In 1994, as I read through the many files of correspondence contained in A.D.'s collection, the story of his search for McMurtrie history unfolded before my eyes. Up to this point, I had known very little about him. But contained in the letters was the story of his life and a lifelong interest.
Like so many of us family historians, his interest in family was kindled at an early age. And it took many forms as he went from novice to experienced genealogist - learning by trial and error; discovering the hard way of how fellow searchers could often lead others astray in their unmeticulous zeal; learning to sift evidence and not jump to conclusions; compiling, organizing, charting, indexing, and always searching.
A.D.'s father, Alexander Boyd McMurtrie, was born in Girvan, Scotland, in 1855. As a young man of 21, A.B. came to Canada in 1876 and ended up in Sarnia, Ontario in 1891. He married for the first time at the age of 40 to a Mrs. Amelia Jane Reeves Blacker, a widow with four children ages 7 to 18. To this marriage, A.D. was born in Sarnia on August 23, 1895.
In October 1911, as a lad of 16, he wrote to Brisbane, Australia in search of his father's brother's family. Since he didn't have an address, he wrote to McMurtrie & Co. Limited - an address he must have found in a commercial directory. The reply he received in January 1912 said, "Not being related to (your) branch of the McMurtrie family (ours originally came from Ayr) we handed a copy of your letter to the Secretary of the Builders and Contractors Association as you mentioned that Mr. McMurtrie was a contractor. As a result of the inquiry, ... we had a call from Mrs. Robert McMurtrie who will in due course write you."
He exchanged letters with the Australian branch of the family and about the same time, he wrote an aunt in Scotland and received a letter from his cousin George B. McMurtrie who shortly thereafter was killed in WWI.
In 1914, while in college, he wrote to Henry Paton, a professional Scottish genealogist inquiring about a record search. But his college studies must have absorbed his energies thereafter and he graduated from the Ontario College of Pharmacy, University of Toronto in 1918 winning the "John Roberts Gold Medal for Chemistry and Pharmacy" and the "College Silver Medal for General Proficiency".
His interest seems to have been rekindled a decade later when, in 1926, he received a referral to another record searcher in Scotland.
In the 1930s and 1940s, he was active in his Presbyterian church, eventually serving as Clerk of Session and Superintendent of the Sunday School. His chief hobby was "boys" work having served as President of the Ontario Boys' Work Board, and Chairman of the "Boys and Girls Work Committee for the Kiwanis International. For many years, he served as chairman of the local Kiwanis Club's Committee" of Underprivileged Children which sponsored needy and poor children and boys on probation from the court.
During the 1940s, he worked in Chatham, 50 miles south of Sarnia, at L.K Liggett Co, Ltd., King and Fifth Streets. He described his work, "I have a fairly large store to manage with a staff of over 12." He got home to Sarnia once or twice a week where he lived with his sister.
It was after his mother died in Jan 1936 that he began to seriously and consistently pursue the family history. In 1936 and 1937, he wrote letters to Bristol, England, and Johannesburg, South Africa, compiling the Reeves family history. Ever resourceful, he put ads in newspapers and even wrote to a police department.
Then, occurred an event that would channel his historical interests back towards the McMurtries. In June 1938, a friend in his international stamp club led him to a contact with Frederick James McMurtrie, a 69-year old family historian in Detroit, Michigan. On June 13 and 14, his ledger of Family History Correspondence lists his first three letters making inquiries about the McMurtries. Whether this was in response to his contact with Frederick James or whether his contact was a product of his developing interest, I cannot tell from the records. But through Frederick James, A.D. learned (possibly for the first time) of the New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Michigan McM families. He was obviously influenced by Frederick James, because in August, he distributed to his cousins a 6-page mimeographed pamphlet, "McMurtrie of Barr, Ayrshire".
