Where my genealogy searches take me, following the Gray roots

I find the hunt for information, and the facts I dig up about our Gray family and connections fascinating, plus what they had to go through.  They had to have patience, perseverence, optimism, be resourceful, be thrifty, and not be afraid of hard work.  There is no doubt they worked hard to achieve all they did. It wasn't all hard work though, the work bees always ended in a competition and a party.  The competition might have been seeing who could get the most beams or boards in place, or who could cut the most trees, or haul the most logs.  It's a guy thing.

One of the things I've always been interested in finding out was where James, Alexander, William, George and John found their wives.  After all they are in the middle of dense forest, with small clearings of farms in their infancy stages, with muddy tracks for roads, working hard trying to clear more land to plant more crops, striving to become self sufficient.

William Gray married Phoebe Street who was born in Prescott, Ontario.  I always wondered, until a recent discovery, how William and Phoebe would have ever met.  Phoebe's parents, Timothy Street and Betty Scott, were both the children of United Empire Loyalists and as such, though they'd already had a land grant near Prescott, which was being farmed by a son; they were entitled to a second land grant, and by 1837 Timothy and Betty were located in Toronto, on Yonge Street.  In order for William to get his flour to market he had to drive his wagon right by her parents farm.  One possibility is that they attended the same church in York Mills.  Or they might have brought grain to Grays Mills to have it made into flour.

Alexander Gray married Marion McLean of Islay, Scotland, and I scoured the census records and land grants for York trying to find a McLean, with no luck, but by chance when reading "Don Mills, From Forests and Farms to Forces of Change" by Scott Kennedy, which has lots of interesting items of information about the Grays in it, I came across another McLean and I had a light bulb moment

...boing!  This McLean was Christina McLean and she met her husband John Coulson in York Mills, and they ended up buying a farm right across the road from Alexander Gray and Marion McLean. I wondered if she might have been a sister.  It might have just been a coincidence to have two women with the last maiden name the same across the road from each other, but they might be cousins.  Another book "Full text History of Toronto and the County of York" gave me the answer I needed, Marion McLean was the daughter of John McLean and Mary McLachlan of Wellington County, Ontario.  It's a bit of a trek from Wellington to Don Mills to get your wheat ground to flour, but I imagine that is how they met.  I'm thinking Grays Mills was a bit like a matchmaking service.

John Gray married Anne Gravely Carley of Wexford, Ireland who's parents I believe to be Joseph Carley and Elizabeth Free who settled near Elizabethtown, Leeds and Grenville.  How they met will probably continue to be a mystery.  John was a wagon maker and his shop was in Milneford Mills, on the Don River, where there was a well known woolen mill. Maybe he had a wagon to deliver, maybe her father brought wool to the mill.  John and Anne named their first daughter after her, their second daughter after John's mother Janet, the third daughter was Elizabeth (after her mother?).  Their first son was after John's father Thomas, and the second son was Joseph, so the naming of the children is a possible clue that I might be on the right track, as that was a common system of naming children back then.

James Gray married Margaret Craig of Glasgow, Scotland who has proved to be a road block for me, but I will persevere.  In the 1861 census, James Jr. has relatives staying with him named John and Ann Craig, but so far, I haven't been able to work out the connection.  I'm assuming that John is a nephew of Margaret but there I'm stuck, for now anyway.  And yes, I'm assuming that James met Margaret at Grays Mills. 

That leaves us with George Gray, that last of the brothers to arrive, and he married in Scotland Mary McMillan also from Renfrewshire, Scotland.

In finding marriage licences for the Gray brothers and some of the nieces and nephews, I found a witness named Christopher Sylvester, and another William Sylvester shows up repeatedly as a witness to Gray family marriages, so I started to wonder, just who are these Sylvesters.  I started a search through Ancestry and in my search I discovered that William Sylvester of Wexford, Ireland, was married to Janet Ellen Gray! Eyebrows go up, but it could be a coincidence, then I see that the place of the birth of one of their sons is Grays Mills, York.  Boing! Bells going off.  That cannot be a  coincidence! 

I'd always assumed that there were Gray sisters and had gone through all the names of their daughters to see which names kept showing up, Janet was one, after their mother, Ellen was another.  I always thought it strange that William Grays sons had a group portrait taken, but there wasn't one of the daughters, so it didn't surprise me that there was no mention of sisters, not even one that came to Canada.

The Sylvester farm was the next concession over from the Grays Mills.  Janet arrived in 1820 with Alexander and married William in 1822.  William Sylvester had also been a soldier in the British Army, so he and James Gray would have had that in common.

Hmmm. Little lightbulb. William Sylvester was from Wexford Ireland.  Anne Gravely Carley was from Wexford.  Another thread to pull to see if it leads anywhere.