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Letters: Intro Armstrong—McCoy

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There are letters from James Armstrong to his daughter who was born Mary Sarah Armstrong. Though he often addresses them to her husband William McCoy. This section included items from 1837 to 1844. He was writing from Dublin, Ireland to Upper Canada.

A few are from William's parents Arthur and Mary McCoy who were already living in Canada.

There is a page of land documents sent from the Canada Company in Toronto to William McCoy.

Transmission Note

Apparently at one point (perhaps in the 1950s) the original documents had been haphazardly divided into three bunches and divided among cousins. I have photocopies of the missing items. Not having children of my own, I have given the originals that I received to my niece Vanessa Melle for care and safekeeping.

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When I came onto these letters and docs in 1989, they were in no particular order. The handwriting was often hard to decipher. Having computer skills and plenty of free time, I gradually photocopied, transcribed and sorted. Background research has taken decades.

In my mother's family tree many of the people had quite common names such as William McCoy, John Gibson or Katherine Armstrong. They had nicknames such as Bill, Jack and Kate. Most of them had large families and some married a couple times. That means the research can be quite confusing if one doesn't pay careful attention to dates and locations.

I wish that my grandmother had told me family stories. I wish that I had met my other grandparents. And I wish that I had had a chance to interrogate various aunts, uncles and distant cousins.

Transcription Note

I generally went for the original spelling and punctuation, but in the case of Kate Armstrong's letters I usually transcribe her initial "S" in a word in lower case (she always used upper case for this). The common "fs" combination is shown transcribed as "ss". I saved square brackets, [], for places that I guessed at things missing such as [.] or to show missing parts of a letter. In some places where there are just a few illegible letters I used dashes. I added a lot of punctuation without comment to the letters from Arthur & Nancy McCoy. Their letters were written as one long sentence. {Curley brackets are reserved for my comments such as these.}

I marked items in pencil with my initials and a number. Items received from Margaret Gibson are marked with GM00 id's. Items marked like JW001 were transcribed from photocopies provided by Jim Waldron in 1991. Most of these are in the physical possession of Dan F. Belcher.

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