Updates made to Up To Rawdon
What’s New
photographs and text additions
Check the characterful photo of Willie Parkinson at photo gallery p_687. William Thomas Parkinson picture as a young teenager was added in February 2026. One sees the James Parkinson farmhouse and may wonder “is that his father, Big Jim, sweeping the porch?”
an additional photo of Mitchell Sadler
The biography the Reverend Mitchell Sadler: “Endeared to All” was published and updated in 2021, with Carolyn Goddard of Red Deer, Alberta, who wanted to confirm the identity of the photograph. Recently, Carolyn found a younger image of Sadler, from our correspondent Richard Lougheed on Ancestry.ca. It was marked on the album page as “Rev. Sadler, minister Montreal (1895) – see both and details on Update pages 544, 551.
Swift family photo and text additions
◊ Newly added photo p 863 I believe is Moses Swift or possibly his son James Henry Swift, who settled in New York City. I was originally reluctant to include the image without a positive identification. Moses’s wife Sarah Jane Smith was a sister-in-law of my great grandmother Ann Boyce Smith, p_841 This photograph was among her things and came to me from her niece Doris Banfill and Sue Sarassin.
◊ My friend John Resler Swift has contributed many pictures and details to UP TO RAWDON – see page 863 and Updates p. 863. In 2016 John gave me a copy of his book The Robert and Eliza Swift Family of Blackburn, Saline County, Missouri – John is their great grandson. This beautiful publication outlined their success as pioneer settlers from Rawdon, at a new family farm home – they arrived well versed in success through hard work.
I have valued and used John’s work. It showed the Swifts as a closely knit family, while all were still at Rawdon, Moses Swift and Sarah Jane Smith were the god parents of two children for Robert and Eliza. John’s book has a new home, with a Swift descendant in Alberta now.
◊
Rawdon men and women – Swifts, Grays, Lewises, Herberts –
settled in Minnesota their families are now spread across the entire USA.
In Updates, pps. 292-303 & 861-889, find sixteen “Gray Swift” entries.
John Resler Swift provided this photo of the memorial stone in their
cemetery at Ashley, Stearns County, MN.
◊ George Swift and Emma Dawson brought their family as settlers to Rawdon, circa 1831. In John’s book, the family line begins as ‘Swfte in 1300, in England. George Swift’s mother’s tree traces her family to the royal lineage of the Lancasters and to earlier English kings including William the Conqueror and before that to the Viking kings and queens of Normandy. This interested me because my recent reading included the novel ‘The Book of I’ and a history on Viking leaders converted to Christianity.
◊ Updates page 569 has additions and corrections made in March 2026 of the descendants of James Mason and Ann Swift.
◊ Updates page 865 confirms some dates and adds trivia: William Swift (1845-1920* date not confirmed ) and Mary Ann Herbert (1848-1911) and their son James Herbert Swift (1872- 1947) and daughter-in-law Jane Riva (1880- 1938). William Walter Swift buried at Mount Royal Cemetery was English born and not from the Rawdon family.
◊ I had thought that Sinclair Lewis, born at Sauk Centre, Minnesota, was part of Rawdon’s William Lewis family and was sorry to learn he was not. In1930, Sinclair Lewis became the first author from the United States to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature “for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of characters” in his many bestselling novels.
◊ In 2024, I published the Solomon Cook and famhzily story, which includes his connection to the lumber merchants Charles Roe Rood & Josiah Stocking Rood. They acquired his farm property at Lot 18, Fifth Range, before April 1842, when a portion of that property was purchased by the Reverend Mr. Bourne, as a part of a village site for the Anglican Church, with attached cemetery. See Update of page 597 for more about Solomon Cook and the Rood brothers.
◊ If you are interested in the Quebec Loyalist settlement of St-Armand look at Heritage News, Spring 2026, https://qahn.org/quebec-heritage-news. It reminded me of the Joshua Gibbs Family and their struggle for land and legal recognition. I published about them in QFHS Connections in June 2020 and Spring 2021 and revised it for UP TO RAWDON in January 2021.
◊ There may be news about the Copping Journal, for readers later this year, a new copy has turned up.