In this publication, he sketched what he had learned of the family, asking for corrections and additions to make it complete. He also suggested that perhaps their ancestor, John McMurtrie, born 1714 in Barr, Ayrshire was a grandson of Joseph McMurtrie of Dalmellington born 1655. Soon, he would learn that Frederick James' was in error about this connection to Dalmellington. But more importantly, A.D. now began in earnest to try to track down McMurtries.
In August of 1938, he wrote 30 letters. Of these, 10 were to postmasters and 3 were to Chambers of Commerce in Scottish parishes, mostly in Ayrshire, asking for names and addresses of McMurtries. The remainder were to individuals in places like Ayr, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dalrymple, Denver, Brisbane, Philadelphia, Dalmellington. In November, he got another spurt of energy and wrote another 17 letters - many of which were following up on leads obtained by the first set of letters. This set included additional postmasters and chambers of commerce as well as individuals in Wyoming, Wellington, British Columbia, London, and Montreal. He also began writing to cemeteries to get records of McMurtries. In this manner, he secured addresses for McMurtries and McMurtrys all over the world.
By December, he was writing of how he had contacted 25 different families but found it impossible to link many of them together even though many came from within a "radius of 100 square miles" of Ayrshire.
One of his first contacts in late 1938 was Edith McMurtrie, an artist and descendant of the colonial Philadelphia family.
His November 1938 letter to the New York Chamber of Commerce was especially important, because the response included the address of Adnah McMurtrie to whom A.D. wrote in December. Adnah McMurtrie opened up to A.D. the fruits of 30 years of Adnah's pursuit of the McMurtries and knowledge of the Virginia McMurtrys, the Ontario McMurtrys, and many more. Adnah handcopied virtually his entire collection and sent it to A.D. over the next year or so. And he opened A.D. eyes to the errors in Frederick James' work - a valuable lesson that seems to have made A.D. more cautious in evaluating evidence in the future.
In May 1939, he received a letter from Ira Smith Brown who had spent many years researching the McMurtries of north-central Pennyslyvania whose origins were in New Jersey. Ira Smith Brown had been sent the letter A.D. sent to Ms. Mary McMurtrie of Hazelton, PA.
In July 1941, he sent an inquiry to Joseph R. McMurtry (father of Richard K.) in Pittsburgh, PA who forwarded it to Charles Leroy McMurtry in a suburb of Philadelphia. In January, Charles Leroy sent A.D. a sketch of his Pennsylvania branch of the family which he had traced back to Joseph McMurtry born 1764 in New Jersey. This was the first of what would be many letters about the many McM.s Charles Leroy encountered in his travels. (Several years later, Charles Leroy passed on some of A.D.s materials as well as his own researches to Joseph R. McMurtry; these materials were found in the basement by me 17 years later and provided the impetus for my interest in the family history.)
A.D. discovered the Tennessee McMurtrys in a most round-about way. In April 1941, he received a letter from Alan McMurtrie, his cousin in Victoria, Australia, telling him of Alan's mother's death. Alan included in the letter a clipping from LIFE magazine featuring Paul James McMurtry receiving the Navy Cross for acts at Pearl Harbor. The clipping said Paul's mother, Ellen, lived in Waco, Texas. A letter to Waco in April 1942 got a reply in August from Eva McMurtry Vaughan, Otis McMurtry's aunt. This letter included a sketch of the family back to John born 1752. (In 1945, A.D. wrote to two McMurtries in Nashville and received a reply in 1946 from George McMurtry, President of the McMurtry Clan of Tennessee, inviting him to the next reunion.)
At the end of WWII, A.D. met two of the most important McMurtrys in the history of McMurtriana - Zelma McCord McMurtry, whose indefatigable efforts account for much of what has been preserved of the central Kentucky McMurtrys, and David C. McMurtry, who became the family history collaborator who would be chosen by A.D. to one day receive his genealogy collection in trust.
Zelma had asked her nephew David (who the family called D.C.) to go to Richmond to look up some records about the history of the family in Virginia. David was in the military in Virginia at the time and needed something of interest to keep his mind active in his off hours. And so David got "hooked" on family history. On one of his weekend trips, he found Edith McMurtrie's address in a Philadelphia telephone book and from her received A.D.'s address.
