George Liston: the Ferryman of Halifax

Every once in a while, I come across a person in my research who is so larger than life, the page their story is written on can barely contain them. The memory of them is so vivid in the words describing them, I can almost hear their voice.

I've never seen a better example of this than George Liston, the ferryman of Halifax.

I'd be remiss if I didn't give credit once again to the venerable Judith Fingard for her work in "Rescue and Reward: Corporal George Liston's Heroism on the Halifax Waterfront." It never ceases to amaze me that whenever I'm arriving at another ancestor in the black community of Halifax, Judith has always been there before me, leaving sign posts and directions for me to follow.

I also owe a great debt to the r/genealogy community on Reddit. I couldn't have put this story together with the hours and hours of assistance from their kindhearted users over there. It started with a singular request for an obituary for my 4th great grandmother, Hannah Bailey, from Newspapers.com. From there, it quickly snowballed into one of my favorite deep dives I've ever done.

 

Clipped obituary for Hannah Bailey, The (Halifax) Evening Mail, 20 Sep 1909, p.12; digital image, Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com : accessed 18 Sep 2022).

 

William T. Bailey and Mrs. Rose Bailey Pinheiro are her children. William's wife name is Charlotte Dixon. I made a mental note that Charles Dixon is probably a close connection of hers, their families were friends, and to explore those connections deeper at another time. I cannot chase every shiny thing at once and right now there's something even shiner than that.

I had no idea that Hannah has a brother named George Liston. I've never heard this name before. And my excitement about it was palpable because my new friend over on Reddit proceeded to send me every mention of George in every newspaper from eastern Canada.

I was totally unprepared for how many there were going to be.

 

"Heroism at Home," The (Halifax) Evening Mail, 22 Jul 1895, p.4; digital image, Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com : accessed 18 Sep 2022).

The person on Reddit who was assisting me said that the vast majority of these articles had already been clipped by someone else. That's likely how they ended up in the Ancestry Hints were I saw the one for Hannah in the first place. I wouldn't have known there was anything to find without this person coming through and clipping the articles first.

 

"The Militia of Nova Scotia in 1861," The (Halifax) Evening Mail, 18 Aug 1897, p.7; digital image, Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com : accessed 18 Sep 2022).

This user on Newspapers.com had hundreds upon hundreds of clippings, mostly related to members of the military. Possibly putting together some sort of military history exhibit at a museum in Canada? They probably took an interest in George one of the more public-facing and well-remembered names associated with the Victoria Rifles, the black militia regiment assembled in 1860.

Judith Fingard provides additional insight into the history of the Victory Rifles. The black troops received a mixed reception by the community of Halifax. Some targeted them with racial attacks. Others came to their defense. Anyone foolish enough to target George with racism could expect an immediate and unforgiving response. Fingard outlines some of those interactions, pointing out that he would largely walk away with little to no consequences.

Court records also provide some evidence of Liston's response to racism. One incident concerns a minor assault by Liston of a labourer he accused of 'calling out names after him' while he was attempting unsuccessfully to collect a bill from a client on Hollis Street. In his aggravated mood, Liston gave the offending party a swipe which knocked him against the wall of the Hollis Hotel. Liston was once again fined and bound over to keep the peace.

That may seem remarkable to anyone in the United States, whose history of lynching black men is well-known across the world.

How did George avoid that same fate?

By saving dozens upon dozens of people from drowning.

"George Liston's Great Record as a Saver of Life," The (Halifax) Evening Mail, 10 Dec 1902, p.12; digital image, Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com : accessed 18 Sep 2022).

The count of people George has saved is unknown, but it includes dozens upon dozens of people. No one was even afraid to fall into the harbor because they trusted George so completely to pull them out. the local joke was that they wouldn't even have time to get wet before they would be rescued. George had endeared himself to so many families from the rescues he had undertaken, he was a local hero in Halifax. And as a practical matter, attacking with racial epithets the person who may be tasked with saving your life one day isn't exactly a winning survival strategy.

Which isn't to say he was immune to coming into contact with Halifax's underbelly. Punching an assailant hard enough to flatten them takes a real amount of skill. George managed it in 1918 when he was in his early eighties.

"Assaulted Aged Boatman," The (Halifax) Evening Mail, 3 Sep 1918, p.2; digital image, Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com : accessed 18 Sep 2022).

What hurts my heart is knowing that he likely had a traumatic brain injury after this, which led to a steep decline for him. It's clear in the articles that follow this attack that George was a treasured member of this community. It was difficult for them to see he was in decline.

"Faithful Old Servant Too Ill to Ring Fog Bell," The (Halifax) Evening Mail, 24 Jun 1921, p.4; digital image, Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com : accessed 18 Sep 2022).

The community rallied around George, to advocated for him to receive better treatment than to be put into the poor house.

 

"George Liston Deserves Better Treatment from the Citizens of Halifax," The (Halifax) Evening Mail, 23 Nov 1921, p.15; digital image, Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com : accessed 18 Sep 2022).

He received a medal recognizing his years of dedicated service and the many lives he saved. He was also formally recognized by Mayer Parker of Halifax, who also took up the effort to get George Liston a better living situation in his final days.

