As many of you know, our Lacey family has been in Salinas since, well, before there was a place called Salinas. According the information I have, my 3rd great-grandfather, Joseph Vanderlip Lacey, first came to California in the late 1850s with his family - his wife, Isabella; children, Mary and James; father, Isaac; mother, Maria; brother, Frederick; and two sisters, Arabella (in the photo on the right) and Augusta.We have a letter written by my great-great uncle, Garth Lacey, which indicates that he believed the family had come from St. Catharine's, Ontario, Canada. Joseph was Garth's grandfather, putting him much closer to the events and much more likely to know at least some of the details of this family.
But none of this tells us how the Lacey family ended up in Canada, what they were doing there, or how long they had been there. In the mid-1800s, it was not uncommon for immigrants to come first to Canada, stay for a few years, then immigrate to the United States. Was this what our Laceys had done?
A look at the 1860 U.S. census was the first clue to our Canadian heritage. In it, the entire Lacey family mentioned above is living in Monterey, California. Every member of the family, with the sole exception of Joseph's wife, is listed as having been born in Canada. If this is true, three generations born in the country would certainly indicate more than a short stopover on the immigration path.
This was good information, and quite exciting to have found. I rushed home that evening, dutifully plugged it into our family tree and then proceeded to promptly do nothing with it. Great going, Colleen.
About four weeks ago, I dusted off this little fact and, just to see what I'd get, googled Thorold. It turns out to be a small town in Ontario, located very close to St. Catharine's. This was looking quite promising as the Canadian home of the Lacey family. Adding the name Lacey to my search turned out to be even more fruitful, with this post from a genealogy forum coming up as the first result. Voila! A Lacey family from Thorold!
But were these our Laceys? The patriarch on this family tree, George Lacey, did have a son named Isaac. The author of the tree does not have a birth date for Isaac Lacey (our Isaac was born about 1804), but does have a marriage date of 1826, to a woman named Maria Larroway (our Isaac's wife was named Maria). So far, so good...but that was all he had on Isaac.
Still, Thorold had only a few hundred residents in the first half of the 1800s. The odds of there being two Isaac Laceys born about the same time, in the same town, who both married a woman named Maria...well, those odds seem pretty small. To confirm, though, I decided to do a bit more research on the rest of the extended Lacey family of Thorold.
In the 1897 "Jubilee History of Thorold, Township and Town," the Lacey family appears several times. Among the information in this book is the following brief mention of Isaac Lacey's sister, Abigail:
"Abigail S. Lacey, wife of Robert W. Hagar and daughter of George and Elizabeth Lacey, was born July 28th, 1801 on lot 117, Thorold Township, and died at Salinas City, California, January 16th, 1884."
Now I was getting excited...what were the odds, even if there I accepted that there were two Isaac Laceys, that the sister of one would end up in the small pioneer town in California as the family of the other Isaac Lacey?
Robert Hagar turns out to have been Abigail Lacey's first husband; her second husband's name was Collins Matthews. With this information, I went back the 1860 U.S. census records. And what do you know...guess who I found living right next to Isaac Lacey in Monterey in 1860? Yup...Abigail Matthews!
So there you have it...our Isaac Lacey appears to be the son of George Lacey and Elizabeth Lee, of Thorold, Ontario, Canada. And before Thorold? Well, it appears that George and Elizabeth immigrated to Canada from New Jersey around the turn of the nineteenth century. Before that? Well, that answer's probably another few rounds of research away...
