Published August 23, 2015
Revised March 10, 2016
How to Find War of 1812 Related Documents
for Your Ancestors
Part 3:
Personal Recollections
This is a series of blogs on how to find Upper Canadian
documents from about the time of the War of 1812, but some of these strategies
could be applied to other British provinces.
This discussion will focus on documents from before, during, and after
the war.
There
are a number of sources for personal recollections of the war that were written
throughout Upper Canada. Diaries with
daily entries were kept, letters sometimes survived the years, journals were
compiled after the war, newspapers reported on interviews with veterans, and
some wrote down the stories that they had heard from veterans. The compiled journals, newspaper reports, and
family stories were more likely to contain errors.
Finding
a personal recollection by a veteran who lived in the same community as your
ancestor or who served in the same regiment may reveal details about your
ancestor and their experiences during the war.
Personal
recollections may also be found in land grant petitions, war loss claims, and
other correspondence with the Upper Canadian government, which I will write
about in other How To Pages.
Private William McCay’s “Quick March to Glory” recounts his experiences with
Brock’s expedition to capture Fort Detroit.
They travelled in small boats across Lake Erie to Detroit and William
returned on a ship guarding American prisoners of war. This diary has most recently been published
at The Yorker Gazette Volumes 2 & 3 at https://www.2ndyork.com/news
Donald E. Graves edited Merry Hearts Make Light Days: The War
of 1812 Journal of Lieutenant John Le
Couteur, 104th Foot, Carleton University Press, Ottawa,
1994. I have not found this book online
but was fortunate to find it on the shelf in the local library. Le Couteur arrived in Kingston in April, 1813
and remained in that area until sometime in 1814 when the 104th moved
to the Niagara Frontier. The journal was
written sometime after the war and Mr. Graves has noted discrepancies in Le
Couteur’s recollections of the war.
Captain
William Hamilton Merritt’s diary was published in Journal of Events, Principally on the Detroit and Niagara Frontiers,
during the War of 1812, by Capt. W.H. Merritt of the Prov. Light Dragoons, The
Historical Society, B.N.A., St. Catharines, C.W., 1863. Google Books has a copy of this journal
online.
Lieutenant Ely Playter of York Township kept a
diary during the war and wrote about life on his farm and in the community and
his experiences as a lieutenant in the 3rd York Militia. The Ontario Archives has a copy of this diary
and excerpts have been posted online at https://twitter.com/ElyPlayter1812
Private Benjamin
Smith of Ancaster Township also kept a
daily diary. His diary is at the Ontario
Archives in the Benjamin Smith Fonds F582.
Transcripts of the diary are available for the years after the war but
there were none in the fonds box for the war years. This diary was of particular interest to me
as my ancestor, Ebenezer Blair, was living in the same township at that
time. Although Benjamin wrote about his
interactions with a number of people in the community he did not mention
Ebenezer. I have a digital copy of the
pages from June, 1812 to February, 1816.
This diary is difficult to read for a number of
different reasons but I did discover some interesting details about life in the
township which I have included in my Story Pages. Benjamin served as a private in the 5th
Lincoln and also wrote about his militia experiences.
Correspondence
between British officers and Upper Canadians and other papers can be found in a
number of books online at ourroots.ca and other online libraries. On this website I have looked at the Annals of Niagara by William Kirby and
Lorne Pierce, the Documentary History of
the Campaign Upon the Niagara Frontier, Volumes 1 to 9, A Memoir of Colonel, the Honorable James
Kerby, and Records of Niagara (in
a least 3 volumes) all by Ernest Alexander Cruikshank, publications of the
Welland County Historical Society and the Wentworth County Historical Society,
and a number of local histories. There
is a search engine that will help you find a particular topic or name.
There
are probably personal diaries and journals, autobiographies, letters, and
reports that I have not seen yet. This
is a Page that I will no doubt have to update a number of times.
I
usually try to substantiate the personal recollections that I have read. I recently found a copy of Papers and Records of the Wentworth
Historical Society 1892 at www.openlibrary.org. On page 62,
Joseph Birnie gave an account of Brock’s death which was different from the
generally accepted version. He had Brock
shot by a stray shot at the foot of the escarpment while sitting on his horse,
rather than targeted by a lone sniper while leading the charge on foot up the
side of the escarpment, and Joseph reported that he had caught Brock as he fell
from his horse. I have also seen a few
reports made by elderly veterans in which the names of commanding officers and
regiments were questionable. Document as
much personal history as you can.
Fred Blair
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