 

"The Death of George Liston," The (Halifax) Evening Mail, 13 Mar 1922, p.3; digital image, Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com : accessed 18 Sep 2022).

He passed away on 12 March 1922 at the age of 89. His obituary added incredible details that his parents were black refugees from the War of 1812, freed from slavery by the British and brought to the Maritimes. Judith Fingard was able to identify his parents' names in the cemetery registers at Camp Hill Cemetery: John and Mary Liston. From George's obituary, we gather they were freed from Richmond, Virginia. Taken together with the details from "Hero at Home" (posted above) that his parents were among the cohort of freed people that left in 1812, I have more details about my family's history during the time of slavery than I ever thought possible.

"Not a Sister, But a Niece," The (Halifax) Evening Mail, 14 Mar 1922, p.14; digital image, Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com : accessed 18 Sep 2022).

 

Some of his contemporary family members are also listed: Mrs. Charles (Rose) Pinheiro and William Bailey, his niece and nephew. Also, a brother who is also buried in Camp Hill Cemetery. Note that a correction is posted later correcting the relationship from "sister" to "niece."

News of George's passing made it all the way to Montreal.
 

"George Liston, Negro, Aged 89, Dead in Halifax," The Montreal Gazette, 14 Mar 1922, p.10; digital image, Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com : accessed 18 Sep 2022).

His absence was so keenly felt after his death, he was the star of the Remember When? column almost two weeks later, referencing the visit on Queen Victoria's son, Albert Edward, to Canada in 1860.

"Remember When," The (Halifax) Evening Mail, 25 Mar 1922, p.11; digital image, Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com : accessed 18 Sep 2022).

 

George Liston never married or had a family. He dedicated his life to being the ferryman, the watchman over the waters of Halifax Harbor. The only descendants he has are through his siblings children. And since many of ours have since left Halifax, there was no one among us who remembered his name or knew he was one of our own.

Until now.

For the rest of my life, I will hold a special place in my heart for George Liston. I already know I will be telling his story to anyone who will listen. As a giver of so many gifts, even beyond the grave he has given a special one to me. I treasure anyone who preserves the exact piece of information I need exactly where I will find it. 

George did that with a greater finesse than anyone else I've met in my journey so far.

MyTreeTags, ThruLines, and a Major Discovery

*taps mic*

Is this thing on?

Seems to be.

All right. Let's get into it.

Let's acknowledge the elephant in the room. I went offline long enough for my entire site to go down for quite some time. I'm currently getting things fixed up and running again. It will take some time. I have a huge backlog of messages and issues on various platforms to address. I'm working my way through them and I appreciate your patience while I do so.

Where have I been?

Dealing with a lot of the issues I talked about in my last post on family fragmentation and revisionism. That post was autobiographical. The 2016 US election and COVID-19 have done permanent damage to several relationships in my family. Doing genealogy, in light of those conflicts and fractures, became incredibly painful. For my own health, I had to step away. 

Healing has been slow to come, so my reentry from that hiatus has been gradual. But in the short time I've been back, I've started several new projects and made a major discovery on one of my longest standing mysteries.

Let's talk about it.

MyTreeTags

I missed the major updates that Ancestry has been doing to their tree tagging system. The last time I was using them, the only utility I had for them was marking off folks in my tree as "DNA Match" whenever I successfully identified them on one of the DNA testing services and could put them in my tree. The obvious problem with that system is all the matches from the testing companies I use are mixed together, with no easy way to sort or target them.

That is, until now.

Ancestry's MyTreeTags added custom tagging at some point, which means I now have tags for all the testing companies and matching services where my DNA exists. I can now tell, at a glance, which matches are from which services, and which ones are available on multiples services.

My Access database was born out of a desire to have this information from all of the various testing services in one place. Ancestry has made the tree I work in the most the ideal place to store and handle this information now.

Documenting Slavery and Freedom using MyTreeTags

Additionally, Ancestry has added more Life Experience tags, including ones for slave holders. I spent an entire weekend documenting the slaveholders in my tree across the American South. It's the most comprehensive effort anyone in my family has ever taken to accurately document slavery. Because the slave schedules in the US censuses of 1850 and 1860 provide only first and last names of the owners, these records need to be cross referenced with other records to positively identify both the enslavers and the enslaved. It's an ongoing project that took me through wills, vital records, and various other record collections in the communities I research, trying to figure out how to identify the names of people enslaved by my family and to make that information accessible to researchers who need it.

On deck, I have other Ancestry default tags to utilize, including for the Free People of Color in my tree. I've been slow to circle back around to it because the tree tags aren't accessible on the Ancestry app, which is something I definitely need future updates to address. These tags are so much a part of my work process now, it's a huge inconvenience not to have access to them on my phone.

Other Opportunities to Use MyTreeTags

Other tags I will eventually use: Immigrants, Military Service, the Adoption tags, and the ones that indicate when a person Never Married or had No Children. There are several places in my family where aunts raised generations of children in my family that could easily be mistaken for their own.

