After Alexander came to Canada in 1832, he worked at a variety of jobs, first in Quebec City and then in Montréal. Then HSS continues his story:

In the spring of 1834, by which time his wages had been increased to $10.00 per month, he left Montréal by boat to Prescott, and thence by steamer to Hamilton, and thence on foot to the township of Nichol three miles from Fergus, where Peter had taken up land. Grandfather took up ten acres but did not work it. He was employed on farms for a year or so, and then in the spring of 1836 went to Simcoe and Port Dover. Grandfather worked in saw-mills at Port Dover and later Simcoe [in Norfolk County], and came to have oversight of two mills. His wages rose to $25.00 per month and board.

At that time, Simcoe is reported to have been "a very small backwoods village". Nevertheless, it had a post office, saw mill, grist mill, distillery, cooperage, and two stores.

This was to prove a fortunate move for it was here that he met Esther Stratton Wilson, the woman who was at least partly responsible for his religious conversion and then for enabling him to devote himself to his vocation.

William Wilson (or Willson) and his wife Esther (or Ester) were both born in Warton, Warwickshire, England, according to their gravestones. Warton is a tiny village or hamlet in the center of England. According to family tradition, the Wilsons came to Canada from Bedford, a larger town in the neighboring county of Bedfordshire, in 1831. I have not been able to confirm their move from Warton to Bedford nor could I find the family in passenger lists recording immigration to Canada.

In any case, William Wilson was born about 1787 and his wife Esther about 1794 (according to ages recorded on their gravestones). They married in England and had several children, the older ones born in England and the younger ones in Canada. According to family tradition and an obituary, their second daughter was born in 1821 and named Esther (or Ester) after her mother. The 1851 census listed three brothers, William junior, John, and Samuel G., and a sister Catherine J. all still teen-agers or younger. Family tradition holds that Esther had two additional sisters: By the time of the 1851 census, Esther, then about 30, had left home, as had any other brothers and sisters not listed in the household.

The family is believed to have come to Norfolk County, Ontario, about 1831. The area around Long Point on the Canadian shore of Lake Erie had been surveyed into townships in 1796, land was granted to settlers, many of them Loyalists from New Brunswick, and by 1831 Norfolk County is reported to have had a population of over 5600. The land was flat, fertile, well watered by many small streams. It lent itself well to the self-sufficient farms of the pioneers and, later, to tobacco and fruit orchards.

Simcoe was the principal village, serving the farmers with mills and stores. Southwest of Simcoe was the township of Charlotteville (now Delhi) and here William Wilson took up land. According to the Charlotteville assessment list of 1841, he had 40 cultivated acres and 74½ uncultivated, presumably pasture for his stock and a woodlot for firewood and perhaps timber. He had two oxen that he must have used to clear the land and plough it in that first pioneer decade, and two milch cows. The family lived in a log house. The land was in Concession 11, the east half of lot 12 and the west part of lot 13, fronting on the main road running west from Simcoe, "Queensway" or Route 3.

John Kenneth Galbraith has written about growing up in Elgin County just west of Norfolk County. He wrote that Route 3 was one of the earliest roads, paralleling the lake shore along the back of the earliest farms, hence called "Back Street". He described the basic family farm of 50 to 150 acres, growing winter wheat, oats, corn, hay, beans, and fruit trees, occasionally roots and barley, raising cattle and sheep, making their own cloth, and grinding their own wheat. He paid tribute to the pioneer settlers from the Old Country who

must have displayed a phenomenal capacity for innovation and adaptation in their farming methods... [T]he soils, crops, crop rotation, the insects and plant diseases, the problems of farm architecture, machinery and drainage, even the wagon that went to town, were all different. Within a matter of a few months, men made the transition from an agricultural system in which they were guided by the experience of centuries to one where a very great deal depended on a man's capacity to figure things out for himself or imitate with discrimination those who could.

Friends were important sources of material and psychological support and emigrants often left the Old Country in groups. The Wilsons may have travelled and settled in one such group. Their daughter Esther had been given the middle name "Stratton" and Thomas Stratton was one of the witnesses at her wedding years later in Canada. Near the Wilsons lived Thomas and Mary Stratton, also from England and the same ages and religion (Baptist) as the Wilsons. Surely, they had been close friends in England and perhaps relatives.

The Strattons also lived in a log house but had only 30 acres of land, three cows, and no oxen of their own. Perhaps they borrowed William Wilson's.

The part of Charlotteville where the Wilsons lived was full of other Wilson families. It is possible that some were relatives, but some, at least, seem to have had other origins from "our" Wilsons.

The Wilsons and Strattons were Baptists. Historians S. Ivison and F. Rosser state that Baptist influence seems to have been present among the earliest settlers of the area right from the first. In 1804 a Baptist church was organized in Vittoria, the government center of the district and principal village of Charlotteville township. At first it was a log church. Then, in 1807, "a commodious frame building with a three-sided gallery" replaced it. Finally, in 1856, a brick building -- still standing -- replaced that, in a more central location in Vittoria, according to the church's centennial booklet.

It seems likely that the Wilsons attended the frame Baptist church, at least at times, because it was Elder William Smith, the pastor during the years 1836-1838, who baptized daughter Esther and whom they chose to perform her wedding ceremony in 1842. However, when the Wilson parents died, they were not buried in the Vittoria Baptist Cemetery where the old frame church had once stood, but closer to home.

