All the Journey Through

Chris Raible is a social historian and the author of Muddy York Mud:
Scandal and Scurrility in Upper Canada.

An old woman, Amelia Eliza Blackstock, died in Toronto in the 1930s,
leaving behind neatly tied bundles, family letters spanning a century in
time, marked “Destroy Everything.” Her instructions were ignored;
the letters became the source material for a charming book. Had C.M.
Blackstock simply compiled and then published her great-aunt’s
archives as a family scrapbook-chronicle, it would have been a valuable
Toronto social history source book. Instead, she turned them into
something much more marvelous. The letters became the vehicle for
telling a family saga that flows back and forth in time without ever
losing its immediacy.

In these intertwined family tales, we learn about the Blackstocks, the
Gibbses, the Gooderhams, and the Tates. Some were distillers; others
were temperance reformers. Some made great fortunes; others did not do
well at all. The familiar themes of our history books—pioneer
settlement, westward expansion, economic development, religious
revivalism, social-class rivalries, Confederation politics, emerging
feminism, and more—form the backdrop for the personal dramas of the
human characters. There are genealogical charts to help us follow the
complicated narrative.

This book, which happens to be beautifully designed and produced, may
focus on a family tree—or rather four family trees—but its roots and
branches are intertwined with the entire social history of 19th-century
Ontario. With these few trees, we view the forest afresh.