I think it's also worth creating and documenting the LGBTQ+ folks in my tree with their own tag or tags. How to implement that is something I'm going to put more thought into and explore with other researchers before implementing it to make sure I do it in the most respectful way possible. It's a feature I'd love to see Ancestry adopt themselves to remind all family researchers that LGBTQ+ people have always existed and they deserve to be identified correctly and remembered for who they were and who they loved.

Using ThruLines and Common Ancestor Hints to Trace Private Trees

At some point, these ThruLines got good enough to document relationships to cousin matches with private trees. I have had cousin matches on my AncestryDNA match list that have been there for years, never being positively identified. Using the Shared Matches tab, I had a pretty good idea how several of them were related to me. But I recently discovered that once these relative matches have a Common Ancestor hint, clicking on View Relationship enters a space that uses public trees to provide match details to aid in identification.

When working on documenting matches from my DNA about a week ago, I saw multiple instances where my own descendancy research in my tree filled in the blanks on the Common Ancestor page. I was able to work down to the relative match, with the assistance of the algorithm, then use public records to identify them and add them to my tree. I've operated for years off of the assumption that the more information I fed to the algorithm through my own tree, the more heavy lifting it would ultimately do for me. I'm seeing now that this is coming to fruition in how I can now process matches with private trees.

I'm not entirely sure how this works. But based on the information that was being filled in for me, it appears to use a combination of other public trees, as well as information in my own tree, to populate the lineage from the Common Ancestor hint to the cousin match. It's especially effective, however, when the information is in my personal tree. In one instance, I knew I wasn't going to be able to deduce the mother for one of my relative matches on my own. I added all the siblings for that generation of the mother's family to my tree anyway. I was surprised to see the Common Ancestor match filled in which of the siblings was the match's mother. The algorithm gave me that confirmation simply because she was in my tree, even though the cousin match was not. 

I'm fairly certain that the anonymization of living people applies in these cases, but I'm not entirely sure. I'm also unsure how much of what I was seeing was the algorithm using the information in my own tree to help me identify this match locally, without necessarily sending that confirmation to other people on the platform. I do have questions about this because there were instances where the lineage the algorithm was populating for me was pulling information from other public trees. Does it do that with my public tree and all of the descendancy research I've been feeding to it? If I input this person and their connection to me into my tree, how much of that information gets fed to other AncestryDNA users via their Common Ancestor hints?

I'll be honest: I'm not asking because I care. But there are a lot of people with private trees connected to their DNA who definitely care about these answers. I don't think it's clearly understood how much the algorithm is working around their privacy settings right now. The only thing that seems to be off the table, from what I've seen, is an actual positive ID of the match themselves. But depending on what information they provide about themselves on their AncestryDNA page through their username, personal details, and location, even that's not a guarantee. 

I identified at least half a dozen matches this way that have been sitting unconfirmed in my match list for years. Maybe this isn't news to anyone else and I'm simply the last one to know. But somehow, I don't think so.

To target these kinds of matches, activate the Common Ancestor filter and the Private Tree filters at the same time. Since the layout on these Common Ancestor hints is identical to the ThruLines interface, I suspect the two of them are connected and they work together to make this happen.

What does this mean? It means having a private tree attached to DNA results can be functionally meaningless in certain situations. And while I find that to be incredibly convenient and exciting for me and my purposes, it's pretty important for folks who think they're keeping secrets and protecting privacy in their private trees to realize it doesn't work that way once you connect them to your DNA results.

The Major Discovery

I started doing genealogy when I was 14 years old. I still have the first pedigree chart I ever made, handwritten, in the back of the journal I kept at the time. That pedigree chart had two blanks on it, which I've been trying to fill for eighteen years.

I filled the one years ago when I identified my maternal grandmother's birth father. My paternal grandmother's birth father was the only one who was still missing.

That is, until a couple weeks ago.

Because of DNA matching, I had my paternal grandmother's birth father narrowed down to four brothers in a family from Ontario, Canada. I had matches to three of the four brothers on AncestryDNA and had been trying to narrow it down further from there. With my own match, the centimorgans were inconclusive, being indicative of too many possible relationships to be useful by itself.

Then my sister tested. Her match to the daughter in Canada was significantly higher than mine. But before I tried to call it confirmed, I wanted to be sure.

A couple of months ago, one of my cousins in Canada took an AncestryDNA test. His match was high enough that it became clear that this woman was our grandmother's half sister. It's physically impossible for any other relationship to align with our centimorgans, age differences, and generational compositions, which is why the technique of triangulation is so valuable. While there were many explanations for my singular connection to this woman in Canada, there is only one that explains the relationship between her, me, my sister, and my first cousin.

After eighteen years of searching, the blank in our tree has been definitively filled because of DNA testing. At 32 years old, I can fill out a four generation pedigree chart accurately for the first time in my life. That may not be a big deal to some people, but it's a tremendously big deal to me. It's what 14 year-old me set out to do at the outset of this journey almost two decades ago.

I'm proud of her for taking the first step, and I'm proud of me for sticking with it for as long as it took to make this happen.