Spring 2011, Volume 103 Number 4

"Listen," said Aunt Sue. "Someone's got to go to Newfoundland and find Annie before it's too late." Someone turned out to be me, accompanied by my husband Gary, who is always up for an adventure, and that’s how we two mainlanders, me a British Columbian and Gary a New Brunswicker, wound up traipsing through the cemeteries of Bonavista in the summer of 2007. Although we never found Annie's grave, we found much, much more. We found my family.

Annie Saint is my great-great-grandmother. It was her daughter, Margaret Caroline Beaumont Saint, my great-grandmother, who had left her British Columbian offspring with a handful of clues and the injunction that Annie must be found. I was seven in 1963 when Margaret passed away, so the evidence came to me as sketchy memories of family history. Still, I aimed to make a go of it.

Margaret had said that as a child growing up in Bonavista she had attended school in a building that had also served as a church and that in winter she had walked across a body of frozen water to get there. She was 13 when her mother Annie died. After Annie’s death, her father James had gathered his sons about him and headed west for BC. She, Margaret, had been sent to live with her aunt in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, but when she was old enough she lit out after them, stopping briefly in Red Deer, Alberta, before arriving at her final destination, Vancouver, when she was 18 or 19 years old in 1888 or 1889.

We had thought that finding Annie would be a simple feat and that we’d be joyfully Skyping our success back to expectant Aunt Sue. Margaret had been born in 1870 and, it being 13 years afterwards that Annie had died, we had thought we’d find a gravestone inscribed with something like this:

Annie Saint
Relict of James
Passed to a Better Place
___/___/1883

But, after four hours of trekking through the cemeteries of Bonavista, we hadn’t. We had, however, found a clutch of very frail and elderly Saint gravestones in the boneyard of the Memorial United Church of Bonavista so, after respite - soup, sandwich and plentiful rumination - we headed back there for closer inspection. A scaffold had been erected up the side of the church where craftsmen were undertaking restoration work. We exchanged friendly g’days and got back to looking for Annie.

The Saint stones are at the back, precariously perched in a line along the edge of the existing parking lot. Nubby, well-worn bases of some stones long since broken are almost grown over with grass. One, broken at the base in more recent times, lies face up, its inscription facing the sun by day and the starry heavens by night; and there are others with no markers at all, but the undulation of the ground - the rises and depressions - indicates that they are there.

Roughly in the centre of the Saint gravestones that yet stand is a crypt containing the remains of Charles Saint, who died in 1840, aged 76, and who was, therefore, born in 1764. Viewed from a distance, and the stones, laid out in their more or less row-like fashion, give the distinct impression of a bird, Charles’s crypt being the body, and the other, much smaller stones, arcing out to both sides like wings. One, flying in the direction of the church, is noticeably shorter, however, so the effect is of a broken-winged bird.

I found myself standing at the exterior wall of the church where the tip of the wing of stones is cut off, staring suspiciously at the spot where they disappear.

“Yeah, bones have been found in the basement when folks have done work down there,” offered a voice from atop the scaffold.

“Really? What is directly above this area?” I pointed at the wall.

“That’d be the minister’s office.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, this isn’t the first church built on this site.”

“I see.”

No more needed to be said, but it would be interesting to determine the date the current church, The Memorial United Church of Bonavista, was built. I was pretty sure it was after 1883 and that if Annie’s wasn’t one of the now unmarked graves, her bones were probably under the church - possibly right under the current minister’s desk and chair.

Had we really come up empty? Not in the least, for who were all the other Saints buried along with Charles? Relations that I hadn’t even known I’d had the day before. Amongst the several that yet stand, there was Sarah, wife of James Saint, who had died aged 24, and there was John Beaumont, who had died aged 26. There was little Sarah-Annie, daughter of Annie and James (possibly my Annie and James?), who was four years and three months old when she passed. And there was James Saint, Esq., J.P., a merchant, who died aged 67 in 1873 and his relict - his widow - Thirza, who died aged 77 in 1883 - the same year as Annie. Who were they? Solving this mystery would, undoubtedly, help to solve the puzzle that was my great-great grandmother, the illusive Annie.

The next day we headed to the Bonavista Museum, which is housed in the Ryan Premises, a National Historic Site, and the staff there proved to be most helpful. I put in a request for archival information on the Saint family and was later mailed rich genealogical information that sorted out the folks in the graveyard¹; and, because a Saint had once owned it, we were sent to Mockbeggar Plantation, which is really a fishing room of large proportions and which, since 1980, has been a Provincial Historic Site. We were also told that the Saints had been planters, probably using indentured Irish servants for labour.

Planters!

