William Mackenzie Roberts, the second son of James Mackenzie and Phoebe Roberts, was born on 8 May 1852 – at 30 West Square, Southwark, according to an announcement of his birth in the Essex Standard, 28 May, although at Heath Cottage, Dedham, Essex, according to his obituary in 1920.

He was at Heath Cottage, aged nine, when the 1861 census was taken, but does not appear in subsequent UK censuses. There is a good reason for this – William had left the family for good and emigrated to Canada. The 1901 Ontario census gives the date of his arrival in Canada as 1883. The next census, 1911, also gives it as the 1880s. However he had already appeared on the 1881 Ontario census (which didn’t ask for the date of arrival in the country) and had married, at Hamilton Township, Ontario, on 1 November 1876, so he must have arrived in the country before that.

From an analysis of ships’ passenger lists, the most likely answer is that he landed at the Port of Quebec on 31 May 1869 in the steamship Cleopatra, run by the Temperley Line. A sixteen-year-old William Roberts (no middle initial is given), travelling alone, is included on the passenger list for this voyage. William was in fact just seventeen: his birthday had been five days before the Cleopatra embarked from London’s capacious Victoria Dock. (If this is indeed him, he had a lucky escape: three months later the Cleopatra was wrecked off the Newfoundland coast – forty-three years later, the Titanic would go down in the same icy location.)

Newspapers of the day reported a ‘distressing spectacle’ at Victoria Dock on the morning of Thursday, 13 May 1869. ‘The spectators who thronged the quays to watch the tardy process of warping out of the basin equalled in numbers the emigrants themselves,’ wrote the Daily News (14 May). ‘The latter seemed very jubilant at the prospect before them, and their relatives and friends ashore proportionately depressed and tearful.’ Surely William Mackenzie’s parents were among the lamenting crowd lining the quayside in the cool early summer weather, as the Cleopatra puffed away on the noonday tide?

On board was a motley collection of passengers. Most of them (240 it was estimated) were unemployed East End labourers and their families, some of whose passages were assisted by the British and Colonial Emigration Fund. Also aboard was a party of sixteen souls from Portsmouth who had brought along their vicar to wave them off. Elsewhere on the ship, it was noted, was a small cage containing a variety of English songbirds.

A group of eighteen teenage boys also appears on the list. It is tempting to assume William was one of them and that this explains why one so young was journeying to Canada without his family – technically he was still a child, although those over twelve were counted as adults by the shipping company. However, as The Times reported (14 May): ‘Among those going out are 18 boys from the Refuge for Homeless and Destitute Boys in Great Queen-street’ who were, as the Daily News put it, ‘conspicuous by the dress by which they are known in the metropolis’. They were Home Children, heading for a new and hopefully prosperous life in Canada.

William, whose occupation appears to be given as ‘farmer’ on the passenger list, was also bound for a new life but was clearly not with that party. He, or perhaps his father, could afford a cabin, which would have set him back around £10 10s. Those who were unable to obtain assisted passage would have paid £6 6s to be crowded together in steerage, which is where the Home Children were, along with the East End families. Conditions were notoriously awful. Before embarkation, they could purchase a ‘ship kit’ for around 7s 6d, according to quality, which included a ‘Mattress, Water Bottle, Wash Basin, Tin Plate, Drinking Mug, Knife and Fork, Spoons, and Marine Soap’.

Most passengers travelled in steerage so William’s cabin companions on the voyage were few in number: Maria Marriott and her two infants; a young spinster, Eliza Gattin; Mary Johnson and her three children; and Harry Nicolls, a twenty-eight-year-old merchant. One can imagine Maria or Mary might have kept a motherly eye on the seventeen-year-old William during the the eighteen-day voyage.

Oddly, when William married in 1876 he was unable or unwilling to provide the registrar with his own mother’s name, so the marriage entry gives just his father’s name where both should appear. Is this a clue to why he emigrated? Whatever the circumstances of his emigration, how daunting must have been the prospect of such a journey for a lone seventeen-year-old from rural Essex. The National Emigration Aid Society published a penny guide for those embarking on such a voyage as this. Emigrants to Canada were warned to ‘avoid crimps [tricksters who coerced the vulnerable into military service], touters, and all other land-sharks, who wait for you upon arrival by train, &c., and who look upon emigrants as safe prey for plunder.’ What arrangements had been made for William’s arrival? Where did he head after setting foot in the country?

By the late 1870s William had settled at Cobourg (population: circa 5000), 100 miles along the Lake Ontario shoreline from Nelson, not far from Toronto. He married Jemima (or Mary Jemima) Anderson at the Presbyterian church in Hamilton township. She was a Scottish emigrant from Forfar, the daughter of Alexander Anderson (died 1868), and was a Presbyterian. She had landed at Quebec with her mother, Lilly (née Walker, 1818–1903) and siblings, on the Damascus just a few days before William.

They lived at Cobourg, a significant harbour town built on the railway, which no doubt offered plenty of work opportunities. In 1876, when he married Jemima, William’s occupation was given as ‘miller’. Perhaps he worked at Cobourg’s four-storey Ontario Woolen Mills on Factory Creek, which employed around 170 people and manufactured exclusively tweed goods. Could he have met Jemima here? Alternatively there were other mills: saw mills, carding mills, grist mills, oatmeal mills (see here). William could have worked at any of these.

