Farming methodists

Not exactly work related, but it is research...

I've been researching my family history online off and on, over the last few months. I was started by my husband - his Jewish European family history seems more compelling to me, but he's expressed interest in my ancestors. So I've been plugging along little by little, and gradually became fascinated.

My mother's family I've always been more familiar with - they go back to England, mostly, and seem to have done various English things over there in places with names like Sedgely and Nottinghamshire.

My father's side was a mystery. He's from a blended family of 9 kids, and it's only while doing this research that I've figured out which were full or half- siblings, on which side. One uncle died in childhood, and I discovered his name just this year. Before that was a blank - we were only in very occasional touch with the surviving aunts and uncles, and my grandparents died before I was born. An aunt showed me a picture of my grandfather, once; my father kept none.

Anyways, what I've found, mostly, going back, is Scots-Irish, Methodist farmers. Wesleyan Methodists, no less, at least that's how they list themselves, all farming and marrying and breeding in this little area of midwestern Ontario where my father came from. A set of great-great grandparents had 13 children, and most of them reproduced themselves too, on down to my father's family of 9.

I have this mental image now of farmers, a whole army of them, with their pitchforks and beards, their wives in long prairie dresses, old ones and young, standing on the land, all looking vaguely somehow like my father. All going to church on Sunday, and getting up at 5 to feed the cows. Some mix of my father's few reminiscences, Little Houe on the Prairie, and Green Acres.

No wonder he fled.