MySource:Srblac/Hannah Butt Taylor Letter

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MySource Hannah Butt Taylor Letter
Author Hannah Butt Taylor
Abreviation Hannah Butt Taylor Letter
Coverage
Place Huron, Ontario, Canada
Year range -
Surname Butt
Publication information
Publication Letter, March 9, 1941
Citation
Hannah Butt Taylor. Hannah Butt Taylor Letter. (Letter, March 9, 1941).
Repository
Name Scott Black and Betsy Feaster Genealogical Library
Address Fort Wayne Indiana
Call # Copy on file

Filmore, March 9, 1941

Dear John,

Received your letter yesterday and glad to hear you felt so young. I knew you were about 60 as I was 15 when your parents were married and I kept track of you since but the others I just guessed about. I admire a big family. You raise them then they grow up and scatter but they are doing something towards keeping up their country. I am coming to the close of a childless life and I can't see that I have ever done any good and I leave no one to do any good for my wasted life. I should have been married when I was twenty and I could have been although I was never very handsome but there is never a Jack without a Joan and I let my Jack get away. I couldn't bear to leave home. We had a good home and a good time. Lots of work and lots of fun. Plenty good clothes and plenty to eat and no restrictions. I have a good memory and I love history like my father (Elam Butt) for that.

I never remember of my father speaking of his grandparents but I have heard him speak of his uncles on the Butt side. He had five uncles and his father (Joseph Butt) was the smallest and shortest and he was six feet tall and weighed 175. They lived in Dorsetshire, England and they worked at trades or in factories in town. I think the name of the town was Poole. They were all good workers and good singers. People used to say the Butt's were born with hymnbooks in their hands and singing instead of crying.

My grandfather's name was Joseph and he married Sarah Arnold when he was only 18 and Uncle James and Father (Elam), (twins) were born when he was 19 and Uncle Josiah 1 1/2 years after that and Ephriam a year after that until the twins were 17 there were 9 children namely

  1. James (twin)
  2. Elam (twin)
  3. Josiah
  4. Ephriam
  5. Lionel
  6. Eliza
  7. Hannah
  8. Henry
  9. and Stephen

Note: Current records (based on Butt GED Johnson), disagree somewhat. They show the birth order as (Eliza, Henry, Lionel, Hannah, Ephraim) vs. (Ephraim, Lionel, Eliza, Hannah, Henry). Also, Ephraim is listed as having a twin sister Jane who died at the age of three.

By that time my grandmother who was the daughter of a gentleman, got so tired of being snubbed by her rich sister, made grandfather leave England and go to Canada. The twins were born Sept 24, 1824 and grandfather came to Canada in 1841. He was only 36 then and his wife died and a baby also a week after they arrived in Toronto.

At that time two rich young men by the name of Elliott came to Canada and bought up 1000 acres of bush land near Toronto and they were from Devonshire. They went back and hired a lot of men from Devonshire to come out and they gave them all work as they built a gristmill and saw mill, a store and hospital. They all had trades as carpenters, farmers, blacksmiths and all tradesmen came from, Devonshire to work for them. Grandfather was a cooper (barrel maker) and he hired with them to make flour barrels. He was the only one from Dorsetshire. Then father got in the gristmill, Uncle James in the sawmill and the other boys got jobs too.

Henry Elliott married my mother's cousin and father fell in love with my mother while visiting there and as soon as his trade was learnt they got married. They were both 21. My brothers were all born in Hampton that is the name they gave the new town. They built 4 room cottages and rented them to their employees. Your father was just 6 weeks old when mother prevailed on father to buy land near Exeter. Here father and brothers had taken homesteads and Aunt Mary's husband too.

Father was a good worker but a poor farmer but mother's father and brothers showed Jim how to work as mother's father was a farmer in England and owned a farm but he gave it up and married a blacksmith's daughter called Ann Oke and so his father called that a disgrace. The Oke's were all tradesmen but the Dayman's were gentry. The Butt's were tradesmen too and the Arnold's were gentry so we are half breeds neither gentry or tradespeople (just folks).

