Andrew Jeffrey

Brother of Mary (Jeffrey) Short, and the family's leading man in Canada. He came out in 1819, at about twenty, and settled at Cobourg in 1820; the family accounts have his parents and sisters coming the same year. He was a saddle and harness maker as well as a hardware merchant (the family's papers, as WikiTree quotes them); the Trent University Archives' history of his firm, A. Jeffrey & Son, has him running a foundry and later a hardware store (source). He was ordained an elder of the Presbyterian church at Cobourg in 1827, in connection with the Church of Scotland; was elected to the town's Board of Police at its incorporation in 1837; sat on its Board of Trade; and in April 1849, by the Cobourg Star, was moving his hardware store next to the Albion Hotel. The county directory of 1851 lists "Jeffrey, A., merchant, (hardware) Cobourg," a few lines from his brother-in-law "Short, John, postmaster Newcastle" (record). In 1853 his son-in-law Robert Kingan opened a branch of the store at Peterborough. Cobourg named a street after him.

He was a witness, as her brother, at Mary's marriage to John Short at St Andrew's, Cobourg, in 1836. He married Janet Hall at Cobourg in 1828; she died in 1851, and in 1853 he married Agnes Moscrip McLenhan at Port Hope. A son, Francis (1839-1910), is on Find a Grave.

His obituary in the Cobourg Sentinel of 1 August 1863 sums up his public life (record): "one of the oldest inhabitants of this town," who "by his strict integrity and upright conduct, had endeared himself alike to all classes"; councillor in 1851 and mayor of Cobourg in 1852; from the same year until his death president of the Board of Trustees of the Northumberland and Durham Savings Bank; one of the five commissioners of the Town Trust from 1859; and from 1860 the member for the Newcastle Division in the Legislative Council of the Province of Canada, hence "the Hon. Andrew Jeffrey, M.L.C." He died on 27 July 1863, leaving "a numerous family of children and grandchildren," and on the day of his funeral the shops of Cobourg closed from noon to two o'clock. His gravestone in the Cobourg Union Cemetery reads: "In memoriam Hon. Andrew Jeffrey, born at Foulden, Scotland, Feb. 17th 1800, died July 27th 1863; his wife Janet Hall, born 1799, died 1851."

Open questions

• His birthplace: Foulden (his gravestone) or Swinton (his obituary), both in Berwickshire.
• His children by Janet Hall, beyond Francis and the daughter who married Robert Kingan.