1790s

Leaders and Associates – the unique land grant system of early Lower Canada

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 1 Comment

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:

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Monday: Map Day! – A very early map of Stanstead, LC, landowners

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 1 Comment

Sorry for the late post. So much information, so little time to organize and interpret…

I’m back on the hunt for Jonathan M. Clark’s possible kin in Stanstead Township, and in the process also trying to master the land grant system, documents, and archives of Lower Canada in the early 1800s. For background to our search, you may want to read (or at least skim through) these posts:

It’s complicated, I don’t yet have a full grasp of the details, but I didn’t want Monday to pass without a new map to help guide us on our way. Today’s example may not seem like much at first glance, but it’s really quite special:

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Monday: Map Day! – Lower Canada, 1802, part 2

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 5 Comments

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? …

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Monday: Map Day! – Vermont, 1796

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 3 Comments

That was fun!

I enjoyed our recent look at early Mequon pioneers and Jonathan M. Clark neighbors (but not kin) Cyrus Clark and Sarah Strickland. I hope you did, too. I was particularly struck by how mobile Cyrus and Sarah were throughout their lives, even in the earliest years of the Wisconsin Territory. You’d think that after making their arduous treks from the Atlantic seaboard to the wilderness of late-1830s Wisconsin, Sarah and Cyrus might settle down and stay in Mequon for a while. But no, it was back and forth across Wisconsin, from Mequon to Potosi to Grafton to Moscow and then on to Madison, Dakota Territory, and then back and forth between South Dakota and Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

I also had a lot of fun learning something about early photographic techniques and historic attire and applying that new knowledge to the Cyrus and Sarah (Strickland) Clark family cabinet cards and tintype photographs. In the future I hope to apply these new skills for a fresh look at the few photos we have of members of the Jonathan M. Clark family.

Back on the JMC trail…

Speaking of the Jonathan M. Clark family, we still have some key mysteries to solve in the JMC timeline, the most important of which is: who were JMC’s parents and where was he born and raised? This is something that I have been working on for a long time, in collaboration with JMC descendant, and friend of the Clark House, Liz Hickman, Clark House museum director Nina Look, and others. In particular, Liz and I have gone through piles of information on Clark families in northern Vermont, New Hampshire, and southern Quebec, and I’d really like to take the time to collate and evaluate the information we have, and try to find Jonathan Clark’s roots.

So, time to head north, eh?

As we’ve discussed before, we have multiple authoritative, official, federal government documents in which Jonathan M. Clark stated he was born in Derby, Vermont. Or in Stanstead, Lower Canada. (It depends on which authoritative, official, federal documents you look at, of course!) And that brings us to today’s map:

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