Being a naïve mainlander from British Columbia, the words planter and plantation were deeply disturbing and I, naturally, thought of the cotton and sugar farms in the Southern States and the salt plantations in the West Indies, and I wondered if I really wanted to find out anything more about this lost family of mine.

But I rallied.

*

The Bonavista Historical Society and the Town of Bonavista have done a fine job getting information about their historic structures out to the public, so it was relatively easy to find out about both the Memorial United Church of Bonavista and the Mockbeggar Plantation.

The current church, built between 1918 to 1923, is actually the fourth of four Methodist churches to have been built on the site, the previous three opening their doors in 1812, 1851 and 1871.² The congregation that had started out as a small number of stalwart souls had expanded over the years so that successively larger churches were needed to meet the members’ needs. Then, in 1925, two years after the current church opened, the United Church of Canada was formed as a merger of four protestant denominations, including the Methodist Church of Canada.

A quick read of Charles Lench’s book, The Story of Methodism in Bonavista (1919), confirmed my supposition that my relatives had been Methodist³; and, not only had they been Methodist, but Charles’, the patriarch whose remains lie in the aged crypt, together with Thomas Bass, to whom he had been apprenticed when he first came to Newfoundland,⁴ were amongst the first residents of Bonavista to welcome Methodism into their homes and the community prior to the year 1800.⁵ Charles had also purchased pews in 1823 for the first church built on the site.⁶ Since then, the Saints had been involved in the construction and, most probably, the maintenance of each of the four successive churches to be built at this location.

However, that being said, the “Methodist feet” of my Newfoundland ancestors were obviously left far, far behind when they arrived in BC. Margaret loved fashion - gowns, gloves, hats, shoes, jewelry - and she was an excellent card player, hosting many boisterous card nights at her home; and her daughter, my grandmother Helen Katherine Beaumont Maddison, was a lover of the fox trot, smoked du Maurier cigarettes, drove a red Alpine sports car (later traded for blue), often with its top down, and loved to have a tipple when evening came on.

*

Information on the Mockbeggar Plantation was equally enlightening.

Four buildings currently sit on its grounds: a lovely old residence, a seal-oil-extraction building, a huge two-and-a-half storey saltbox, and a much smaller store. Believed to have been built around 1733, the saltbox, barn-red, is possibly the oldest surviving structure on the coast. Over the years it has served as a salt fish store; salmon packing house; salt store; fish dryer; barter shop; residence for the owner while the current stately home was being built; temporary Methodist Church in 1871 while the third in the succession of Methodist churches in town was being constructed; and headquarters for the Salvation Army Corps in 1886.⁷

I would add school to this list since Margaret had said she attended church in a building that also served as a school. This must be the building to which she referred. O’Dey’s (Old Days) Pond is situated behind Mockbeggar. Could it be the body of frozen water she walked over to get to school?

The next questions were how the Saint family had acquired Mockbeggar Plantation, which family member had purchased it, and when the transaction had taken place. Charles had arrived in Newfoundland as an apprentice, a young man without experience or enough earned or inherited property to be the head of a household, circa 1780. So how had the Plantation come into the family?

It was through Charles’ second eldest son, whose pillar-style grave marker stands tallest amongst the remaining Saint gravestones, my great-great-greatgrandfather, James Saint, Esq. J.P. - Esquire and Justice of the Peace. A Bonavista merchant, he had purchased it in 1851 from John H. Warren. Previously owned by a succession of Poole merchants, Warren was possibly the first Newfoundland owner, making James the second.⁸ Therefore, the story of Mockbeggar is the story of the evolution of the Newfoundland fishery from an industry controlled by merchants in England to one that developed its own merchant class.⁹

James still owned Mockbeggar in 1871 when the multi-purpose building had served as a Methodist Church, and when a mighty revival had taken place in it to reawaken the religious spirit of the community, and also, possibly, to raise funds to finance the church that was under construction in town.¹⁰ When James died in 1873, he left Mockbeggar to his eldest son Jabez, my great-great-granduncle, who built the handsome twostorey residence that is still there today.

*

The genealogical information mailed to me by the Bonavista Archives was invaluable. It put the family tree together, and showed me how I fit into it - who my direct ancestors were. It turned out, of course, that I had already been to their gravesides and had seen evidence of their handiwork.

Although Charles, my great-great-great-greatgrandfather, was the first permanent settler in Newfoundland from his Dorset-based family, prior generations may have been involved in the seasonal fishery. What became of Thomas Bass, the man who apprenticed him, is unknown, but perhaps he was an uncle or cousin.

