City Directories at BAnQ and the short life of Norman Parker Smith

Finding the burial record of my great-uncle, Norman Parker Smith, brought the events of his short life into focus for me.

Quebec church records don't seem to have any consistency in terms of content. This one is a gift because in a time well before civil death records, the Minister chose to include Norman Parker's cause of death, which is very unusual in my experience. Norman Parker died of infantile debility, his little body was not absorbing the nutrients from his food and he wasted away.

Still perplexed by his baptism in Montreal just eight days before his death and the fact that the witnesses did not include his father, I began to wonder if his illness could explain it. Unlike an illness such as influenza which would strike quickly, infantile debility could have given Norman's family time to seek medical help; specialists, perhaps hospitalization.

But there was one more question to answer, and for that I would need help from city directories. I knew that there was a time that the Smiths were living both in Montreal and Thetford Mines and they were enumerated in Montreal in the 1911 census, so that could have explained the Montreal baptism, but were they there as early as 1903?  Luckily, as I pointed out in my previous post , the digital online collections at BAnQ include the Lovell directories from 1848-2010.

I began my search for George Robert Smith, my great-grandfather, in the 1902 directory but this entry from the 1910-1911 edition was the earliest I could find for him, so the family was very likely not here yet in 1903.

That timeline matched with my current theory which is this: That Norman Parker Smith was born at home in Thetford Mines, Quebec on July 26, 1903 into a growing family of two sisters, and three brothers. At some point it became apparent that he was not physically well and the local doctor was unable to either pinpoint a cause or to offer treatment.

I don't know of any photos of Norman Parker.
Shown here are George Robert Smith and Isabella Frances Parker with their youngest child, William John White Smith.

It may have been on the doctor's recommendation that my great-grandmother boarded the train for Montreal with her baby to seek the help of a specialist. The death of another son, Benjamin, in 1889 could not have been far from her mind.

Whether they were in Montreal for weeks or days I don't know, but at some point the reality of Norman Parker's condition and the probable outcome must have set in. My great-grandmother took him to be baptized at St. Gabriel's Presbyterian church on November 10, 1903 without even her husband by her side and only eight days later, at the age of three months, twenty-two days, little Norman Parker was gone.

Then Isabella Frances, and for some reason I see this as her decision, made the difficult choice to send her baby 250 miles away so that he could be buried, not all alone in a local cemetery, but with his brother Benjamin and their grandmother, Lucy Hamilton Parker.

At the burial service only Norman's father and grandfather, George Lakin Parker, signed the church book. Perhaps Isabella was there, or perhaps she was too grief-stricken to make the long trip and bury another son. She did have a household to run and five other children from 16-4 years old. Maybe it was just time to turn her attention back to them and find comfort in their company and love.

There are still more records to be found to verify Benjamin's birth and burial, but I can't see my great-grandmother burying Norman in Buckingham if Benjamin weren't there already.

Whether or not Benjamin and Norman Parker ever had headstones I don't yet know but I am definitely looking forward to my next trip to Ottawa, and making my way to Buckingham, now Gatineau, to pay my respects to the Parkers and Smiths at St. Andrew's Cemetery. On our recent trip to Quebec, we were able to pay our respects to George and Isabella.