Another Family Bible -- Even Older!
/A Family History in Artifacts — Part 3
I’ve been reconnected to a missing piece of my family’s past, thanks to the kindness of a stranger.
The phone rang while I was still puttering around in housecoat and slippers. From the ring, I knew it was long distance, and I fully expected the tell-tale silence that tips you that this is a call from some telemarket scam on the other side of the world. I was ready to hang up, but the male voice came on right away.
“Is your name Cummer?”
I hesitated before I answered, “Who’s asking?”
Dan Vlahos had a minute to make his pitch, and after he explained why he was calling, I said to him, “You’ve found the right place.”
Dan lives with his wife Kim in Wallaceburg in Southwestern Ontario. I’ve never been to Wallaceburg, but I’ve always wanted to make the seven-hour drive to see the place where my grandfather, John Wellington (Jack) Cummer was born in 1890. I wrote in an earlier blog about how, at the age of 19, he and his older brother Charlie took the harvest train out West to seek their fortunes in Alberta. The rest of the family soon followed. I’m not sure if I’d find any distant cousins out in Chatham-Kent counties, but it would be nice to see the landscape where my ancestors lived for two generations.
Dan and Kim currently operate a business called Drybasements.com. Got a leak in your foundation? They’ll use epoxy and carbon fiber to fix the crack. Dan has been working in construction all his adult life. At 61 he says, “my body is punishing me for how I treated it in the past.” As a young man, he did a lot of the demolition as well as he construction work. “I am by nature an explorer. So I would examine the area before proceeding with any work. You would be surprised what you find.”
Look at Dan’s Facebook market page and you’ll get an idea of the kinds of things he finds. Currently, the page features a marine trailer jack for $55, unopened packages of shoe guards at $25 for the whole lot, batteries and battery chargers for $25, and replacement glass for a Samsung phone, $25 He finds things and he sells them. I’m guessing that most items sell faster than the particular item he cold-called me about that morning.
Some 40 years ago — so long ago he can’t remember the exact circumstances — Dan was clearing out a house when he came upon an old Bible. Dan is a Jehovah’s Witness. He noted that in this Bible, the last verse of Psalm 83 invokes the Name of God: "That men may know that thou, whose name alone is JEHOVAH, art the most high over all the earth."
Dan’s faith would not permit him to have the Name of God dumped into a landfill site. That in itself was sufficient reason for him to retrieve this Bible and keep it safe. Of additional interest was the date the Bible was published: 1827.
I already have in my possession a family Bible from the 1880s. It belonged to my great-grandparents, Fred W. Cummer and Maggie Robertson Cummer. I have written a blog about what the 1880s Bible says about my family’s history.
The Bible that Dan found was about 60 years older — two generations back in my family history. The ink used in the early 1800s was made from lamp soot mixed with walnut oil. It could be watery, and it faded with time, but even after 193 years, this ink is just legible enough for Dan to make out “Cummer” on the marriages page. He googled the name to see if he could find anyone interested. I was the third Cummer he called that morning.
On March 24, 1824, at Markham in the Home District, County of York in the Province of Upper Canada, David Cummer had married Abigail McKergan.
I knew that David and Abigail were my great-great-great-grandparents. David was the seventh of the 13 children of Jacob and Elizabeth (Fisher) Cummer. In 1797, Jacob and Elizabeth and their first three children (Elizabeth was expecting her fourth) had come to Upper Canada by conestoga wagon from Pennsylvania. Jacob and Elizabeth were the first to clear a homestead in the wilderness north of York (now Toronto). The settlement they established is now the Toronto neighbourhood of Willowdale. David was born there on January 31, 1803. Abigail had been born on November 2, 1797, in Harwich, Ontario, in modern-day Chatham-Kent, which is in the Southwestern part of the province — not far from Wallaceburg.
I knew about David and Abigail and their marriage from a book about the descendants of Jacob Cummer published in 1911: The Cummer Memoranda.
The book included pictures of David and Abigail taken later in life.
But the Cummer Memoranda does not include the geographic information revealed in the pages of the 1827 family Bible.
1797 Abigail McKergan born in Harwich, Kent County, Western District, Upper Canada
1803 David Cummer born in York County, Home District, Upper Canada
1824 Abigail and David married in Markham, York County, Home District, Upper Canada
1826 Caroline Elizabeth born in Township of York, Home District, York County, Upper Canada
1826 David Ninnian born in Township of York, Home District, York County, Upper Canada
1828 Joshua Caleb born in Township of York, Home District, York County, Upper Canada
1831 Ezra Adams born in Township of York, Upper Canada
1833 Jacob Israel born in the Township of York, York County, Upper Canada
1835 Margaret Matilda was born in the Township of York, Upper Canada
1837 twins Samuel Sutherland and Sarah Catharine born in the Township of York, Home District, Upper Canada
From the Cummer Memoranda we know that one of the twins, Samuel, married in Willowdale in 1862. Were Abigail and David still living north of Toronto by then? Or had they moved to Southwestern Ontario, where in the following century, Dan Vlahos would find their family Bible? Their second child, David Ninnian Cummer, born December 11, 1826, was my great-great-grandfather. He was born a mere 11 months after the birth of his sister Caroline Elizabeth.
