A Newly-Found Price Family Portrait From 1914

Newspapers.com is an outstanding resource for amateur family historians like me. The website has millions of scanned pages of historic newspapers from around the world, and I’ve been using it recently to learn more about my Price and Warner ancestors.

One of the fruits of that effort was the discovery of a Price family portrait in the November 14, 1914 edition of the Star Weekly, the Toronto Star‘s Saturday supplement. It depicts a toddler the paper calls “little Miss Price,” surrounded by her four grandparents and four maternal great grandparents.

Between the poor resolution of the newspaper photo itself, and the deterioration caused by the archival scanning, it isn’t a quality photograph. But it provides an interesting glimpse into one branch of our Price family tree.

Here’s the text that accompanies it:

A LITTLE TORONTO GIRL AND HER EIGHT GRANDPARENTS

Little Miss Price, 123 Lee avenue, and her eight grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. E. Galley, Walmer road, and Mr. and Mrs. W. G. Edmonds, 372 Parliament street (seated), are her great grandparents. Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Price, Lee avenue, and Mr. and Mrs. W. L. Edmonds , 127 Balsam avenue (standing, left to right), are her grandparents.

It was three and half months into World War I and the page where our family photograph appears is crammed with illustrations related to the war effort. Ours the only one that isn’t connected to the war.

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Little Miss Price’s grandparents are identified as “Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Price” and “Mr. and Mrs. W. L. Edmonds.” Her great grandparents are identified as “Mr. and Mrs. E. Galley” and “Mr. and Mrs. W. G. Edmonds.”

Let me tell you about everyone.

“Little Miss Price”

We seemed to have a thing about calling people by their middle names back then. The “little Miss Price” in the photo is Blanche Isabel Price. She was given the first name Blanche but was always known by her middle name, Isabel. Her father’s first name was Joseph (Joseph Leslie Price,), but he was always known by his middle name, Leslie. Her mother’s first name was Ida (Ida Blanche Edmonds) but she was always known by her middle name, Blanche. Her brother was given the first name Joseph like his father (Joseph Edmond Leslie Price), but has always been known as Ted, a diminutive of his middle name, Edmond.

I’ve written about Isabel a couple of times. You can read about her here and here.

The Grandparents

“Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Price”

If you’ve been following this Price Family website for a while, you already know who “Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Price” are. Joe and Lizzie — Joseph Price and Helen Elizabeth Leslie — are my great grandparents and the central characters in the family story I’ve been trying to share with you. I’ve written about them many times. If you don’t know their story, here is the place to start. For a focus on Lizzie, see here and here.

“Mr. and Mrs. W. L. Edmonds”

William Lewis Edmonds was born in Simonburn, Northumberland in 1859 and emigrated to Canada with his parents in 1873 (although some records incorrectly say 1877). He was fourteen. William had a long career in the publishing business. He started out as a typesetter (what they used to call a “compositor”) and then worked as newspaper editor and later as a journalist. His byline appeared often above articles on Canadian business affairs. The Star Weekly was one of the periodicals he wrote for, which might have had something to do with how the family photo ended up in its pages.

Ida Emily Galley was born in Toronto in 1862. She was twenty-four when she married William, in Toronto, in 1886. He was twenty-seven. The couple would live another twenty years after the 1914 photo was taken. He died on April 4, 1934. She died just a year later, on April 20, 1935.

The Great Grandparents

The photo caption says that Isabel’s four great grandparents are seated, but it doesn’t say which couple is which. Fortunately we have some other photos of the Galleys that allow us to identify them as the couple on the left and the Edmonds as the one on the right.

“Mr. and Mrs. W. G. Edmonds”

William George Edmonds and Eliza Cawley, the parents of William Lewis Edmonds, were both born in Bideford, a harbour town in North Devon, he in 1836 and she in 1833, and it was in Bideford that they were married in a lovely June wedding in 1858.

Eliza was the daughter of Lewis Cawsey and his wife, Mary Ann Murphy. Lewis was a master builder. Mary ran a public house called the “White Pack Horse Inn” on Union Street in Bideford.

William had grown up on the grounds of Moreton House, the stately home of the Bucks, a wealthy shipowner family, where his father — also named William George Edmonds — was head gardener. His mother’s name was Mary.

As a boy, he showed early promise and, in 1849, at the age of sixteen, he was awarded a scholarship to attend the Bideford Endowed Grammar School.

At a meeting of the Trustees of the Bideford Endowed Grammar School, held last week, […] William George Edmonds, son of Mr. William Edmonds, gardener at Moreton, was elected a scholar on the Foundation.

— The North Devon Journal Herald, November 8, 1849, page 5

By the time the 1861 census was taken, the younger William had become head gardener in his father’s place. He was just twenty-four. Ten years later, according to the 1871 census, he had lost that position and was living in town and working as a “butcher and seedsman.”

Two years later, William and Eliza and their six small children boarded a train in Bideford and travelled to Liverpool where, on August 7, 1873, they boarded a Canada-bound ship named the SS Polynesian. They arrived in Quebec City ten days later, on August 17, and then continued on to Toronto where they settled for good.

As his family adjusted to life in the new country, William returned to his work as gardener. In the 1880s, he got a job as a shipping clerk at the cookie factory of Christie, Brown & Company on Adelaide Street, and he continued to work there until his retirement around 1903.

Eliza died in 1918, at the age of eighty-five. William was eighty-six when he died in 1923.

“Mr. and Mrs. E Galley”

Edward Galley was born in the Isle of Wight in 1834 and came to Canada in 1852 at the age of eighteen. He was twenty-two when he married Mary Jane Jewell in Toronto in 1856. She was twenty-one, having been born in Oshawa in 1835 to Richard and Jane Jewell.

From the time Edward arrived in Canada until his retirement in 1879, at the age of forty-five, Edward was a prolific and successful builder. The following excerpt from a nineteenth-century history book tells his impressive story as a businessman, landlord, politician, and devout Methodist.

Mary Jane died in 1921, at the age of 85. Edward died two years later, in 1923. He was 88.

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Resting Places

Joe and Lizzie Price are at St. John’s Norway Cemetery in Toronto.

The Edmonds and the Galleys are at Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Toronto:

• William and Ida Edmonds
• William and Eliza Edmonds
• Edward and Mary Jane Galley

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Some Additional Photos

Here is a more flattering portrait of Blanche’s mother, Ida Emily Galley (“Mrs. W. L. Edmonds”), and her grandmother, Mary Jane Jewell (“Mrs. E. Galley”), taken a few years earlier, together with Blanche and little Isabel.

And here are two photos of Edward and Mary Galley that were shared to Ancestry.ca by a relative of the Galleys. One was taken for their fifth wedding anniversary and the other was taken fifty years later for their fifty-fifth.