Father gave $400.00 for the farm and he ditched, fenced and worked in Pickard's mill in Exeter (Note: see MS 37a: Ransom Pickard Treatise, 1947 for a history of Exeter during this time) and Jim worked the horses and put in the crops with the help of Uncle Humphrey and Billy and father earned enough in the grist mill to pay them both. Father never drove horses if he could get out of it. But he chopped trees down and did anything else that his hands found to do. Jim did the teaming from the time he was ten years old.

Grandfather Butt would never take up land. He said all the earth he wanted was six feet of earth. He got married the second time in Hampton about a year before Uncle James and Father did.

He married a girl (Ann Winn) who had no people around her and she was only 18. Her mother was hired to keep house for two old toughs who worked in the bush for the Elliott's. The mother died and Grandfather took pity on the girl and married her. Father and Uncle James never could acknowledge her and they never cared for her or any of the second family. All the others mixed up together.

There were nine who lived in the second. The first one died. The others were called in rotation

  1. Jane
  2. George
  3. Charles
  4. Mary
  5. Maria
  6. Vianna
  7. Jonah
  8. Mark
  9. and Anjoulettea

They are about the ages of us an Uncle James' family. Jonah was a lovely singer and could play any instrument he could get hold of. He was a carpenter and lived in Brantford. He was married and had a child or two and died before he was 30 and I never heard a word about his wife after.

A girl from Filmore went to work in Weyburn about 20 years ago and married a man called Alfred Butt. I made inquiries and found that he came from Nova Scotia and he didn't know anything about his antecedents but if grandfather's five brothers were as prolific as he there will be Butt's all over England and Australia as two of them went to Australia when father was a boy and grandfather was the only one who came to Canada that father ever knew of any way but they never kept track of one another.

There were three uncles left in England when granddad came to Canada at least that is what I understood. I think granddad was the eldest, as I never heard father speak of the others as being married. When the two left for Australia all the six brothers were at the dock and some one asked them to sing as they would never be all together again. The six stood together and looked so tall and straight and sang How Firm a Foundation so beautifully and feelingly that people said they were like a heavenly choir.
(Note: There are five known brothers, Charles, Robert, Stephen, George and Joseph. George is known to have gone to Australia. The missing sixth brother must be the other.)

Great Uncle George (see note below) was a fighter. He could beat any two other men and was scared of no one. One time three men waylaid him when he was going to see a girl and he had no weapons but his fists. He knocked all three out and one he thought he had killed so he turned back and told the magistrate who sent men out to find out and all three had to be carried to their homes and put under a doctors care. The Butt's are very religious but they fight for the poor and oppressed.
Note: Hannah has a great-uncle George, but he lived in Australia. She also has an uncle George, her father's half-brother.

About 40 years ago there was a great stir amongst the Butt family. It was said there was a great deal of money left by one Phyllis Butt and Uncle Josiah came to father to get the history of their lineage as Ephriam, his son, was going to England to find out about it. Father wouldn't tell him a thing as he said he never knew of a Butt that was fond enough of money as to save up a fortune. So he said it couldn't be any relations of his father or uncles. My father was better off than any of his brothers. My father got a big pumpkin and an axe from his father and his father's blessing which father appreciated. Father was prospered all through his life and he thought it was all because his father blessed him.

When Ephriam Butt went to England he never found a Butt in Dorsetshire so it is hard to say where those others went after the other three left. Father and Uncle James were old enough to go to the boat to see their two uncles off for Australia. (Note: Elam and James were born in England, they moved to Canada when they were 17). People were too busy raising children to keep up any correspondence with their brothers in another land. They would just part never to see or hear of another again.

Father used to say that Aunt Eliza's sons were more like his old uncles than any of the relations. They were big good looking tall 6 footers and lovely singers. They were named Ephriam, William, Joseph, Henry and Philip. Their father was William Palmer, mother's cousin. Mother's people and father's people lived in Hampton for 14 years then they came to Huron County. The Butt's to Goderich and the Dayman's and Oke's to Exeter. Father followed mother's folks. I can only remember the name of one of the old uncles and that was George the fighter.

Love to all, Aunt Hannah Taylor

Tell Maggie Christie that I got the card all o.k.