I have found nothing written in the family chronicles that tells us anything about him. But I have inherited a charcoal portrait of him that shows him to be a handsome young man.
We don’t know whether it was David Ninnian and his descendants who took possession of the family Bible, but I’m grateful that Dan Vlahos was able to retrieve it and preserve it so it could be returned to the family. Nor do we know who let it fall into disrepair. By the time Dan rescued it, it was already in bad shape.
Within its pages are tucked little mementos that give some clues as to the people who have owned and cherished it. A clipping from the Evening Telegram (a Toronto newspaper) from September 17, 1932, announced the dedication of Willowdale United Church. There had been a public outcry when the church congregation had voted to demolish the building because of the widening of Yonge Street. “Strong protest from families whose ancestors had helped build the structure succeeded in having the church remodeled and redecorated instead.” Evidently, in 1932 the owners of the 1827 Bible had an interest in the fate of the “Cummer church” back in Willowdale. We can assume it was still in the Cummer family by then.
Elsewhere, a spray of leaves and a sprig of heather have been pressed and preserved — as was the fashion in earlier times.
On another page, another sprig of heather has been preserved along with a photograph of the Forth Bridge as seen from North Queensferry in Scotland. Did someone make a trip to Scotland?
If a trip to Scotland had been made, was it to visit Scottish inlaws? Inserted elsewhere is a death notice for an Inspector of Schools in South York (ie. back in Toronto). He has a good Scottish name: D. Fotheringham. A relative perhaps?
The notice is preserved alongside a ribbon awarding Third Prize for the Field Day of a school, collegiate institute or other organization whose initials were EHCI — could that the first letter stands for Essex, and the last two, Collegiate Institute? The date of the ribbon is 1933.
The year the ribbon was awarded (perhaps at an Essex high school) brings us forward by a century from the days in which David and Abigail recorded the birth of their children in North York. And on another page we get a better sense of the personality of someone who inherited the 1827 Bible. There, along with a pressed pansy, is a handwritten note.
The note, written in a very different style from the records from the 1820-30s and in ink that looks much more like the ink we’re familiar with today, reads: “Have you noticed how well Dan 12:1 Matt 24:21 Rev 11:17,18 agree as to the existing conditions to-day. There are many others I’d like to look up with you.”
There’s an intimacy, a fellowship and a tenderness to this note: one spouse to another, or a parent to a child, perhaps. But the Biblical quotes are anything but intimate and tender.
Daniel 12:1 reads: “And at that time shall Michael stand up, the great prince which standeth for the children of thy people: and there shall be a time of trouble, such as never was since there was a nation even to that same time: and at that time thy people shall be delivered, every one that shall be found written in the book.”
Matthew 24:21 “For then shall be great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be.”
Revelation 11: 17 “saying: ‘We give You thanks, O Lord God Almighty, The One who is and who was and who is to come, 18 And the nations were angry, and thy wrath is come, and the time of the dead, that they should be judged, and'“
Someone studying the Bible today might have a similar feeling that these verses reflect our own troubled times. If the writer or the reader of this note is also associated with the winner of the Third Prize ribbon, then our history tells us that 1933 was another time that suggested apocalyptic visions of world affairs. In North America this was the depth of the Great Depression; in Europe, the rise of the Nazis and Hitler’s seizure of power in Germany. The Second World War was just six years away, and were these two intimates to survive, they would probably agree with Daniel that the world had seen a “time of trouble, such as never was since.”
The 1827 Bible — although a hefty tome in its own right — is smaller and less elaborate than the 1880s Bible that has come down through my family. It reflects an earlier time when pioneers did not have the money to afford elaborate books, but they took the time to read their Bible. By the 1880s, Bible publishers could offer not only the Old and New Testaments, but also essays, maps, marginal references, and “a concise history of all religious denominations.”
The 1880s Bible feature “2000 Scripture Illustrations on Steel, Wood and in Colors.”
The 1827 Bible was published in Cooperstown, New York. By 1885 the economy in Canada could support a sophisticated publishing industry and the Bible was produced by McDermid & Logan of London, Ontario. Another reflection of the later 19th century: the 1885 Bible contains a page for people to sign a Temperance Pledge. My grandfather and his siblings each signed before they reached their teens.
The 1827 Bible certainly reflects a different era and through the mementos left between its pages, it ties the 1830s to the 1930s and brings it forward so we can connect with those who proceeded us. I’m deeply grateful to Dan for rescuing it as a young man and keeping it safe all those 40 or so years.
When we first spoke, I told Dan that I really wasn’t in the market for an old family Bible — my home is full of stuff I’ve inherited from my Cummer forebears, and I’m writing these blogs as a means to chronicle what the family has left behind. So far I’ve written about my Uncle Allen’s 1930s stamp collection and what it says about the family’s early years in Calgary, and I’ve written about the 1880s Bible and the photo album that my grandmother kept while her fiance (my grandfather) was away fighting the Great War. I have plans to keep this series going.
But I don’t have room in the house for a second family Bible. Fortunately, there are others in the Cummer family who share my interest in our story. It’s going to find a good home.
