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Hi Peahen, I have submitted all the necessary paperwork that they have asked for and they have confirmed that the paperwork is complete. I phoned the Ontario. Ca customer service number last week and after 5 minutes of confirming everything I submitted to them, the lady put me on hold for a few minutes, then said she was going to send the researchers an email to push them along. She advised if I did not hear anything within 4 weeks to ring back. It's all taking so long!!! I am wondering if his mother even registered his birth in Canada. When she brought him back to Crumlin aged 3 months old, could she have done so without a birth certificate?

So pleased to hear this and you WILL get the information in due course. Your mind is working 20 to the dozen so rest up and consolidate and all will fall into place.

I would like to thank Joonie for her tenacity and help she gives all Canadian requests - it is she who helped me and the information on the Canadian Site.

I am always waiting eagerly for your results!!

I would like to say that if you think this is taking time, try the Russian Archives - months before a reply of any sort and then it says you will hear in 20 weeks! I have learnt a lot - mainly in the area of patience.

Thanks helpers - better than Ancestry!

Peahen

Another thought is the distance between Quebec and Toronto - over 800 kms - how did they travel - must have had help - thinking church here.

Peahen

The arrival document stated she was going to Salvation Army, Toronto. I know they had a big operation going at that time when they brought over child workers and adults to fill gaps in their industry, mainly as domestics, servants. I am guessing they took them en mass to their intended destinations.

Just recapping - Salvation Army Records - have you been i n touch with them? They keep their records going a long way back.

www.salvationarmy.ca/contact/

Just in case, go into the site and see what they offer by way of the schemes they ran for bring migrants to Canada. You can google them in Toronto too!

Good luck.
Peahen

Well today the birth certificate arrived!!! It's bitter sweet. There is no father's name on the certificate, just an empty section. To say I am gutted, is an understatement!

There are a few strange anomalies on it - FULL NAME OF CHILD is filled in John Kenneth McKee, however you can plainly see under the McKee, it says Kerr. The McKee is written over in a heavier ink, with different handwriting to the rest!

Section 19 - CHILDREN OF THE MOTHER - Margaret has written ONE for children born alive, when this was her second birth.

A THIRD style of handwriting has scored out TORONTO as residence and written, what looks like Mimico, Ontario.

Any input to this would be welcome :-S

Mimico is part of Toronto:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimico

Mimico is a neighbourhood and a former municipality in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, being located in the south-west area of Toronto on Lake Ontario. It is in the south-east corner of the former Township (and later, City) of Etobicoke, and was an independent municipality from 1911 to 1967.

Mimico is the oldest of the former Lakeshore Municipalities. The Town of Mimico was established by a plan of sub-division in 1856, but was not sub-divided from the former Township of Etobicoke until 1911. The land area of Mimico originated mainly from three family farms, namely: Stock Estate (North of Portland), Hendry Estate (between Royal York and Queens Ave), Van Every Estate (between Royal York Rd and Dwight Ave). Mimico was an independent municipality until 1967, when it was amalgamated into the new Borough of Etobicoke (later, City of, in 1984), which was itself amalgamated in 1998 into the current city of Toronto.

Maybe he had to be registered as McKee if Mr Kerr wasn't willing to be named as his father, and the entry had to be corrected.

ArgyllGran is certainly right, it would be as in England: no father named if parents not married and father not present to register.

Possibly she gave the father's name first, and then came the question 'are you married?' or something like that, or she gave her name and it wasn't Kerr ...

You're actually very lucky the 'mistake' was made so there is a record there of the father's surname (as reported by the mother) even though there should not have been! :-)

For the 'children born alive' question, my only experience with that is on a couple of Australian birth certificates in my family c1890. From memory since I don't have them handy, I think the 'children born alive' question refers to previous children, i.e. not counting the child being registered. So 'one' would be the correct answer when the birth of a second child was registered, I think.

Thank you for your replies everyone. I guess I will never find out what happened to John Kerr? Why leave Canada with a young baby but not his father. I was thinking perhaps that her employers could not keep her on because of the baby and then there was also a recession hitting the country. It's strange that you can have an actual address of someone but it leads to no information whatsoever about him :-( :-(

Sandra -
back in September you said,
"Maybe he just decided he didn't want to be a father and left them. That could be why they came back alone, or maybe he died between Jan - April? Or maybe he was married ."

Any of these are possible - but it's so frustrating knowing we'll never find out the reason!

Sandra, women throughout history, lots and lots of women, and their children, have been abandoned by the fathers of their children. Until recently, they had very little recourse, and of course had access to very few resources of their own to support their children. Childcare and working did not go together well in the 1930s.

A woman alone with a child in a country where she had no family at all, like your Margaret, would very likely be in desperate circumstances. Returning to Ireland would have been a sensible move, and maybe the only real option open to her, if she wanted to keep her child.

I see I haven't mentioned DNA yet. :-)

Do you by any chance have a brother? Or does your dad's brother Frank have a son?

Male-line descendants of the mysterious John Kerr would carry his YDNA, probably an identical copy. If you have such relations - a son of a son of John Kerr - testing that person could possibly find a match in the YDNA database at Family Tree DNA, for instance. That is the most accurate way of finding genetic matches, but it works only for male-line descendants, to identify a common male ancestor.

