by Sam McBride
As a genealogy buff and a great-great-grandson of the PEI Father of Confederation Col. John Hamilton Gray, I have long been curious about what happened to his youngest son, Hamilton Edward Jarvis Gray, who was born Jan. 7, 1880, and his baptism/christening under that name can be viewed among the online PEI records. The mother was the colonel’s third wife, Sarah Caroline Cambridge, who would have been 38 when Hamilton was born, while the colonel was much older, at 69!
Col. Gray, who died in 1887, listed Hamilton in his will as a child to receive a third portion of his estate, along with his mother and older brother Arthur Cavendish Bentinck Gray, born in 1876. I have never been able to find out when or where Hamilton died, or anything else about his life. His mother Sarah’s obituary after her death in Bedford (north London) in 1906 did not mention him at all. Through an Ancestry search, I recently came across online the estate information of Edward Hamilton Gray of Bedford, who died May 12, 1900 at the Royal Albert Asylum. His estate of 56 pounds and change went to Sarah Caroline Gray, listed as his “widow”.
It looks like Sarah moved to England, partly for a facility that could accommodate her son with mental disability, but also to keep his story “swept under the rug” to avoid damaging the general reputation of the Gray family in that era when things like that were felt to be important.
It is likely that Col. Gray decided on the middle names of “Edward Jarvis” for his youngest son in light of his admiration for his nephew Edward Worrell Jarvis (1846-1894), who had a dramatic career in Western Canada as a CPR surveyor, expedition leader, engineer and Royal Northwest Police superintendent.
As family historian, I am pleased to discover this information because it answers a lot of questions, but sad to think of the situation at the time. I know from family letters that my great-grandmother Bertha Gray Peters (1862-1946) took her five Charlottetown-born children (including my maternal grandmother Helen Peters Dewdney 1887-1976) to England some time in 1900 to live in Bedford for about a year and a half, where Helen and her four brothers (including Frederic Thornton Peters VC) went to private school. I think Bertha, who was a staunch Anglophile, thought the schools in England were far better than Canadian schools, so wanted to try them out at least. Ultimately, the cost was too much, so the family returned to Victoria, BC where father Hon. Frederick Peters had a law practice. So I suspect Bertha may have taken advantage of an invitation from her step-mother Sarah to stay at her Bedford house for an extended period. Attached are some images from my research, Sarah’s obituary in 1906, and pics of Col. Gray, Arthur Gray and Edward Jarvis. I have never seen pics of Sarah or Hamilton.
Sarah’s other son, Arthur Gray, was a career soldier, including service in WW1 as an officer with the Royal Canadian Regiment. While stationed in Halifax, Arthur was seriously injured in the Halifax Explosion of December 1916, and went to England for treatment, marriage, and died there in 1924.
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