I’m still on the hunt for the elusive parents and kin of Jonathan M. Clark. Based on what we know so far, we are looking in the area of Derby, Orleans County, Vermont and its northern neighbor Stanstead Township, Lower Canada, circa 1800-1830 or so.

There are so many documents to read and sort through in order to get a grasp on the various Clark families that pioneered this area. Our Canadian friends had a land grant system that was quite different from our U.S. system, and this has taken time to get used to. Happily, most of the original paper files have been digitized and made available for free (thanks, Library and Archives Canada!), but the organization of the files remains confusing (why do there seem to be so many duplicate images in many of the files?), and the LAC’s user interface makes browsing slow and cumbersome. That said, we are making progress.

Here’s today’s map:

Last time, we continued our search for possible kin of Jonathan M. Clark in Lower Canada by looking at a map found in the Lower Canada land petition archives. Please take a moment to peruse that post and look at the manuscript map of Stanstead Township, Lower Canada from the very early 1800s.

That map was contained in the land petition file of one of Stanstead’s earliest and largest landowners, Isaac Ogden. The Lower Canada Land Petition archives are a tremendous resource for studying the early settlement of the province, but the files are often very large. And, for those of us accustomed to the system of federal land patents used in the United States, the Lower Canada land petition and land grant system is sufficiently different that it may be hard to understand and navigate.

Today’s post will focus on one element of that system in particular, the unique, and often corrupt land petition practice known as the system of township leaders and associates. It has a complicated history, so rather than paraphrasing, let me quote at length from the official provincial report that I discussed in an earlier post, the List of lands granted by the crown in the province of Quebec, from 1763 to 31st December 1890, printed by order of the Quebec Legislature by C.-F. Langlois, Printer to Her Most Excellent Majesty the Queen, Quebec, 1891, beginning on page 7:

I’m working on some longer posts, so I thought you might enjoy this image of a hand-colored lithograph from 1827. It’s a view the village of Kilborn’s Mills, Stanstead, Lower Canada, as seen from the south side of the international border, near Derby Line, Vermont. It’s very likely that the 15- or 16-year-old Jonathan M. Clark would have known this scenery, village, bridge, and border crossing:

Still getting our bearings at the turn of the 19th-century

As we discussed in a few weeks ago, if we’re going to find Jonathan M. Clark’s kin in the early-1800s, we need to know where to look. Lower Canada—one of JMC’s two “official” birth places—has a very long and complicated history. For a decent summary, you can skim this article, and then be sure to look at part 1 of this post. In part 1, I wrote that “we only need to understand a few basic places and dates, all centered around the modern Canadian Province of Quebec, or as it was known from 1791 to 1841, Lower Canada.”

Well, I was wrong. Because “a few basic places and dates” seriously underestimates the complex and changing nature of place names and legal boundaries in Lower Canada during that period. So today I’m going to take another look at the 1802 Lower Canada map and point out some additional places and terms that will be useful in locating Clark-related documents created in the English-speaking part of the province at the turn of the nineteenth century. So, remember this map? …

Getting our bearings at the turn of the 19th-century

If we’re going to find Jonathan M. Clark’s kin in the early-1800s, we need to know where to look. Lower Canada—one of JMC’s two “official” birth places—has a very long and complicated history. For a decent overview, start here.

One point to keep in mind is that “Canada” as a unified, completely self-governing nation is a fairly recent creation. At the beginning, Canada, like all of the Americas, was heavily populated by a large number of Indiginous Peoples, representing many cultures, language groups, and political alliances and rivalries. For the first several centuries of European contact, Canada consisted of a number of colonies and provinces governed at different times by various European nations and one very large area controlled by a for-profit fur trading company (still famous for retailing woolen goods).

That’s a lot of history to catch up on. But to get started, we only need to understand a few basic places and dates, all centered around the modern Canadian Province of Quebec, or as it was known from 1791 to 1841, Lower Canada: