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| Jean Rae Baxter, a new cousin |
When I was growing up, and even to this day, I have never personally met another member of the Wright family. My dad was raised as an only child, as was I. My Wright grandparents died before I was born.
My mother, on the other hand, was raised as the youngest in a family of five sisters and four brothers. So I had lots of aunts and uncles (several dozen first cousins, all deceased now) and a whole lotta spoiling by my grandparents on the Perry side.
Truth be known though, I always felt deprived of relatives on the Wright side and kind of sad that my particular branch of the family tree would eventually die along with me. Regretfully, my father Ken just never got around to telling me much about family background before he died when I was only 14 years of age.
Perhaps all of this is the reason for a preoccupation with genealogy in my senior years and the development of several family related web sites, culminating with certification as a member of the United Empire Loyalists' Association of Canada and the amassing of literally hundreds of cousins I never knew existed, thanks to participation in a world-wide Wright Family DNA Project. I also belong to a number of ancestry and heritage groups, through which I have come in contact with even more individuals claiming roots in what is now a very large family tree.
In fact, I have reached a point where I am having difficulty keeping up with almost daily notifications that a new DNA relative has been found for me. The key, of course, in doing justice to this type of program is follow up contact wherever possible -- exchange of information and, if lucky, the sharing of rare photographs and valuable never-before-seen documentation. Resultant online relationships are truly the icing on the cake.
A case in point is one of my latest new-found cousins and I instantly felt that we were cut from the same cloth. We actually found each other through an article I wrote recently for a heritage newsletter.
Jean Rae Baxter of Kingston is an author with two collections of short stories to her credit. Her short stories have been included in such anthologies as Revenge and Hardboiled Love, and In the Wings and Scattered Light. Her literary murder mystery Looking for Cardenio was published in 2008 and she is the author of a series of Young Adult historical novels that have been used in the International Baccalaureate Program. It and others in the series have won awards in Canada and the United States. A sixth and final book in the Forging a Nation series is scheduled for publication in the spring of 2021.
Pretty impressive stuff, to say the least.
Without going into detail, Jean traces her maternal lineage back to my 3Xgreat grandparents Henry and Mary (Klingensmith) Wright and their family of 10 siblings, the original United Empire Loyalists who settled in Oxford County in the late 1790s. She was born in Toronto and grew up in Hamilton, but "down home" was the same region of Essex and Kent Counties on the north shore of Lake Erie where her ancestors also settled, some following the American Revolution and some a century earlier, in the days of New France. There were many family stories to awaken her interest in Canada's past, and frequently, in these stories, the lives of settlers were interwoven with those of First Nations people.
After earning her B.A. and M.A. from the University of Toronto and a B.Ed degree from Queen's, she lived for many years in the Kingston area, where her interest in Loyalist history led her to find out more about such figures as the Rev'd John Stuart, Sir William Johnson, and Molly Brant.
Her career as a teacher began in Lennox and Addington County, Loyalist country 20 miles west of Kingston. While teaching at Napanee District Secondary School, she helped to develop Language Arts Curriculum in liaison with the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (O.I.S.E.).
During her career in education, Jean had little free time for her own writing, although she managed to produce a few poems, professional articles, and several one-act plays that have been produced in schools and churches.
Following her career in education, she returned to Hamilton and became a fulltime author. As well as writing novels and short stories, she was a member of the committee that organizes Hamilton's Lit Live Reading Series and also served as Co-chair of the Literary Advisory Committee, Hamilton Arts Council. In 2016 she returned to Kingston, where she now lives and writes.
Jean is currently mentoring an Anishinaabe woman who is writing a historical novel based on her own family's history. We have had several interesting email chats, played telephone tag and shared some precious documentation and photographs. We plan to stay in touch.
I no longer feel like a Wright orphan with so many relatives like Jean Rae Baxter out there just waiting to be discovered.
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