My Great Grandfather John Buchanan 1829-1909

In response to an email from https://irelandxo.com/ireland-xo, I wrote a brief biography of my Irish great grandfather, which I have included below.

In 1847, during the height of the great Irish famine, John Buchanan came to Canada with his parents Andrew and Jane, his brothers Robert, Charles, James, William, Andrew, Samuel, and their sister Jane. In the 1901 Canada Census, he says he was born  on 10 Aug 1829, although some records show him as a year or two younger than that.

The family had lived at Learmore, near Castlederg, as some of his brothers were christened there. But by 1847 they were living at Binnawooda, closer to Drumquin, in the western part of County Tyrone.

When they were at sea for 10 days, the ship was damaged by a severe storm and had to return for repairs.

On the second attempt they reached Canada, and were quarantined at Kingston, where his father Andrew and an infant niece died of the fever.

The family settled on unsurveyed land north of Stratford, Ontario, so they were missed by the 1851 census.

Around 1870, John and some of the other men would travel to Nevada in the winter to work in the mines at Gold Hill. Apparently it was an 11-day journey each way, but the pay was 2 or 3 times what they could get in Ontario, In later years, John's brother Sam liked to entertain children with stories of the Nevada vigilantes in the gold-mining towns. Since Gold Hill is just south of the famous Virginia City, they probably saw the frontier newspaper reporter Mark Twain, or read his articles in the local newspaper.

In 1879, looking for farmland for the younger generation, John and some of the other members of the Buchanan and Watson families, moved to Manitoba, where the new Canadian government had recently purchased Rupertsland from the Hudson Bay Company and was looking for settlers. Again they became pioneers in a new land. They traveled by train to the end of the railroad, which was at St Boniface, and then crossed the river by ferry, then traveled by covered wagon to the area where the town of Neepawa was soon built.

By the 1890s, some of the family moved further west, seeking free farm land. In 1904 my grandfather (William Andrew Buchanan) sold his blacksmith shop in Neepawa and in 1905 he married Elizabeth Jane Watson, in Edmonton, which was then in the Northwest Territories.

So, John Buchanan's life was filled with adventure, as he survived the great famine and two perilous sea voyages, and life in a violent gold-mining town, and pioneering twice in Canada. His wife Isabella Watson shared the hard life of a pioneer woman, pioneering in Ontario and Manitoba, and keeping the farm running smoothly as possible during the winter, while her husband was away working for the gold mines in Nevada.

These are lives that deserve to be remembered.