are missing from the Canadian archives and microfilms, and—sadly—appear lost for all time.

United States decennial census records for Vermont and New Hampshire go back to the first census in 1790. I have not blogged about these early, 1790-1840, “head of household” censuses for Vermont and New Hampshire because there were just too many Clark families in the area, and no information about which ones might be related to JMC.

I’ll soon be able to narrow the possible JMC-related Clark families down a bit and tie some of them to the early days of Anglo-American settlement in Lower Canada’s Eastern Townships. At that point we will want to go back to the Vermont and New Hampshire census schedules and see what we can find regarding Jonathan Clark’s supposed New England roots.

Military Records

We believe that JMC’s ancestors (father? grandfather? uncles? older brothers?) fought in the Revolutionary War and/or the War of 1812. I have access to U.S. military records—including muster rolls and pension files—via several sources, including Fold3.com that, in theory, might provide important information on any Clark kin that fought in either war.

The problem, once again, is that there were so, so many Clark men that fought in these wars. I’ve skimmed through a substantial fraction of these documents, but could not find a genealogical “smoking gun.” However, once we work through some of the genealogy sources discussed above, we might be able to narrow our sights on a more manageable number of Clark veterans that might be related to JMC.

And, to leave no stone unturned, we’ll also look and see if any Clark men went over to the British (Canadian) side in either conflict. There are lists of British/Canadian Loyalists to check, and other related documents as well. And did you know there were Clark men in the Stanstead militia during the short-lived Rebellions of 1837 and 1838? Yep, there were, and we have the details.

Vital records and cemeteries

Birth, marriage, death records for the period 1790-1840 are sparse and incomplete in Lower Canada and rural Vermont and New Hampshire. But some were created at the time, and a portion of those survive. The essential archive of birth, marriage and death/burial records in Québec is the Drouin Collection, which can be accessed through Ancestry.com ($). We’ll take a look at the records that still exist and see how those records may relate to JMC’s Clark family.

One substitute for non-existent civil or church-created death or burial records are published death notices in newspapers. We have a some of those to investigate. And when lacking written records, a look at the faded grave markers in the local cemeteries can be useful.

In fact, there is a Clark Cemetery not far from Derby Center, Vermont, and several friends have visited there and shared photos with me.⁵ There are eight identified Clark burials in that Clark cemetery, and I believe they are all related to a Revolutionary War veteran named Nathaniel S. Clark, Sr. Could Nathaniel S. Clark, Sr., be related to Jonathan M. Clark? That is an interesting question, and we will give it the full CHH treatment—with photos and, perhaps, a genealogical chart or two—in an upcoming post.

Onwards!

Sorry for the long and text-heavy post. It couldn’t be helped.

Think of this as the outline for several months of Jonathan M. Clark-centered historical and genealogical investigations and blog posts. Will we find JMC’s kin? I don’t know, but we’ll have fun trying.

Thanks for your interest and your support. I’ll see you soon with lots of new Clark House history.

______________________________

NOTES:

1. Bartlett, W. H. and R. Sands, A settler’s hut on the frontier, London, Geo. Virtue, 1841. Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ numérique, public domain).
   
   
2. FYI, after this post goes live, I’ll copy these annotated links to the blog’s (sadly neglected!) Index.
   
   
3. These are not, by any means, all the JMC-related posts on Clark House Historian. I have omitted most of the posts that chronicle his life after 1831, the year he left the Stanstead/Derby area and came to Utica, New York, followed by three years of U.S. Army service at Fort Howard, Wisconsin and, eventually, life as a farmer in Mequon.
   
   
4. I have access to digitized historic U.S. newspapers, including some early papers from Vermont and New Hampshire, via GenealogyBank.com ($), Newspapers.com ($) and the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America site (free). Surviving issues of the bilingual Quebec Gazette,and other early Québec papers are available from BAnQ numérique (free, but knowing a little French will help you navigate the site). If any readers know of other 1790-1840 Vermont, New Hampshire or Lower Canada/Québec newspaper sources, please advise. I’m still searching…
   
   
5. Thanks to Clark House friends and tireless workers & contributors Nina J. Look, Fred Derr, and Liz Hickman for photos and info about the Clark Cemetery near Derby, VT.