John Mooney (1812 - 1893)

Born 12 Dec 1812 in Nenagh, County Tipperary, Ireland

Descendants

Died 3 Jan 1893 at age 80 in Oakland, Manitoba, Canada

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Biography

John Mooney immigrated from County Tipperary (Republic of Ireland) to Upper Canada in 1830 and worked as a shantyman in Ottawa River lumber camps; he settled in 1841 on a free-grant farm of 50 rocky acres near Chatsworth, south of Georgian Bay, and married Letitia McCurdy, a Scottish-born Presbyterian 20 years his junior. Nellie's autobiography describes them as good Christians who valued hard work, education, rural life, and discipline. She loved her father's Irish wit and light-heartedness and admired her mother's determination and sense of personal duty, if not her strict Calvinist approach to life.

In 1880 the family joined the migration of land-hungry farmers to the prairies, in their case by steamship, ox-cart, and foot to the Souris River valley in Manitoba. After rejecting land that might have involved uncomfortably close contact with Métis neighbours, they chose an isolated holding southwest of Portage la Prairie, near Millford. Life there was demanding, yet the holding proved more prosperous than the farm in Ontario. Nellie's childhood, colourfully captured in her autobiographic Clearing in the west ... (1935), unfolded in an affectionate Methodist family that took for granted its right to displace natives and Métis and create a dominant British community.

According to Nellie McClung's book "Clearing the West" John was first married to Jane Shouldice. "After taking up his land on the Garafraxa, my father married Jane Shouldice, his cousin, but Jane lived only a little over a year. When the news went back to Nenagh, Ireland, that Johnny’s wife had died, and that Johnny was the only one left of the three fine lads who had sailed from Limerick, and that he was alone on a bush farm, old Judy Connor, one of the servants in my grandfather’s house in Nenagh-and she was then fifty years of age-braved the terrors of the Atlantic, and came all the way to Sydenham to keep house for him. In 1858 he married my mother, Letitia McCurdy, who had come with her mother, Margaret Fullerton McCurdy, and a younger sister Ellen from Dundee, Scotland, the year before."

Sources

• http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio.php?id_nbr=8424
• https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/140753261/john-mooney
• https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/mcclung-clearinginthewest/mcclung-clearinginthewest-00-h-dir/mcclung-clearinginthewest-00-h.html