The other possibility is autosomal DNA, which Ancestry tests for its stupid ethnicity analyses, but also does matching, as I understand it. Family Tree also does this testing, with its 'Family Finder' test. It can identify genetic relations possibly as distant as 5th cousins. If a match is found, the legwork has to be done to try to figure out what that match is (and in particular which of the tested person's parents' side it comes from), but it can be a valuable pointer.

Matches can only be found if (a) they exist (e.g. the family has not dwindled to a single line, as one of mine did when the only son, born c1820, of an only son of an only son was the only one left of what were once several families in a village), and (b) someone related has tested.

But it is not outrageously expensive, and it can be particularly likely to yield a match if the possible match is in the US, or to a lesser extent Canada or Australia, where people are much more likely to be searching for ancestral info than people in the UK and Ireland are.

Give that a think. A test might very well turn up nothing and nobody at all, but the only way to know is to try it!

wow never thought of that! Actually I have 6 brothers, so plenty to choose from. :-D

Wait til Father's Day and FTDNA will have a sale on YDNA testing. You start with Y37 to see whether there are any likely-looking matches. If so, you can work with them to try to refine the match to see how distant the connection might be.

The reason my sig line says "Researching Hore/Hoar/Hoare esp. St Austell/Roche Cornwall" is that in trying to figure out which of my ancestor's surnames might be his 'true' paternal line - the surname his birth was registered in or the one he assumed as an adult - I discovered that his male-line descendant's YDNA is a very close match (almost certainly with a common ancestor within 300 years before his birth) with a completely different surname/family.

https://www.familytreedna.com/products/y-dna#compare

You can get all kinds of help at that site from people in the surname project your brother's YDNA may match with. And if you decide to give it a try, I can give you info about iron-clad protection for his privacy at the site unless he chooses to disclose info. (You can administer his 'kit', as I do for my male rellies who have tested.)

The surname group for Kerr is called Carr (probably because most participants are in the US and immigrants there tended to phoneticize their names - my match's grandfather had abandoned the 'Hore' spelling for instance :-) ).

https://www.familytreedna.com/groups/carr/about

'The Carr Surname Project is open to everyone searching their Carr paternal line family history. All phonetic variations of Carr are included in the project. Phonetic variations of Carr include Kerr, Karr, Carre, Keir, Corr, among others. Membership requires testing the YDNA of a male with paternal line descent (father to son in each generation) that has used the Carr surname for several generations. The goal of this project is to unite Carr families around the world with the lost Carr cousins who share their recent paternal line ancestry. Studies show us that the geographical origins of people using the Carr surname today include Scotland, Ireland, France, Germany and elsewhere. We also find that the spelling of the Carr surname across generations within the same family often includes many phonetically equivalent variations. YDNA identifies paternal lines that may share a genealogically significant recent paternal line ancestor. Using this information and traditional genealogy methods has helped many family historians extend their family history back generations.'

And if there is no match with any Kerr, then you may still find a match with another surname, and be left, as I am, trying to figure out what the heck the connection is. :-)

Hi everyone who has kindly helped me in the past. I have decided, after chewing it over for almost a year, that I can't let this lie. I need to find out what happened to my grandfather John Kerr! I have today contacted the Salvation army in Canada to see if they have records of my grandmother in the hope it might lead me to some sort of disclosure about John Kerr and his whereabouts

I do have a question for you very knowledgeable people! What records would have existed in 1929 which could find him. All I know is his address 580 Ontario Street?? When my father was born in 1931, his mother was in Mimico.

Don't know if this might help ?? Probably not if he was just a lodger.

https://archive.org/details/torontocitydirectory1929



EDIT:

From the above Directory, Wm McClung was at 580 Ontario street in 1929.

Related threads:

https://www.genesreunited.co.uk/boards/board/ancestors/thread/557032

https://www.genesreunited.co.uk/boards/board/ancestors/thread/521086

Argyll Gran is it possible to search by name, if I knew he lived in mimico in 1931?

Yes, it's possible to search by name.

However -
there are lots of Kerrs, but
a) we don't know Mr Kerr's first name (do we ??)

b) all the streets of Toronto are arranged alphabetically, without specifying which area of Toronto they're in, so you'd have to know the names of the streets in the Mimico area to be able to see if there were any Kerrs listed in those streets.





https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimico#Main_streets

Main streets

Lake Shore Boulevard is a four-lane arterial that runs parallel to the Lake Ontario waterfront from east to west, and is primarily residential within the Mimico area. The major north-south route is Royal York Road.
The original naming convention for Mimico side-streets was for English community names: Buckingham, Windsor (now Blue Goose Street), Newcastle, Portland, Burlington, Manchester, Oxford, Dorchester (now in The Queensway), Southampton (Cavell), Salisbury Ave. (Park Lawn Rd.), Torrington (Grand Ave.), Cambridge (to the North became Mendota), Coventry (to the East became Queens Ave.).
Some later streets were named for Mimico settlers: O'Donnell, Van Every, Robert Hendry (Wheatfield), George (Hendry), Pidgeon (western part of Stanley), Howland (Ourland), Stock's Side Road (Queen St., later The Queensway); and more recently for former mayors of Mimico: Skelton, Norris. The Griggs and Edwards retirement homes are also named for former mayors.

His first name was John ?