Dictionary of Glengarry Biography (review)

Glengarry County, situated north of the St Lawrence River in the eastern corner of Ontario, was settled by Gaelic-speaking Scots; its Highland identity was popularized by novelist Ralph Connor in the first years of the twentieth century. The Dictionary of Glengarry Biography (dgb) presents in a single volume the biographies of 1,600 men (mostly) and women dating from the county’s origins to the late twentieth century. The people featured in the dgb include those who lived there and others linked by kinship or by experience with Glengarry or its people. In an interview published in the Glengarry News, Royce MacGillivray emphasized the book’s factual basis and his decision to use the county’s rich story tradition only where it was confirmed in the documentary record. The author also drew on his personal knowledge of growing up in the county in the 1940s and 1950s. The goal of the dgb was to cover the lives of ‘anybody and everybody who helped make Glengarry Canada’s most storied . . . county.’

In spite of the large number of entries in the dictionary, MacGillivray provides only a nominal list to navigate its contents, with access by personal names and not by subject. The limited number of Christian and family names, the use of nicknames or patronymics, and variations of spelling make finding a specific person a challenging task. The list also furnishes dates of birth and death, occupation and residence(s) for each person. Such information will enable those who have knowledge of the county to identify people of interest, while the range of occupations listed provides an entry to the economic as well as the social and cultural preoccupations of Glengarrians. Alongside lumbermen, blacksmiths, miners, and businessmen are slaves, writers, architects, vagabonds, pipers, hoodlums, and ‘figures of legend.’ Given the importance both of genealogy/family and of place to the Highland settlers, it would have been useful to make the biographies available by family line or by community within the county.

The opportunities and challenges inherent in producing a county dictionary are clearly demonstrated in the structure and content of the dgb. Is the volume the story of Glengarry seen through the biographies of individuals? If so, francophones, who began moving into the county in the late nineteenth century, do not receive appropriate representation in the volume. If the volume is about Glengarry’s Highland community, something of the nature of everyday life is captured in biographies like that of Allan na Coin (the Dogs) McRae. It is interesting to compare biographies done for the Dictionary of Canadian Biography and those for the dgb. Bruce Hodgins wrote an extensive entry on John Sandfield Macdonald in the national dictionary in 1972, while MacGillivray provides a much shorter biography in his compendium. Hodgins’s work focused on Macdonald’s role in the complex politics of the province of Canada in the mid-nineteenth century; his grasp of the political correspondence of the period is evident from the text, as is his appreciation for Macdonald’s business, legal, and personal interests, centred largely in Montreal’s hinterland in eastern Ontario. With this narrative established, the question then arises as to what a county dictionary could provide in order to articulate local perspectives that balance the national story. MacGillivray characterizes Sandfield Macdonald as one of the best jury lawyers in Canada, nigh invincible with a Scottish jury: this hints at, but does not delineate, the role of class and culture in shaping both Ontario’s first premier and the county that produced him.

There are two significant steps to the creation of a richer and a more accessible county history that MacGillivray and his publisher might consider exploring. The first would be to make the dgb available in an online database and thereby encourage collaborative working and improve accessibility. Not only would keyword searches be possible, but the biographies themselves could be tagged to bring together family members, broader sloichd (lines of descent), or geographic communities either in Canada or in Scotland. The second step would be...