Charles had married twice. His first wife, Mary Abbott, bore two sons: Charles, in 1804, and James, the future purchaser and owner of Mockbeggar, in 1806.¹¹

His second wife, Hannah, bore four children: two daughters, Hannah and Amy; and two sons, William Ellis and Thomas.¹²

Mary Abbott is, therefore, my great-great-great-greatgrandmother and, if my supposition is correct, both her sons, Charles and James, are my great-great-greatgrandfathers.

First cousins were known to marry fairly regularly back in the day, and this is possibly what had happened in my newly found family. James and Annie were most probably first cousins, each of them having Charles Saint and Mary Abbott as a set of grandparents.

When Gary and I later looked for their marriage certificate at The Rooms, none was found, although birth and/or baptismal records for all ten children that Annie bore were readily available.¹³ Perhaps the marriage record did not survive. There is also the possibility that if a minister was not available to perform the ceremony when the couple was ready to marry, or, if the Methodist Church did not accept unions between first cousins, that the couple had been married by a ship’s captain.

Charles and Mary’s eldest son Charles married Jane, who, sadly, has come down through the generations without a recorded surname.¹⁴ How often women have been effaced so that it is only by thoroughly researching the men in their lives that we get a glimpse of them. Jane bore ten children, however, and her second eldest daughter, born April 19th, 1837, was Arianna.¹⁵

Charles and Mary’s second son James married Thirza Beaumont, who bore seven children, and Thirza’s second eldest son, born in the same year as Arianna, 1837, was named James after his father.¹⁶

Charles and Jane’s gravestones are not to be found. Perhaps they are numbered with those that have been knocked down in past years and who now appear as nubs overgrown with grass or, perhaps, their remains are under the walls of the old church. James and Thirza’s, however, are prominent amongst the Saint stones that remain (James being the merchant who purchased Mockbeggar in 1851).

And Arianna? Yes, she is most likely the Annie for whom this quest was undertaken.

The Bonavista Archives list James’s wife - James, the son of James and Thirza - as Arianna Caroline with no last name given.¹⁷ Annie was her moniker, an endearment. And her last name? If she is the daughter of Charles and Jane, as suspected, it was Saint at birth and did not change with her marriage.

*

It’s been four years since my first visit to Bonavista looking for the grave of my great-great grandmother Annie Saint - a lark turned quest that unearthed a richness of heritage I would have never have thought possible. As a result, I have developed a deep love and affinity for the land and people of Newfoundland, which now hold a special and dear place in my heart and world.

Many Newfoundlanders have set their sights on far horizons and left their Island nest on betterment migrations, or simply for far-flung adventures. Some return in their own lifetimes. Others return generations later when their descendants, drawn to their roots, find their way home.

Margot Maddison-MacFadyen, a PhD candidate in Interdisciplinary Studies at Memorial University of Newfoundland, currently resides in Prince Edward Island. Interested in reclaiming local histories of the maritime Atlantic, she also writes poetry and short fiction.

1  Crystal Randall. Letter, with accompanying genealogical records of the Saint family numbering 18 pages in total, to author. (Bonavista Historical Society, Bonavista, Newfoundland and Labrador, 2007).
2  "Memorial United Church." The Town of Bonavista: Landfall of Cabot. (Bonavista, Newfoundland and Labrador, n.d.).
3  Charles Lench. The Story of Methodism in Bonavista. (St. John’s, Newfoundland: Harry Cuff Publishers, Ltd., 1985), 57-58.
4  Dorset Record Office, England. April, 1803. Charles was apprenticed to Thomas Bass until 1785 when he was twenty-one years of age.
5  Lench, 59. 6  Ibid, 46. Thirty people contributed funds for the pews. Four of these persons were women. Charles, whose donation was the second largest, paid £10 for pews in the body of the church and contributed another £4 with Mrs. Skiffington. Sarah Abbott, whose contribution was the largest, paid £20 for pews in the upstairs gallery.
7  "Mockbeggar Plantation or Room." The Town of Bonavista: Landfall of Cabot. (Bonavista, Newfoundland and Labrador, n.d.).
8  Mockbeggar Plantation: Provincial Historic Site.” (Government of Newfoundland and Labrador: Department of Tourism, Culture and Recreation. Published by the Minister, n.d.).
9  Ibid.
10  Lench, 112.
11  Saint family genealogical records. (Bonavista Historical Society. Bonavista, Newfoundland and Labrador), 1.
12  Ibid.
13  Gary and I conducted our search in The Rooms, the Provincial Archives of Newfoundland and Labrador which are located in St. John’s, on the 14th and 15th of August 14-15, 2007.
14  Saint family genealogical records, 2.
15  Ibid.
16  Ibid, 3.
17  Ibid, 12.