Genealogy has been described as beginning as an interest, later becoming a hobby, then growing into a passion, and finally developing into an obsession. Once one is addicted, there is no known cure.
For many, an awareness of family history serves, apart from general curiosity, the need to understand the forces that have shaped you. It provides a sense of personal identity, an understanding of who you are and where you came from.
My own obsession with genealogy started about 1960 as an adolescent after hearing family stories from a great uncle Andrew Dixon (1907-2002), the de facto historian for my mother’s Dixon family. Among his photographs of and brief accounts about later generations of Dixons, there was as well a rather rudimentary family tree listing various Dixon ancestors going back to 1745.
The Old Dixon Family Tree (ODFT), as it came to be known, had been found towards the end of World War I by my uncle and his brothers in an abandoned McGillivray Township farmhouse formerly occupied by an aunt and uncle of the boys. Deciding to explore what was left of the house and rummage about inside, the family tree was discovered amongst various apparently discarded papers.
John Dixon, father of the orphaned Dixon brothers was born in Weston, Ontario where all members of the family eventually settled after their 1818 arrival in Canada from England. John ended up in McGillivray Township after his recently widowed mother Margaret Dixon (1810-1894) moved there from Weston with her seven children in 1849. The belief that the brothers compiled the family tree is because as young men they are known to have kept in touch and even visited with the many Weston members of the family. The marriages and issue of those Weston relatives have been documented as well as those of the McGillivray Township Dixons. No other member of the McGillivray Township branch of the family, it is believed, would likely have had such extensive knowledge.
Andrew Orr and John Thomas Dixon, lifelong bachelors, around 1901 eventually settled in the United States, Andrew Orr dying in California of tuberculosis while in his early thirties and William John, eventually dropping out of sight, likely dying somewhere in the United States sometime after 1943 when he was last heard from. Although it is impossible to know for certain now well over a century later if one or both brothers had a hand in compiling the family tree, they seem to be the most likely authors. That is both on account of their previously mentioned Weston connection and on account of no other member of the tightly knit McGillivray Township Dixons ever having come forward to take credit after the discarded family tree was discovered.
Although not completely accurate, the ODFT for the most part has been proven to be generally so, many entries having been confirmed in searches of various archival records. It also has served as a useful road map in narrowing geographic areas in which archival research should be concentrated. Without it, it is unlikely, for example, that the precise location of the Dixon family’s roots in England would ever be known.
Apart from the usefulness of names and places mentioned, intriguing notations such as “fought at Battle of Waterloo”, “married four times”, “got whole of large fortune”, and “Captain South African War” clearly suggested there were many interesting Dixon lives that were worth exploring further. In the years that followed, extensive research managed to flesh out the stories of many of these ancestors and their descendants—their accomplishments and their challenges.
But for the ODFT pointing the way, I would have never learned that one Dixon was in the first class to graduate Canada’s Royal Military College. Another, an Inspector of Customs in Belleville involved in a gunfight with a smuggler who was shot and killed, for a time faced a charge of murder. Another, a recently impoverished widow, walked with her seven children in tow over 100 miles from Toronto to begin a new life in another county. Yet another was transported as a teenager to Australia from England for theft. Even the brothers who are thought to have compiled the ODFT have a story worth telling—Andrew Orr as a California fruit farmer who died quite young and William John as a feckless delusional wanderer who eventually dropped out of sight.
Discovering the identity of ancestors often seems to give people an added sense of self-identity after learning of past lives that, for better or worse, are part of them. At the very least it provides a context to life beyond the present. Memoirist Maya Angelou once wrote: "I have great respect for the past. If you don't know where you've come from, you don't know where you're going." It seems there are a lot of people today who want to know where they've come from. Following a genealogy craze that started with Alex Haley's best seller Roots, genealogy is said to be the second most popular hobby after gardening and second most visited website category after pornography. Brothers Andrew Orr and William John Dixon were well clearly decades ahead of it all with their invaluable circa 1900 Old Dixon Family Tree.
David Arntfield
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