An Unjust Will

 Family bickering over the terms of a will is not an uncommon occurrence.  The February 2, 1860 will of James Dixon, termed unjust by some of his family, was one such case.

James Dixon Signature On 1860 Will

I have previously written about James Dixon (1771 – 1862), my earliest known Canadian ancestor who emigrated from Yorkshire about 1818 with his third wife (he was by then twice a widower) along with seven of his children.  Most of his Canadian life was spent in Etobicoke Township where he and many of his sons bought lands and farmed on what became and is still known as Dixon Road.  All Dixon farms were in close proximity to what is to-day Toronto’s main airport.

This great great great grandfather (my mother was a Dixon) would father three more children in Canada, be widowed again, and then later briefly marry for a fourth and final time.  By the time of his death he had fathered fifteen children by three different wives and seems to have also outlived his fourth wife from whom he had been separated.  Because five children had died as infants or children, four others had predeceased him as adults, and the eldest, though surviving his ninety-one year old father) had remained in England and gone his separate way, there were left only five children, three sons and two daughters, for consideration by James in his last will and testament.  His decision was to favour one to the almost exclusion of all others.

James’ seemingly harsh decision may be rooted in both the mores of the day and the personal circumstances of his son Richard (1811 – 1882) who received the bulk of his father’s estate.  In those days, married daughters tended to receive only modest bequests or legacies since their husbands were expected to provide for them.  Sons who stayed on the farm tended to inherit more than sons who did not.  In other cases, family dynamics tended to favour one particular son.  Although it is now a matter of speculation, all of these factors appear to have influenced James when he made his will. 

After rather unusually appointing four executors, James left his home farm of one hundred acres and all other property to son Richard subject to his  paying almost niggardly legacies to James’ other two surviving sons and somewhat more generous legacies to his two surviving daughters and their descendants. 

Daughters Jane (Dixon) Ibbotson (1817 – Aft 1888) and Rebecca (Dixon) Potter (1822 – 1898) were each to receive a legacy of £10 per year for life with an additional two sums of £50 to be shared equally by their children as each daughter died.  Jane had five and Rebecca nine surviving children eventually entitled to this distribution.  Since both sisters outlived Richard by many years, it fell to Richard’s heirs in later years to fulfil this continuing obligation which had been a condition of Richard’s original estate entitlement.   

Sons Anthony (1819 – 1878) and John (1809 - 1880) were each left £5 from their father’s estate of £1246/15s as their only bequest.   Anthony had forged a career as Collector of Customs at various Ontario ports and it was perhaps considered that he, reasonably well off and with no interest in farming, did not need to benefit.  John’s snub is, however, at first blush, more difficult to understand.

John and Richard were full brothers, their mother being James’ second wife.   (The other heirs, Jane, Anthony, and Rebecca were children of James’ third marriage.) John had continued with farming and in fact owned property near his father.  He also had once been quite close to his brother Richard, both for a time operating an early brewery in the area and also a lumber business.  Despite this early working relationship, the brothers eventually quarrelled and had a falling out.  Reminiscences of James’ granddaughter Rebecca (Potter) Dixon (1856 -1938) who had married her first cousin, a son of John, were as follows:

“Mother said they worked together until John was married and then they quarrelled.  The two families were always enemies. … The two wives never agreed. … ”

It may be that James took sides in this quarrel and chose to effectively disinherit John.  The more plausible explanation, however, is that he was keeping a promise made years before.  Rebecca (Potter) Dixon in her reminiscences continues:

“He (Richard) was chopping wood and cut his leg.  Old Dr. Deluke said he must have it cut off.  Grandfather begged him to (have it amputated) and said ‘Richard I will see you well provided for’.  The brute of a Doctor cut it off and never gave him anything.”

It seems that James may have simply been an honourable man making good on the promise made to his son so many years before.  Since it has also been said that Richard, as a dutiful son, kept his father in his later years, James no doubt was expressing his gratitude for this as well.  Not all the family, however, was so charitable.  The reminiscences continue.

“Grandfather left everything to Oliver’s father (Richard).  Uncle Anthony would have broken his will but Uncle John … would not help out.  He didn’t want anything; he wanted for mother and Aunt Jane. … Grandfather left mother and Aunt Jane $40.00 a year (roughly the equivalent of the £10 left under the old monetary system).  It was an unjust will.  Mother (Rebecca) thought lots of her half-brother but she never complained.”

Just how Anthony believed he could “have broken” the will” made more than two years before James’ death is unclear. Although the family never seems to have ever suggested that there was testamentary incapacity, it may be that there was some unproven belief that coercion or undue influence was involved.  Although this is unlikely, it must be said, however, that the will is in some respects unusual The daughters and grandchildren benefitting under the will all lived in the United States and had done so for a good part of, and in some cases all of, their lives.  Their contact with James would have been minimal.  Other grandchildren, the issue of sons who had predeceased James, all lived nearby but received nothing. 

