166 years ago today my great-grandfather, John Haines was born in Niagara Twp., Lincoln Cty., Canada West (Ontario), son of Benjamin Haines, SUE and Sarah E. Freisman Haines. John Haines grew up and lived in the Niagara region, working for the railroad, and followed it's expansion into southern Ontario first to Taylor Station in Elgin County and finally ending up in Rochester, Essex County about 1895.
During this period, he and his wife, Harriet, had eleven children, 7 girls and 4 boys and the surname was changed to Hines. He had two more children after coming to Essex County.
There were some family tragedies in the first two decades that his family was in Essex County. His youngest daughter, Hariett Melinda, died after eating poisonous roots at the age of six. Her name is incorrect in the obituary:
Then the war broke out and his youngest son was over-eager to enlist, fibbing about his age, then being the first man in the town of Essex to die in the war, he was buried in France.
Then if that wasn't enough, his daughter, Henrietta Kennedy, was murdered by her second husband in New York City and died on John's birthday.
John's grand-daughter died form burns in a fire in 1921, the week before Christmas,
his oldest son, Wm. John, died in 1930,
and John died in 1932 at the age of 88.
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Ancestral Notes by Earline Hines Bradt is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License.