My first historical discovery:

As a disclaimer, when you get through this blog post you will probably be thinking that this is the smallest historical discovery in history, and that it has no real importance to the historical world. You know what, that may be true. But it’s one tiny step for history, and all I really got as a historian in training.

So I have been working pretty dam hard on this LACH project. There have been many poorly slept nights over the fact that my house is “lame”. But I did not give up; I really wanted to find something. As a historian who hopes to unleash historical scandals that have been hidden to the world, I may have been approaching my subject with a view already in my mind. I know, very bad historian of me. Ideally, if I could have fabricated a history for it, I would have made it a house where illegal booze was brewed during the prohibition, and the Winder family would have sold the alcohol  from the back of their store in cans marked paint. Yes, I have a little bit of an over active mine, and have been loving “Board Walk Empire”. I did not come across anything of this sort by the way.

So I did the assignment through the steps that were laid down to us. I first went to the ARCC and looked through the Fire Insurance Plans, nothing there changed. Then I went through the bounded copies of the City Directories from 1961-2010. Nothing special there. It was a tad sad though, whenever the husband died (which always came before the wife) the wife would have to move out, probably because she could not afford the rent on her own. Then I faced my fear of microfilm and got the Archivists to teach me, and then re-teach me how to load it. I had some issues with it; I swear my finger almost got sucked in at one point. By the end I did not mind the City Directories on the microfilm, but on that first day when I was looking at them for three hours, I felt so sea sick. What I came across was that in almost every year there were new tenants in my house, and that they were all working class people. I only had George L. Winder live in my house from 1906 to 1911, and while he was living there he did not even own it, it was his father’s, Edward Jr. So even though I had a Winder property, I barely had them living there.

Next I looked at some of the Assessments Roles available at ARCC, and then I went down to Service Ontario. They gave me the wrong number, the number was for Lucan. I will not even get into how much that angered me. So I had to go back to Service Ontario a few more times. Once I got the right number, I had the hard task of determining which Winder is my Winder, no easy feet since they all give each other the same names. I also had to distinguish which property on the lot was mine, I figured that out quite easily though, it’s the one 78 feet from the end.

So once I had all the information collected I was pretty depressed. Nothing cool came up in my research. And since I really want to do well in my masters courses this was not sitting well with me. So I went to the London Room, and used their computers to access Ancestry.com. From there I started entering names from my vast list of tenets, hoping something would poop up.  Trying to research about a city you don’t know much about has its difficulties.

The tenant for the year 1890 is listed as Alfred Wheable, A brakeman on the Grand Trunk Railway. An enlistment paper came up for him on the website. I was all excited maybe I found some great Canadian war hero. Coincidence, I was there on November 11. So I asked the librarian how I can find out more about certain regiments, and people’s military careers. She asked me for whom I wanted this information for, and when I told her she asked me if that was Geoffrey Alfred Wheable’s father. I replied, um who? She repeated the name, like I should know. Then I told her I was not from London. She said there is a school named after him, and that he was a big-shot in the school board.

Alfred Wheable's enlistment form.

I was over the moon, a famous Londoner living in my house. I was so pumped; I headed off to the catalogue boxes to see what I could find out about him. In the London Room there are two “Coronation Souvenir” books one for the year 1937 and the other for 1953. They contain photos and mini-bios of London’s elites, pretty much just men, and some photos of the Royals. Kind of weird in my opinion, are they claiming a similar elite status in London Ontario, to that of the status of the Royals in London England?  In the books they had Geoffrey Wheable’s birthday as February 21, 1891.  I then tried to find his birth certificate on Ancestry.com. I found it, but it was very different. His middle name is written as “Praceadman”. Though I will later discover that his grandmother’s maiden name was Proudman, it could have just been a wrong spelling. However, his birth certificate had the same birth date as the coronation books.

At this point in my research I did not have every year from the directories as I pretty much do now (some are missing from the microfilm). One of the years I did not have was 1891. Surged with hope that I found a person to claim for my house's associated value I packed up my papers in a flash and scurried home to get my car so I could drive to the ARCC.

Geoffrey Pracafman Wheable written. Bottom, second from the right.

This was a high point in my researching; I skipped down Dundas then up Richmond to get to my appartment. I went down to my parking spot and grabbed my car and drove to school. I busted in to the ARCC, and on like most Fridays, was the only researcher in there. The archivist asked me what I was going to use today, and I told her the City Directories. Since I was so excited about the fact that Wheable may have lived in my house I shared this information with her. She made me a little sad, she said it did not matter if he only lived there a few years; it was a harsh comment in my mind. I brushed off the remark as the pages of the City Directory zipped by, and I waited to find the beginning of the year 1891. Sadly, Alfred Wheable is not listed as the residents for that year; however, I decided to find him in the directory for that year and was surprised to find that he was not at the house that was listed on Geoffrey’s birth certificate either. My historian senses went off at this point, there has been some poorly documented sources, what should I and should I not trust?

I went home, defeated, to eat and be cheered up by fiction. After what I thought was the big breakthrough for this project, I had bubkiss, I was one sad little historian. I was going to go for a whole fetes angle, which was “he was a fetes in my house, and since he is born in February, he might have lived there for a few days since you don’t know when the data was collected”, but that angle was not very popular.

So I went back to the London Room to see if I could find something else. The very nice librarian who told me who Geoffrey Wheable was, had done some researching to see what the library had on him. Since she knew from last time that I found his birth certificate hard to read and confusing because it had a different middle name, she got me the microfilm reel “Index of Births and Stillbirths 1869-1910”. As I went through it I was socked to discover that his birthday was February, 21, 1890. THIS MEANT HE WAS BORN IN MY HOUSE!!! What! What! Party in the library!

Now you may be asking yourself, how do I know that this document is accurate? Well, unlike his birth certificate that was written in 1929, this index was written in 1890.  Now you may be wondering to yourself, how did this confusion come about? My guess is that since his birth was not documented right away, and his sister, Glady, was born on December 20, 1891, people got the years confused. Also, once I looked at the birth certificate again I noticed that all the other children on the page were born in 1890.

So this is my first historical discovery, the correct birth year for Geoffrey Wheable.

Now you may be wondering, who in the world he is. Here is the point form summary of his life. Began his career as a teacher at Chesley Ave. He later goes on to be the Superintendent of the London School Board for over 25 years. During which time he helped London deal with the demand from the baby-boom population.  Additionally, he helped pioneer many new pedagogy methods in the London Public School system. Wheable stated his influence on teaching to be “from a system of simply imparting information, to that of training the child to think and to use his own judgement.”[1] During World War I he enlisted and served in France and Belgium with 1^st Canadian Infantry Battalion C.E.F.  Wheable was wounded during Passchendaele in November 1917, for which he was awarded the Military Cross.

My angle: The significance of having Wheable born in the house is that it helps strengthen the claim that Wheable was from London. Though Wheable is known for being born in London, he spends his formative years in Port Colborne. Preserving the house where Wheable was born is vital in sustaining the London-Wheable connection.

So after making my first historical discovery I think I have earned my patches. I plan on rocking a cardigan with some elbow patches during my LACH presentation on Wednesday; since I am now one bad ass historian.

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[1] “Wheable Now 25 Years in Ontario Education,” The London Free Press, May 6, 1951, Historical Series Scrapbook volume 7, page 80, call number: r971.326.