A History of the County of Grey - 1931 by Edith L. Marsh sponsor by Grey C C. (on CD)
Cat No.: CA0130: (See also product CA0130-DL for this "book" as a downloadable file and save the mailing cost.)
Another wonderful history of an Ontario County. This one is a little unusual in that it has been sponsored by the Grey County Council and so has something of the stamp of official authority. As you might expect it contains the history of the county from its earliest settlement. The author has devoted the first two chapters to The Indians and Indian Legends and Customs this being a discussion of the initial interactions of the First Nations peoples with the fur-traders, explorers and missionaries and an account of what was learned from these early interactions.
From this starting point the development of Grey is followed from the making of the first treaties, which made settlement possible, through the establishment of organized communities as we recognize them.
The book's author / editor, Edith Louise Marsh (? - 1960), has shown her talent for writing by including a lot of anecdotal accounts amongst the bald accounting of facts so that it is a pleasure to read what might otherwise have become another dull history text book.
The names of many of the early pioneers can be found here, including in many cases the location of their land allotment and where possible their photograph or portrait is also shown. Not to say that the book limits itself to only the early period. Development is followed right up to just before the publication of the book in 1931 although there were obviously difficulties in giving individual accounts of all those who settled in the county as its population grew. The accounts of more recent times tend to follow specific topics such as Religion and Politics. Of great interest will be the accounts of the establishment and growth of each township, town and village.
Finally there is a genealogist's gold mine in the appendices:
- Appendix A: contains an Alphabetical Directory of Grey for 1865 giving the name of each landowner and their plot's location.
- Appendix B: is a list of all those from Grey who served in the Great war (1914 - 1918) The list shows the Contingent, and sometimes the unit, they enlisted in and the municipality in which they enlisted. It also claims to list those sons of Grey who were elsewhere when they enlisted but the place of enlistment frequently seems to be within Grey so it is not clear where they actually resided at their point of enlistment. It claims to be as complete a list as was possible at the time (c1930) and indicates those listed who did not survive the conflict.
- Appendix C: names of Officials, Wardens and County Councillors of the county from the first provisional council in 1852 through 1931 when the book was published.
- Also given are the incorporation dates of the major towns / city as well as the names of the first Mayor.
The book has been formatted for text searches using the features of the freely available PDF reading applications. We recommend Adobe Reader v4 and better for maximum compatability.
We have provided a free downloadable sampler of this book on our Ontario Downloads web page. You can also reach this Sampler by clicking on the following link Sampler. You can return to this page by closing the Sampler Page when you are ready to purchase.
No. of CDs is: 1 ; Format is: PDF ; Searchable?: YES;
FastFind: No; ISBN No.: 1-897338-44-9;