David wrote to A.D. and in Feb 1946, A.D. replied, thanking David for supplying him with such a complete family tree of David's Kentucky family and in return providing David with the connection to the early Virginia families. As a byproduct of David's contacting A.D., Zelma began a correspondence with A.D. that went on for many years - sending him pages and pages of data that she was collecting through correspondence and through court house visits. And David visited A.D. in Canada at least twice in the ensuing decade.
In March 1948, Samuel McMurtrie of Denver loaned A.D. the "Denver Collection" of McMurtrie family history compiled by his uncle John Aton McMurtrie with the help of a professional genealogist.
A.D. apparently put out feelers trying to get the many family historians who were sharing so much with him to get together in one place to meet each other face to face. There is no evidence of a firm response one way or another, but there was not a lot of enthusiasm for a long trip by any of his colleagues.
So, undaunted, A.D. organized a trip of 2500 miles between July 25 and August 7, 1948 which took him to Ohio, Kentucky, Virginia, Washington, D.C., Pennsylvania, New York and back home. He spent the night with Zelma and Bob McMurtry in Georgetown, Ohio; with David and Mildred McMurtry in Lexington, Kentucky; with Charles Leroy McMurtry in Media, PA. He visited with David McMurtrie Gregg in Reading, PA, with Capt Richard Angus McMurtrie in Washington, D.C., with Ira Smith Brown at the McMurtrie reunion in Hazeltown, PA, and with his own cousins in Niagara Falls, Ontario. I am sure he had a wonderful time on this trip.
In November, Mrs. Sydney McMurtry of Tennessee secured a copy of the pension record of John McMurtry born 1752 which showed him to be of the Somerset County, New Jersey McMurtrys. A.D. was delighted to be able to connect this family to the larger family tree.
At the same time that discoveries and connections were being made, there were some sad events. Adnah McMurtrie died in August 1946; Edith McMurtrie of Philadelphia died in 1947; ; and Frederick James followed her late in the same year. Miss Susan McMurtry who had done so much work beginning in 1913 died in 1948.
In writing about Adnah in Nov 1947, A.D. quoted a letter, "In sending you the McM. information I had gathered, I am getting something off my chest and in the future I expect to refer inquirers to you - of course I'll send along anything more that I learn, but my active searching is about over - nevertheless, I am very much interested and I hop you will keep me posted from time to time of anything new that you may locate. I am dropping my mantle on your shoulders. I hope that when you approach the three score and ten line, that you shall have found some younger tribe member to take up the work."
In 1952, a letter to Ruth True, Adnah's niece, said, "I have been taking things easy since last May when I had to quit work and come home to Sarnia. I spent July in our local hospital, ending up by having a serious operation and since then have been slowly recuperating. I get out each day and do the odd jobs around the house, but I tire very easy."
In this same letter, he commented on his plans for his collection, "I have arranged that when I am through with them, they will go to David McMurtry of Lexington Ky a young teacher in the University of Kentucky and who is extremely interested in the history. I have visited with him and his wife and he, in turn has visited us in Sarnia, so we know each other well. I believe that he will carry on the work satisfactorily when the time comes." There are not many letters in the collection from the 1950s. I don't know what A.D.s health was like during those years. But on November 7, 1959, he died of cancer.
Soon after, David was notified of A.D.'s death, he called Otis McMurtry in Nashville and asked him to join him in a drive to Sarnia to retrieve the collection. They stuffed the many boxes of papers into the trunk and back seat of the car and brought it to a new home in Lexington. There it continued to grow over the next 35 years - a source of information and a repository for research for scores of individuals interested in finding their McM. family roots.
A.D.'s vision of a worldwide collection of family history has been passed on through the years and been an inspiration for many of us. And in this publication and distribution to libraries of his work and the work that it spawned, it is hoped that it will forever be available to anyone who wishes to answer the questions:
How am I related to these many McM I encounter in my life?"