William Jeffrey

Great-grandfather of Ruth (Short) Ellingwood, as the family accounts have it. Everything known of him comes through Ward Skinner's compiled Descendants of William Jeffrey, as WikiTree quotes it (source). He came from Foulden, a village in Berwickshire about four miles from Berwick, and was a blacksmith there (John Graham) or a stonemason (Leslie Godfrey). Family tradition has him going to Canada first, to help rebuild the St. Louis Gate at Quebec, with his wife and children following; Bob Rumsey thought the Jeffreys and the Lyalls came out together in 1820 and settled at Cobourg. The family later lived near Keene, Peterborough County, where he died in 1852. His wife's monument is at Little Lake Cemetery, Peterborough (record).

Graham counted "five children, one boy and four girls, all born in Foulden," and Skinner's compilation names them: the boy was Andrew (1800-1863), hardware merchant and mayor of Cobourg, whose gravestone says he was "born at Foulden, Scotland," and the girls Isabella (1801-1885), the wife of George Gillespie of Keene, baptised at Foulden in 1801; Jean (1803-1887), Mrs. Grigg; Catharine "Addie" (1806-1882), Mrs. Adam Hall of Peterborough, on whose family monument his widow is commemorated; and Mary (1809-1883), who married John Short at Cobourg in 1836. Find a Grave, and Skinner too, add a second son, William (2 Oct 1802 - 1879), a Presbyterian of King Township, whom family researchers doubt (source). A note on his Find a Grave memorial says there is no evidence he is buried with her at Peterborough, which fits the tradition of his grave at Keene.

His father may have been Andrew Jeffery, "smith and feuer in Chirnside" (1734-1810), whose stone at Chirnside names his wife Catherine Steel (d. 1776) and a son Peter (d. 1811, aged 49): a smith of the right age, a few miles from Foulden, as the FamilySearch tree has it, and a trade that fits the family's blacksmith. Nothing yet names William as his son.

Research: Ruth Short's ancestry: the archive, the Ancestry tree, WikiTree and FamilySearch compared.

Open questions

• Any record of him in Scotland: his baptism (Chirnside, January 1772?), his marriage to Mary Lyall (about 1799), the baptisms of his children at Foulden. The FamilySearch and WikiTree trees give him parents, Andrew Jeffrey and Katherine Steele of Fogo and Chirnside; Andrew was a smith at Chirnside, but no record seen names William as his son; not linked.
• William Jeffrey (1802-1879) of King Township: a son, as Find a Grave has it, against Graham's "one boy"? His Ontario death registration (1879) may name his parents.
• His grave at Keene, and the 1851-52 census of Otonabee or Smith Township.