rambling othercat

I'm a 40 sumthin' computer geek. I like to barmp my sax with the band on thursday nights. I live in Toronto with my partner, and Grendel, a chihuahua.

Monday, February 28, 2005


Looking north on York St towards Osgoode Hall, 1856. From the collection of the Toronto Archives. Published in the Toronto Star, Feb 28, 2005 Posted by Hello

PJ in the Toronto Star, Feb 28, 2005 Posted by Hello

Bringing the past to life

Seven volumes of tax assessment rolls reveal the people of Toronto in the 1850s Their occupations and their lifestyles are now all online, writes Bill Taylor

Paul McGrath, who earns his living by living in the past, today is cleaning off a dusty, time-smeared window on a year in Toronto's fledgling existence.

It sheds eye-opening light on a city, population about 30,000, where ... well, you think you have it bad with piddling bylaws and tax grabs? In the 1850s:

You were taxed if you owned a dog; a little higher for a bitch.

Compulsory community service wasn't just something handed down by a judge as punishment. All men between the ages of 21 and 60 had to put in about 10 hours a year, working on highway and bridge maintenance, or pay a stand-in to do it.

A woman who owned property was a relative rarity, McGrath says. Among them was his great-great-great-grandmother, Amelia Pearsall, whose husband Samuel drowned while duck-hunting off the Toronto Islands.

"People called them the Islands even then," says McGrath, at the City of Toronto Archives on Spadina Rd., "even though the sandbar at the Eastern Gap hadn't yet washed away and it was actually a peninsula."

He'll get to the Eastern Gap and a hotel that used to stand on that wobbly sandbar in a moment. Time is a river and, as a professional genealogist, part of his stock-in-trade are the seemingly unconnected facts that float to the surface and let the current push them together into a narrative of life.

Few documents have survived from Toronto in the 1850s. The 1852 city census is long-lost. But volunteers from the Ontario Genealogical Society, with the help of the city's archives, have painstakingly transmuted the 1853 tax assessment rolls — seven volumes of elegantly spidery writing so fragile they have to be handled with white gloves — into digital form. As of today, they're available, free, on McGrath's website, http://www.ontarioroots.com.

"This fills a gap, a whole generation wide, between the 1842 and 1861 censuses," he says. "Genealogists and historians were kind of stuck. We got this idea of looking at the tax rolls and it turns out that in some ways, they're better than the census. There's amazing information in there."

His triple-great-grandmother, for instance. "She owned land on King St. near Parliament, where it turns north to join Queen St."

McGrath kept coming across Elizabeth Hutchinson's name. "She was either the world's best landlady or related."

Related by marriage, he learned — a mother-in-law, with links to the earliest days of Toronto. In 1834, her husband Isaac dug the city's first well, at St. Lawrence Market. "He was paid 25 pounds to dig down to shale and then three shillings a foot after that. He made about 40 pounds, enough that he could buy his house."

And that, McGrath believes, was the city's first stone house, built in 1819 with stones carted from the lake. "Elizabeth Hutchinson owned a considerable piece of land on Duke St., which is now Adelaide, three-quarters of a block between Ontario and Berkeley Sts. There's some commercial thing there now. But when I look at city maps of the period, I can see the house where she lived."

The tax rolls list all kinds of things. That hotel where the Eastern Gap is located was owned by Reuben Parkinson, "listed as a wagon-maker, but I guess that was his day job," McGrath says. "When the sandbar washed away in 1858, the hotel must've gone with it. But it wasn't as dumb a place to have a hotel as it may seem. This was a popular spot, a sandy beach."

Another of his ancestors also owned a hotel. "At the corner of Parliament and Queen. You were taxed on the number of `neat' — that's domestic — cattle you owned. And look, it's listed here ... he's got a cow. Right downtown. It must've been for fresh milk and butter."

Quakers, including a sect called Tunkers, and Mennonists (as they called Mennonites) were listed, too. "They were pacifists and the rolls were used as master lists for the militia."

The tax rolls offer a guide to the lifestyles of the rich and famous:

William Lyon Mackenzie was Toronto's first mayor. He's listed as a newspaper editor and owned property on the west side of Yonge St. between Temperance and King Sts.

