Here's a link to the 1901 Vancouver Island census, which lists John and Annie Norton on Saltspring Island: viHistory : Census Search.
Ruth Sandwell talks quite a bit about the Nortons. John was a Portuguese from the Azores who evidently arrived in BC in 1859 and pre-empted land on Saltspring in 1861. In 1867, when he was about 43, he married Annie Robinson, the daughter of Henry and Margaret Robinson. Henry was a black from Bermuda; Margaret was an Irishwoman.
Annie Norton bore her first child when she was just 12 years old, and went on to have 13 more. Apparently most of them lived and stayed on the family farm. In 1901 John Norton was 77 and Annie was 64—but among the family members as children of the head of the household were Pearl, aged 7; Grace, aged 4; and Joseph, aged 2.
This seems highly unlikely; the children were probably John and Annie's grandchildren. While John is listed as Portuguese and white, the rest of the family is listed as black.
Moreover, none of them is said to be able to read, write, or even speak English. Again, I can't believe this was the case. Norton was among the most successful farmers on Saltspring, dying in 1911 at age 88 with a considerable property. I just don't believe that the Nortons talked to one another (and the rest of the world) in Portuguese. Nor do I believe that John Norton could exploit the pre-emption system as well as he did if he was illiterate.
The answers may turn up in the next few weeks, or the Nortons may simply offer yet another mystery about the black pioneers.
Update: I think I've figured out the age discrepancy. For some reason, the census taker (or transcriber) got Annie's birthdate and age wrong. She was born in 1856, not 1836, in San Francisco; she must have been among the youngest of the black pioneers, since she arrived here in 1858.
She married John Norton in December 1873, at the age of 18. By then Norton was a widower, his first wife having died of TB. We can assume that she was the mother of Norton's son Emmanuel (born 1866) and Elizabeth (born 1868). Annie's first child would have been William, born in 1874.
She then went on to have 11 more children, the last of whom seems to have been Joseph Deblair Norton in 1899, when she was about to turn 43. She died in Ganges, SSI, on May 12, 1903, at 46.
Baptism records exist for all the children, and marriage records for some. Most of them have very ordinary names—William, Mary, Maud, Walter—but a child born in 1880 was named Gautherius.
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