I guess you can say I love a mystery, but I love a challenge even more.
I have been reading through old correspondence that I had received over the years, some dating back to 1983. There are just some clues that jump out and catch my attention. In one letter from my Aunt Helen she wrote, "James Howie was William George Howie's brother. They had another brother which went "west" as a young man and was never heard from again - it is believed he met with disaster of some kind." Doesn't that leave you intrigued? It does me. Was he traveling by train, or stage coach? Was he attacked by Indians, or did he join the gold rush? It turns out that William George Howie and James Alexander Howie were just two of seven children. There are three confirmed boys and three girls. One un-legible name. So Helen was correct. His name was John S. Howie, and I still can't find him. Without more details, I probably never will with a common name like John.
The other mystery is very new to me, "The Lost Rider Family." I was recently put in contact with my third cousin Lillian Madelyn Rider. She had sent me a family tree of the RIDERS of Fitch Bay. It begins with the progenitor of the Canadian family, Ezra Bartlett Rider. Who happens to be my 2nd Great Grand Father. He was Helen Desdemonia Rider's father. Prior to this I knew that Ezra had two wives, however I never knew that he had children by his first wife Fanny Chandler. On this tree, RIDERS of Fitch Bay, there is a box that just says 8 children moved to Illinois & Kansas in 1844. I passed over this without much thought as they would be no blood relation to me, and there were no names, until this Thanksgiving holiday when I received an email. Prior to this, I had sent out some requests to get information on locating a Masters Thesis, titled "The RIDERS of Fitch Bay." I was looking for more information on my fourth Great Grand Father Seth Bartlett Rider, as there is over a hundred year gap in the national registry. I had contacted the University for a copy of the thesis in hopes that it might have a missing link that would help me locate the parents and siblings of Seth Bartlett Rider who would be my 3rd great grand father. The University was very prompt with a response; they held two copies of the thesis, and to contact my local library for an international exchange. Which I did, but this will take sometime. They also gave me the email address of the author, so I shot and email off to Stephen Moore.
So, over Thanksgiving Stephen Moore responded to my request, and also said he had questions of the Lost Rider's who went west, did I have any information? Now again I was intrigued. Here is someone who wrote their Masters Thesis on the Riders of Fitch Bay and he was asking me for information. He stated that his source for the thesis was Lillian Rider, and they both were looking for information of eight Rider's who moved west. Being the great investigator that I am, I quickly got on it to find the lost family. I went on Ancestry.com and found that there was nothing except other genealogists also looking for clues on this family of eight children. So I posted a thread to a message board that I was also looking, and off to the library I went.
I had a copy of the New England Historical and Genealogical Register which had a story on Samuel Rider, so that was my first stop. Since I am a member of the NEHGS, I went online first with no luck. Then at the library I went to the index for the NEHGR. Found some information, but nothing new. So back to my family tree to get more clues. It is amazing that three months ago I barely knew the name of my 2nd great grandfather and today I have well over six thousand aunts, uncles, cousins and so on. I add everyone, as this has been the biggest help for me. Many times on a census form or death certificate of a cousin or brother's uncle I find the name of another family member I was looking for. Truly I am so lucky that our family immigrated from Massachusetts up the east coast and into Canada. Back in the early 1980's I hated this fact as I did not have the resources to contact Canada. Now, I am so glad because so much work has already been done, and many Churches in Quebec Canada kept wonderful records. Although the French documents are difficult to read.
So I have a story of a female farmer with three young boys, and I have a story of settlers to Stanstead Quebec. Well my local San Antonio downtown library has an extensive genealogy area, it fills the entire top floor of the library. So I started looking for one of these books written about the settlers of Stanstead, and lucky for me they had a copy. Now I understand that books are secondary sources, and not the most reliable to a true genealogist, however, this book has so much detail. The book title is: "The History of Stanstead County", by Hubbard, ISBN:1-55613-123-2. There in the pages was my great grandmother Helen D. Rider and my 2nd great grand father Ezra B. Rider. It listed both his wives and their issue (children). I entered the names and birth-dates of the eight missing children of Ezra and Fanny into my family tree on Ancestry.com. Then through U.S. Census data I was able to follow some of their movements from Illinois, to Kansas, Wisconsin and one son even moved back to Canada with his wife. Anyway my prior hunch that whatever the reason they moved, they had probably changed their name. I was so correct. These eight children changed the spelling of their last name to Ryder, stayed in the United States and moved west in 1844. Their mother Fanny Chandler died in 1843. Then in October of the same year Ezra re-married Dorothy Ann Lee, of the settler Lee's of Stanstead. They married and settled in Fitch Bay, Quebec during the time of the mass exodus from Canada.
Between 1784 and 1844, the population of Quebec increased by 400 percent. However, between 1840 and 1930, more than 900,000 French-Canadians left Canada and immigrated to the United States and Australia. Canada did not have enough inhabitable land for the rapid growth and they were moving from a rural economy to an industrial one. Manufacturing was replacing the farmer, and this is probably the reason these Riders chose not to follow their father into Canada. Going from what they knew, being a farmer, to working in a factory probably was not on their bucket list. A story for another day, but these eight farmer's probably were able to get land grants in Illinois and Kansas.