Paul Kane, the artist noted for his western landscapes and paintings of First Nations people, was living on King St., McGrath says, "but he owned a house on Toronto St. And he'd just bought the lot on Wellesley St. where his house is now."

Thornton Blackburn was a former slave who fled from the United States and became Toronto's first cab-owner. "A fascinating man," McGrath says. "He owned quite a lot of land. He lived on Park St., which is now Eastern Ave. And look, you can see here that he's done his 10 hours' labour for the year."

Time being a river, a couple of currents are about to flow together. Samuel Pearsall, McGrath's great-great-great-grandfather, was a blacksmith. "I'm pretty sure he worked on Blackburn's cab. I know he worked in Paul Bishop's shop where the cab was built."

(It was, incidentally, a pretty ritzy four-seater, red and yellow with "The City" painted on it.)

Notable names are linked to the Dictionary of Canadian Biography On-Line. You can call up whole streets and see who lived next door to whom. You can marvel at the jobs they had: lime burner, huckster, maltster, band-box maker ...

And look for happy — bittersweet, anyway — endings. Like the man who went to court to say, "I'm not paying this dog tax. My dog is dead." Sure enough, there's a later entry in the book, striking out the poor pooch.

Article from Toronto Star, Feb 28, 2005 - GTA Section

Sunday, February 20, 2005

The Persistance of Memory

Shake Hands With the Devil: The Journey of Roméo Dallaire

Using Dallaire's return to Rwanda on the 10th anniversary of the genocide, in which Hutu extremists murdered some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in a 100-day "cleansing" massacre Dallaire was powerless to stop, Peter Raymont's documentary uses the lingering trauma of one man as a way of opening on larger questions of global indifference and responsibility.

Roméo Dallaire is a lifelong soldier who flaunts his weakness, guilt and vulnerability. Even more importantly, given the current epidemic in false, contested and politically opportunistic forms of historical memory, he's an advocate for the persistence of memory. Because he can't forget Rwanda, and because those memories haunt him still, Roméo Dallaire's single most compelling qualification for the role of hero might be his insistence that no one else be allowed to forget either.

Geoff Pevere, Toronto Star

Friday, February 18, 2005


Grape Hyacinths growing under my mum's rock. Spring is on the way. Hang in there. Posted by Hello

Wednesday, February 16, 2005

Radio Astronomy Under Seige

Radio astronomy has contributed several of the most fundamental discoveries of the past century. Now, however, it is under relentless and increasing pressure, above all from the communications industry, to give up the protected wavebands containing the astrophysically most important frequencies. Considering that an ordinary portable telephone, if placed on the Moon, would be one of the very brightest sources in the radio sky at its wavelength, even sideband radiation from transmissions in a permitted waveband may be fatal to astronomy. Continued efforts by the IAU and URSI (Union de Radio Science Internationale), as represented by the Scientific Committee on Frequency Allocations for Radio Astronomy and Space Science (IUCAF) within the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), are vital for radio astronomy to survive in the face of this competition.

Monday, February 14, 2005


My Pal Mouse.  Posted by Hello

Saturday, February 12, 2005

Another Trip Around The Sun

(3.14 x 150,000,000 / 365 /24)kph is a wild pace to travel at. As I approach another birthday I think about these sorts of things. I know the scientific among you will balk at my crude math because our orbit is elliptical and not circular, but wotthehell. Our orbit is almost circular, and we get a "free trip around the sun every year" according to my pal Nick. I'm sure he's not the first one to use a similar expression, but it's a good one no matter who coined it.

Everybody thinks they're going nowhere all the time when the exact opposite is happening. Someone once asked Thelonious Monk what was happening. He replied "Everythings happening... every googleplexth of a second!" Monk was right. The universe is a wonderful and fascinating place, and most of us just blindly make our way in it without paying much attention. There are so many things to see and experience in the world, and it's a shame we fall victim to this trend.

The next time you hear someone complaining that they're not going anywhere, tell them they're going 54000 km/h (give or take a few) and to rethink their gloomy outlook.

A Ghostly Tree at the Allan Gardens.  Posted by Hello

Wednesday, February 02, 2005


The Grey County Forest in summer. Posted by Hello