Pioneers

Surprises about the Norton family

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.

Getting into Saltspring

I've added some links to Ontario sites related to the underground railroad. They're not directly related to the book, but it's clear that BC's pioneers were very much involved in the politics and debates that energized Blacks in the decades before the Civil War.

The Cariboo chapter is finished, though I expect to revise it as more information becomes available. I'm now getting into the story of the Saltspring Island settlers, and finding that Ruth Sandwell's book has some absolutely extraordinary material. The Saltspring story is far more complex—and violent—than I'd realized. Sandwell sees events far differently from the way I did, and has the evidence to back up her arguments. So this chapter will see quite a few changes from the first edition.

Who was Rebecca Gibbs?

I've been asking myself (and others) that question for several days. In the first edition, I mentioned Mifflin Gibbs's younger brother Isaac P. Gibbs and his wife as living in Barkerville. He's mentioned as one of the blacks who suffered losses in the 1868 Barkerville fire, while "Mrs. R. Gibbs saved her things, but lost her house."

I quoted one of Rebecca Gibbs's poems in that edition, and in Bluesprint we have two...plus Wayde Compton's brief biography of her, giving her birthdate as 1808 and her death (in Victoria) in 1873. If the birthdate is correct, she was too old by 20 years to be a likely wife for Isaac, who was born in the late 1820s.

The surname may be a complete coincidence, but I hope to find out more about this person.

Some new information

I've received some photocopied materials from Oberlin. The items on the Gibbs family are a little disappointing: old newspaper clippings, mostly about Mifflin and adding almost nothing new to what I already know about his family. Still, some of it will help.

The materials on the Jones brothers are fascinating. I'd confused two of the brothers, William and Elias Toussaint, who both lived for a long time in Barkerville. William (Oberlin 1857) was a gold miner and dentist, the famous "Painless Jones." His brother Elias (Oberlin 1859) was also a gold miner. Elias spent a quarter-century in Barkerville before returning to Oberlin, where he died in in 1917 at 84. It's not clear where and when William died, but I have much more to go on.

Unfortunately, the Oberlin material has nothing new about Maria Alexander Gibbs, so I'm left to speculate on how and when she met Mifflin.