Hiram Meets and Marries Cordelia Gunnis [Guinness]

Unveiling of the bust of General Isaac Brock in front of the 
courthouse in Brockville, Leeds, Ontario, Canada.

This work is full of swings and roundabouts. You can gain some here and you lose some there. You have to keep trying to prove yourself wrong to be sure that you just might be right. It means a lot of work. I have had to chase down several false leads to ensure that I might be on the right track. Fortunately, the tools are getting better each month.

Take the Automated Genealogy site for instance [Click here for the 1852 Census]. Stumbling on to it saved me a great deal of trouble. I put in 'Hays' and got a hit for a 'Hiram' in Dundas county. Interesting bloke. Immigrated from the United States and lived in Dundas creating generations of people to follow up. But, once you realise,  after reviewing the data of a couple of decades that this could not be our guy, you write him off the list. And, on it goes.

The other Hiram Hays was too young. But, there was a Henry of the right age in Emsley Township, Leeds. So, I followed the link. It led me to a transcribed page that was easy to read quickly. However, you could activate the split view and see the original scanned page from the census book. There are a lot of people doing very tedious work so that we can find our relatives. They deserve our thanks.

What did I find? A lead which was both positive and negative. First the negative, there were no other members of a family with him:

Hays, Henry, Labourer, Ireland, Church of England, 55, M. [He's still there, single, never married, in 1861.]

But, this was positive as well. I had a possible direction to follow, if this was the Henry Hays from Richmond. It meant that Henry was not our likely progenitor. And, it gave me a putative age for Hiram. As I had suspected, they were probably born before the Acts of Union passed in the Parliaments of Great Britain and Ireland in 1800 and taking effect in 1801.

Now, I have to admit that I found a stray bit of interesting information at this point. I cannot discover the source because the link is broken. But, on one of the large names and numbers sites, I found an interesting tidbit on this page of the Sorted By Name site.

HAYS, Hiram (father), and Jane [no surname shown], had a baby, Jane HAYS born 29 Dec 1845 in Elmsley, Ontario, Canada.

I've learned to use the shotgun approach every now and then to break of the monotony of a systematic gleaning. So, I knew that there was something to be found in Leeds. This is part of the positive. I knew that there was a Hiram there somewhere and finding Henry convinced me to investigate further at the Automated Genealogy site; thus, in went a query for Hayes. This is what I found:

Hayes, Jane, Ireland, Church of England, 48, F [Note: Widowed]
Hayes, Hirem, Canada, Church of England, 19, M
Hayes, Margaret, Canada, 10, F
Hayes, June, Canada, 7, F

This was actually in Wolfred Township, Grenville County, Ontaria. But, not to worry, Grenville and Leeds are adjoined. In fact, they are later joined into one county. This is the 1852 Census (begun in 1851 and finished in 1852). So, June or Jane would have been born in 1845. It may be reasonably assumed that Hiram senior died sometime between 1845 and 1852.

Just a few short years later, another event of importance to the family occurs. According to an entry on page 427 of Reid's Marriage Notices, Hiram Hays marries Caroline [Cordelia] Gunnis in Brockville, Leeds, Ontario in the Wesley Chapel on 2 October 1854. The Reverend R. Whitney officiated.

Is this Cordelia Gunnis, the girl with the unfortunate name, the same Cordelia found with Hirom in Brant, Bruce, Ontario and is she the mother of our John Hayes? I'll make the connection in the next posts. And, yes, Gunnis is really spelled: Gunniss, Gennis, Guiness, Guinness and so forth, as well. With the right accentuation, it is easily discerned as the same name [anyone who has been to New Zealand knows the interesting differences that can occur in pronunciation]. Same family origins as well, magennis [Mac Aonghusa], descendants of Angus. Their territory was traditionally the County Down of Ulster Province.

Attribution of Image:

See page for author [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons