Posted by conference on September 28, 2009 under Blog: New Postings, Tours and Events, Visiting Toronto | 
Built of red brick with buff brick accents, Dempsey's store stood for more than 130 years on Yonge Street at Sheppard Avenue. It was moved in 1997 to nearby Beecroft Avenue.
We hope when you come to the Ontario Genealogical Society Conference 2010 that you’ll spend a few extra days getting to know our city.
One thing you’ll notice, in contrast to many other North American cities, is the predominance of brick as a building material.
The earliest buildings in Toronto (then known as the Town of York) were built of wood—first rough-hewn logs, then squared timbers, then later frame and clapboard. Only a few of those wooden buildings have survived—most notably Fort York and Scadding Cabin.
As early as the first decades of the 19th century, brick was used for some public buildings and fine residences, and its popularity as a fire-resistant and fashionable building material continued to grow as bricks were manufactured locally.
Glacial action had resulted in plentiful deposits of shale and clay in many areas of Toronto. Small family-run brickyards clustered where these materials were close to the surface, in Yorkville, along Davenport Road, which ran below an escarpment (the shoreline of the prehistoric glacial Lake Iroquois), in the Don River valley and other ravines.
The craft of brick making was frequently a family business as shown in this listing of brick manufacturers in Might's The Toronto City Directory 1901, p. 923. (www.archives.org)
Some Toronto brickyards made several colours of brick. The most common were red and buff. The buff bricks (called “white” by Victorian builders) were used for St. James Cathedral (built 1832), and some grand “Cabbagetown” homes that you’ll see on our “Toronto’s Irish Heritage” bus tour. Many of these buff brick houses use red bricks as accents, sometimes in quite complex patterns.
Red brick was lower in cost, and much more common for residential use, sometimes with the pricier buff as an accent colour. However, there are some wonderful examples of superb red brick construction, including the 1892 Gooderham Building that combined high-quality pressed brick with terracotta ornamentation.
While Toronto’s brickyards have long since closed or left the city, the site of the Don Valley Brickworks which closed in 1984, has been turned into a treasured 16-hectare public park which preserves and repurposes a number of the industrial buildings.
Posted by conference on September 19, 2009 under Blog: New Postings, Speakers and Program, The Making of Conference 2010 |
The subcommittee in charge of planning the program for OGS Conference 2010 has been hard at work this spring and summer putting together the best lineup of workshops and presentations possible.
With more than 300 proposals to choose from, the selection process has been a challenge. Subcommittee members reviewed all the proposals and assessed them first on general merit. Would the topic appeal to Conference attendees? Was the proposal well organized and thought out? Had it been done before? The calibre of the submissions we received was such that we found it quite difficult to rule out any of them at this stage.
The next step was to categorize the proposals so that we could make our tough choices in a more systematic and balanced way. It was time for spreadsheets and index cards! We grouped proposals by geographic area—which ones had an Ontario focus, an Irish focus, a U.S. focus, etc.? We identified the target audience for each proposal—was it aimed at experienced researchers, at those just starting their family history adventures, or was it suitable for everyone? We sorted by the type of topic—which proposals related to the methodology of genealogy, to record collections, to case studies?
And perhaps most importantly, we looked carefully at each proposal to make sure that it reflected at least one aspect of the Conference 2010 theme—essentials, innovations and delights.
Putting together the actual Conference 2010 schedule has been a bit like working on a giant jigsaw puzzle—hours and hours of hunting for just the right fit, with some trial and error along the way, but a great deal of satisfaction when it all comes together. We started with our “corner pieces”—the presentations by Conference 2010 keynote speaker Thomas W. Jones—and we are building our program around them.
We have calculated travel and accommodation costs, crunched numbers and made the most of our program budget.
We are packing each Conference day with practical and inspiring content. And we are constantly asking ourselves… will every Conference attendee see at least one session in each time slot that he or she won’t want to miss?
We think we’re close to completing our puzzle and we can’t wait to show it off…
Posted by conference on September 14, 2009 under Blog: New Postings, Visiting Toronto |
It is easy to forget that 655 Dixon Road was not always a stone’s throw from Pearson International Airport and Highway 401. Until it became part of Toronto in 1998, the land where the Doubletree now stands was part of Etobicoke, one of the original townships of York County surveyed in 1791. (Don’t pronounce that “k” in Etobicoke.) You’ll find a wonderful 1878 map of the Township of Etobicoke in McGill University’s Digital Library.
This detail of the 1878 map predates Dixon Road, but you can see the path it will take starting with the diagonal Scarlett Road on the east side of the image, then west between the 200-acre farms of Peter Wardlaw and John Little, and a little further along between the farms of R. Dixon and John Dixon.
The Doubletree would be on the next farm, but there’s no sign today of the stream that meandered through the Robert Harris farm.
The Dixons you see on this little map (there are at least four) are likely all descendants of John Dixon, a native of Westmoreland, England, and one of the earliest settlers in Etobicoke. (See: Mulvany, Charles Pelham. History of Toronto and the County of York, Toronto: C. Blackett Robinson, 1885, volume 2, page 250-1.)
The settlement on the right side of the image on the Humber River is Weston, still proudly identifiable within Toronto.
If you have Etobicoke (or other Toronto) ancestry, plan a few extra days before or after OGS Conference 2010 to visit local historic sites, churches, cemeteries, and of course libraries and archives. Exploring the “Researching Toronto” pages at the Ontario Genealogical Society, Toronto Branch web site is a great way to get started.
Posted by conference on September 5, 2009 under Blog: New Postings, Delights Stream, Tours and Events, Visiting Toronto |
Toronto was home to a vast number of Irish immigrants who settled here from the city’s beginnings as the Town of York in 1793. On Friday, May 14, you can join the Toronto’s Irish Heritage bus tour for a day exploring the Irish connections in Toronto.
The tour will begin at the Conference 2010 hotel. Participants will travel by chartered bus to Ireland Park on Toronto’s waterfront. The Park, opened in 2007, commemorates the arrival of some 38,000 Irish Famine refugees who inundated Toronto (population 20,000) in 1847.
We will continue on to the Corktown area of Toronto, named for settlers from County Cork, and explore various venues where they lived and worked, including Little Trinity Anglican Church. Participants will relax over lunch at Enoch Turner Schoolhouse, the oldest existing ‘free’ school in Canada.
In the afternoon we’ll visit the splendid St. Paul’s Basilica in Toronto’s first Roman Catholic parish, established in 1822.
We will continue our journey to the Necropolis Cemetery and the Cabbagetown neighbourhood of Toronto. Cabbagetown’s name has its roots from the cabbages and other vegetables that were grown by the thrifty Irish immigrants who settled in the area. Cabbages grew readily in the sandy soil and provided an excellent food source. The Necropolis was the second non-sectarian cemetery in Toronto. Opened in the 1850s, it provided the final resting place for a number of Irish immigrants who lived in the area and worked in the factories along the Don River. We will also visit the graves of other people who helped shape our history such as Thornton Blackburn, an escaped slave from Virginia who provided the impetus for the underground railway into Canada, William Lyon Mackenzie a leader of the 1837 Upper Canada Rebellion and Joseph Burr Tyrrell who found dinosaur bones in the Alberta Badlands.
Watch for more details about the Toronto’s Irish Heritage Bus Tour when registration opens this fall.