The next door neighbor of the Wilsons, Joe Carrow, had donated land in Concession 11, lot 11, for a cemetery. It was on the road west from Simcoe to Atherton; later the Salem Methodist Church stood here. The church was demolished in 1964 but the cemetery still is known as the Atherton/Salem Cemetery. Here the Wilson parents were buried, next to their old farm. Their land is still farmed, though now for tobacco, and their house has been replaced by a modern ranch house. Their gravestones read:

In memory of William Willson
a native of Warton, WarwickSr, England
who died June 5, 1865, aged 78 years.

Ester, wife of William Wilson
a native of Wartan, Warwickshire, England
who died April 21, 1880, aged 86 years.
Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.

This was the family from which came Alexander Stewart's future wife, Esther Stratton Wilson. HSS continued the story of Alexander's life in Norfolk County:

One day early in 1837, in the winter, he came on a man, James Cowan, who was drunk. Grandfather undertook to drive him hone, a distance of eight miles. On the way Cowan insisted on going into the Wilson home. Grandfather went in to get him out, and then drove on to Cowan's home where he stayed all night. [AMS wrote that "Afterwards this man would go about town praising the 'angel without wings', (Esther Wilson)."] Next day he rode back to Simcoe on a load of lumber with George Lane. He stopped in at Wilson's again. This time Esther Wilson and her eldest sister were washing. After they left, Esther said, "I will marry the crosseyed man."

Tradition says that [AMS related] ...Esther Wilson at one time announced to her family that she was going to marry "Red Sandy", meaning Alex Stewart. His hair was a glistening white halo when his grandchildren first knew him, but some red was inherited by some of his children.

There are still redheads among his descendants.

The Talbot District Marriage Register, which included Norfolk County, for 1838-1857, on page 19, has recorded:

Alex^r Stewart, Simcoe, m. Esther Willson, Charlotteville, on 12 Jan 1842, by W. Smith; w[itnesses] William Dennes, Thomas Stratton.

The Norfolk Observer, Norfolk County's first newspaper (the publisher, William Mercer Wilson, Esq., was not related to "our" Wilsons, as far as I can tell), in its final issue, 29 January 1842, included the following announcement:

M[arried]. On the 12 instant [i.e. January], by Elder William Smith, Mr. Alexander Stewart of Simcoe, to Ester, second daughter of Mr. William Wilson of Charlotteville.

HSS's account of the event was:

The marriage occurred on January 12, 1842, and the ceremony was performed by Rev. William Smith, the Baptist minister at Vittoria, in the home of Esther's father.

Esther and Alex had six children. Despite their poverty, they were able to provide each with the education that their father had missed, three, at least, with enough education for them to become teachers. Two of them, Joseph and Augusta, devoted their lives to the Baptist Church, as their father had done.

The first child was Jane, born in 1844. She married Duncan Fisher on 20 February 1869 but died that same year; she had been a schoolteacher. Her obituary is quoted later in this book.

The second child was Mary Esther, born in 1846 and given her mother's name as her middle name. Her first name, besides being a generally popular name, was the name of the Wilsons' old family friend (and possible relative) Mary Stratton. On 12 December 1866 she married Alexander Cameron MacKenzie (or McKenzie), born in 1837 to a merchant in the nearby village of Hanover. At some point, they moved to Montréal where Mr. MacKenzie went into business. As far as I have discovered, they had six children. Mary Stewart MacKenzie died in 1901 and her husband in 1903 and the J. W. A. Stewart branch of the family has lost touch with their descendants.

Another daughter, Annie E. Stewart, was born about 1850-55 (about 1850, according to her age as given in the 1861 census; about 1851, according to her age as given in her death notice; and 1855, according to cemetery records). Annie was the name of Alexander Stewart's eldest half-sister. The middle initial may have stood for Elizabeth, as her name was given as "Elizabeth Stuart" on her son's death record in Flint, Michigan, in 1922. Annie married Peter Cole and they had four children, all born in Canada. Some time after 1887 they moved to Flint, Michigan, and Peter Cole entered the merchant tailor business. He may have been helped by the gift made to Annie by her father that he mentioned in his will. Like her mother, Annie died young, in 1896; at the age of 45, according to her death notice. The contact with Alexander Stewart's other descendants seems to have been broken. Peter Cole lived another 28 years after Annie and their descendants have continued in Flint.

The one son, Joseph William Alexander, was born 17 January 1852 in Waterloo, just after his father's ordination. I do not know whether "Joseph" was a family name but "William" certainly was; it was the name of both grandfathers and two uncles. "Alexander" was, of course, for his father. He himself and his son Harold have written about his life, so I will say here only that he received the education his father had been unable to get, became a Baptist minister like his father and later headed the Rochester Theological Seminary in the United States.

He married Mary Ann St. Leger McGinn and they had seven children. He died in 1947 and was buried at Dwight, Lake of Bays township, where he had preached for half a century, with his first wife, Mary, and his second wife, Ruth Quinby.

Next came Emma Nancy Person Stewart, born in 1854 in Durham. On 31 August 1975 she married William Knibb Grafftey. They lived in Montréal and had five children whose descendants have spread to several parts of Canada.

Last came Augusta Henrietta Eva Stewart, born in 1865 in Durham. She was named after August Rauschenbusch, her father's friend and fellow Baptist missionary, in his case, to German-speaking settlers. She was certified as a teacher in Hamilton, according to an obituary, and was a life-long Baptist church worker, in Chicago, Illinois, later in Durham, Ontario, when she was keeping house for her father, and finally, for some 40 years or more, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she died in 1949.