James Dixon Estate Inventory

Although James’ testamentary motivation may never be conclusively known, a probated copy of the will found in the Public Archives of Ontario, provides an interesting glimpse into the contents of James’ estate.  The most significant asset was the one hundred acre home farm (Lot 21, Concession 2, Etobicoke Township) which was valued at £1200.  The remaining £46/15s, of which £33 was claimed for rents due (likely some of the farm was rented out), is no doubt consistent with the modest belongings one would expect of a retired elderly farmer living with his son.  The inventory of personal effects was meticulously set out right down to a sugar kettle and a dung fork.   His most valuable belonging was a clock valued at £5.

The real estate Richard was fortunate enough to inherit stayed in his family for almost a century as a working farm.  Sometime during the 1950s his heirs sold it just as development along Dixon Road was starting.  No doubt they and all those Dixon relatives who did not benefit under the so called “unjust will” would to-day be staggered by the value of James’ modest one hundred acre farm and its nearby neighbour, Canada’s busiest airport.

 

David Arntfield

An Inconvenient Truth

 For the longest time, very little was known about David Stratton, a great great grandfather about whom I have previously written. All I really had was his name.  That name had been supplied by my paternal grandmother Beatrice (Clarke) Arntfield (1896-1987) who had emigrated from England with her parents in 1906.   She told me that her mother’s maiden name had been Vickers and that her maternal grandfather, as she understood it, was David Stratton.

If my grandmother knew or was curious about the name discrepancy (one would have expected her mother’s maiden name to have been Stratton as well), she never said.  Genealogy for many people is a late twentieth century interest.  My impression is that my grandmother, never having known her grandfather, was simply passing on what little she had been told without any particular interest in or thought about surname differences.

My grandmother, despite her strong streak of tolerance, would have been aghast to learn that her mother was one of three illegitimate daughters born to David Stratton and her grandmother Sarah Ann Vickers.  Illegitimate births until recently always carried with them a certain stigma, society generally considering any birth outside the confines of marriage as disgraceful and immoral. Some historical context, however, paints a more sympathetic picture of what occurred.

According to various archival sources now available, David Stratton had been born about 1825 in the town of Luton, Bedfordshire, England about 30 miles north of London.  On September 11^th, 1847 at about age 22 he married Hannah Rodwell, also 22, and already pregnant.  By 1849 two children had been born who would die as infants.  At the time of the 1861 census David and Hannah are shown together with now two new children.  For reasons now unknown, it seems the marriage was in trouble.

Sarah (Vickers) Stratton

Divorce was all but unknown in Victorian England.  Until 1857 a private act of Parliament, an expensive and difficult process to which the poor had no access, was the sole route available to legally dissolve a marriage.  Even after rudimentary divorce legislation was enacted, it remained a costly procedure beyond the means of a common labourer such as David Stratton.  The 1861 census taken on April 7^th of that year listed David still together with his first family.  Within a year, however, when about 37 years of age, he was with much younger 23-year- old Sarah Ann Vickers (1838 – 1919) with whom he fathered his first child, my great grandmother Sarah Ann Vickers (1862 – 1931), born on March 15^th 1862.  Was David a womanizer smitten by the considerably younger Sarah Ann?  Was Sarah Ann some sort of femme fatale who lured David from a perfectly sound marriage?  Or, had the marriage, for reasons now unknown, simply irretrievably broken down without today’s panacea of divorce being an available economic option?  

For whatever the reason, and no doubt carrying considerable social stigma with them, David and Sarah Ann began functioning as a couple "living in sin" as it was then called.  Sarah was euphemistically  listed on subsequent census records as a boarder.  Two more daughters were born to the couple in following years while first wife Hannah carried on alone in Luton with her two children.

Hannah eventually died and was buried in Luton on October 1st, 1890 at the age of 65.  Finally David could make an “honest woman” out of Sarah Ann with whom he had now lived for almost 30 years.  On October 27th, 1890, 26 days after Hannah’s burial, David Stratton and Sarah Ann Vickers married, he being properly described as a widower and she as a spinster, albeit the mother of three now grown daughters.     

Sarah Ann (Vickers) Clarke

David Stratton would die in 1900 and Sarah Ann Vickers in 1919.  Their three illegitimate daughters, Sarah Ann, Minnie, and Lizzie, were never known to have spoken of the illegitimacy later made right by the eventual marriage of their parents.  Twenty-first century thinking would suggest that any stigma surrounding their births now more properly rests with a society in which people were expected to remain in broken marriages on account of divorce being an option only available to the wealthy.