In 1880, on the birth record of his daughter Maria, William’s occupation was given as ‘dealer’, however between 1881 and 1911 he is listed as a ‘house carpenter’ in Cobourg (at D’Arcy Street or the Agricultural Grounds?).

Did William ever see his parents or his brothers and sister again after leaving London? It’s unlikely, given the length of time it took to cross the Atlantic and the cost of doing so. His mother died in 1880 and his father in March 1890. He surely wouldn’t have been able to attend their funerals. William wasn’t forgotten by his father, though, who included him in his will.

Annie Anderson Roberts

Annie was born in Cobourg on 9 August 1877. On 26 June 1901 she married the twenty-four-year-old bachelor Andrew Boyd (or Andrew Byrd) Wood, an Irish baptist, born in Quebec, on 21 March 1876 (and living with his widowed mother at Port Hope, Ontario, when the census was taken earlier in 1901). Annie and Andrew were married at Northumberland, Ontario and lived at Wellington Street, Lindsay, Ontario.

Wood’s skill was as a tinsmith. In 1908 was in charge of the plumbing department of the firm of Boxall & Matthie (stoves, hardware, etc.). They had been married barely seven years when Wood collapsed with a paralytic stroke, whilst measuring for a new heating plant at St Andrew’s church, Lindsay. He died seven weeks later, on 3 May 1908, aged thirty-one. This must have been a terrible blow for Annie.

After her husband’s death Annie moved back to the family home at Cobourg. She was the informant for her mother’s death there in January 1920. She did not remarry and had no children of her own, as far as I can see. In 1921 she appears to be living on her own on King Street, Cobourg, her occupation given as nurse.

Maria[h] Mason Roberts

Maria Mason was born in Cobourg on 22 October 1880 and named presumably after her late grandmother, William’s mother, Phoebe Simson Maria (née) Mason, who had died in the spring of that year, back in England.

She married Samuel Bell Warren (1877–1928), an Irish ‘cutter’ (possibly a glass cutter), on 6 June 1906. Maria’s sister Annie and her husband Andrew were witnesses at the wedding.

When the 1911 census was taken, Samuel was working for a glass company in Toronto and their address was 18 Larch Street, Toronto (curiously Samuel’s wife was given as Ida but unless this was a nickname, this is clearly a mistake, as Maria was certainly still alive). By 1921 they were at 680 Indian Road, Toronto and Samuel was a salesman. When he died in July 1928 he was listed as a traveller in the tile industry. Maria died after 1940.

Samuel and Maria had three sons and one daughter, described in the census as Irish Presbyterians, like their father. They were:

Wilfred Roberts Warren, born 20 August 1908 at York, Ontario, a tile setter in the 1940 electoral register (as head of the household at Indian Road).

[Grace] Audrey Evelyn Warren, born 1910, Northumberland, Ontario.

Ross Warren, born 1914, Ontario and on the Toronto voters list up to 1974.

Reginald John Alexa Warren, born 23 July 1918. Twenty-year-old Reginald is listed on border-crossing records as visiting Buffalo, New York for one day in 1939, perhaps to see Niagara Falls. He gave his home address as Indian Road, Toronto. He died at Monroe, Detroit on 23 July 1995, although a Reginald J. Warren, born 1918, was buried in 1995, at Hanover, Ontario, with his wife Evelyn Hastie Warren (1921–2009). Was this him?

Grace Mae Roberts

Grace was born in Cobourg on 5 May 1884. She married twenty-seven-year-old William Charles Hugh, or Hough (1883–1935), of Port Hope, Ontario, on 28 June 1910. Hough was a baker when they married. The following year he was an insurance agent and the couple lived at Bruton Street, Port Hope. By 1921 they were at Hope Street and William was a salesman,

Grace died on 10 March 1949 and is buried in Cobourg Union Cemetery with her husband and elder daughter.

They had two daughters, both born at Port Hope. Bernice Roberts Hugh (born 18 August 1911) was by 1985 living at 360 George Street, Cobourg, and was still there the following year, when she was recorded as appealing against various zoning bylaws. She died on 23 May 1988.

Their second daughter was Doris McKenzie Hugh (born 11 March 1914). She died on 11 August 2003. Her obituary reads: ‘Died Golden Plough Lodge, Cobourg; interred Aug. 15, 2003. Daughter of the late William and Grace Hugh; sister of the late Bernice Hugh.’ Golden Plough Lodge is a care home.

Neither daughter appears to have married. Doris was the last child of the Roberts descendants to have McKenzie/Mackenzie as a middle name.

George Simpson Roberts

William and Jemima’s only son, George Simpson Roberts (born 1888), was one of a twin (his sister, Georgina, died at birth or shortly after). Although there was a slight misspelling of the middle name, perhaps this was also in memory of William’s mother, Phoebe Simson Maria Mason, who had died eight years previously.

George had a tragic end, as he was killed aged ten, on 7 August 1898, when he was hit by a locomotive on the Grand Trunk Railway at Cobourg. At the time of George’s death the family lived at or near the Agricultural Grounds in D’Arcy Street, down by Lake Ontario – the railroad crosses just north of here, so this must be where George died. The notice in a local newspaper of 12 August 1898 read: