Idle hands are devilish tools.
Well, whoot! Someone’s finally gone and done it.
A few minutes of down time at work; a news story about a U.K. archeology dig and a Google Map search to see where; a whim to check out Templeton Burn on my new pen pal’s recommendation; piddling, I find a Templeton Court in Glasgow that one Monteith Row dead ends into. I wonder, “See if anything’s turned up on Allie Monteith?” And The Google came up with the above in the first couple of results!
Now, see, I’d been searching online all around Allie only a few weeks ago — following her brothers, cousins, “Woodward” and the lot — to see if I could discover who her parents were, or maybe some indication as to when she moved where, or anything! (Oh, gosh, now that I’m linking to a blog entry about one such person, I see it was 11 months ago. How could it have been that long?!)
Of course I’d scoured the free precincts of Ancestry.com at the time, but not a lot turned up that I wasn’t finding otherwise. (I don’t subscribe anymore.)
Sheesh! So there she is, now: tantalizing me with possible info on her parents. Maybe dates or places of marriages?
I’ve known for years that there was one gedcom at Ancestry that mentions her, but I haven’t been able to get any particulars — even when I was a subscriber — and the researcher has never responded to messaging.
I need to look before I buy … it’s only such a little info I need …
It looks like I’m going to have to get by the LDS Genealogy Library and use their free access to Ancestry tomorrow, just to make sure.
Nineteenth century photography didn’t always catch the “essence” of a person.
Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.
We’re told that the stern, stiff-necked gentleman above had a delightful sense of humor. You wouldn’t know it by looking at him in this picture, but as a younger man he was an unabashed adventurer and not afraid to live outside the law, to boot. He must have been a fascinating conversationalist since he was an educated university man back when few from the frontier of Central Pennsylvania even finished the local, crude pastor’s schools; and we know that he was a compelling public speaker.
He was the Reverend John Lenox Monteith, son of Daniel Monteith and nephew to our Allie Templeton (nee Monteith).
John was recruited right out of Princeton Theological Seminary (now Princeton University) by Governor Lewis Cass and the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions to bring Protestantism to the wild & wooly (and largely Catholic) burg of Detroit. That was in the summer of 1816. Monteith rode a horse out from New Jersey, making the trip through the forested expanse of the western frontier in only fifteen days!
Within a year of his arrival the Reverend joined with his Catholic counterpart in Detroit, Father Gabriel Richard, to found an institute of higher learning that grew to become the University of Michigan with Monteith as its first President. He also ran the local lending library.
Like his kin among the Ohio Templetons, he was staunchly anti-slavery. His abolitionist feeling was deep and evidently more urgent, however, and sommers ‘round the mid- to late 1830s (our best guess) he made a trip to Utica, New York, where he mixed with other Abolitionists, and met the important activist Theodore Weld. Monteith returned home to become an early affiliate of “Weld’s Seventy” — a group of committed and active public speakers against the scourge of slavery, and as in the Reverend’s case, secret agents of the Underground Railroad.
Upon his return to the Great Lakes, Monteith moved to Ohio and took a position in Elyria, near enough to the Lake so’s a tunnel from his home to a mooring on the lake could be the last leg on the Oberlin trace of the Underground Railroad.
So don’t let the stern, judgmental mien in the picture above fool ya. The guy was a wild man, in his own Presbyterian minister kinda way.
