It was April 2017 and Ruth and I were walking along the boardwalk. When we got as far as the foot of Scarboro Beach Boulevard, we spotted a bronze historical plaque. The Toronto Historical Board had put it in place in 1993.
Category: Family History
About a year ago, I showed you a scanned photograph that I had found on newspapers.com, a research resource with a name that’s self-explanatory. It was a group portrait that had appeared as a human-interest item in the Star Weekly (a Saturday supplement to the Toronto Evening Star) on November 14, 1914, and it showed my cousin, Blanche Isabel Price (she went by her middle name, Isabel), together with her four grandparents and four of her great grandparents.
Here’s that post from June 2025.
The quality of the photo was sub-optimal, given that it was taken from an online archive, but I recently found a better version that I wanted to share with you.
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Helen Price (1898–1967), my grandmother, attended Ontario Ladies’ College (now Trafalgar Castle School) during her sophomore and junior years (the school years 1912–1913 and 1913–1914). We don’t know where she had spent her freshman year, but we do know that she left O.L.C. in 1914 to spend her senior year back in Toronto, at Malvern Collegiate.
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Easter of 1899 wasn’t Helen’s first Easter, but it was the first one for which she understood, in her way, what was going on.
My grandmother, Helen Fredrica Price, was the fourth child and second daughter of Joe Price and Lizzie Leslie. She was born on January 5, 1898, making her three months old when Easter arrived on April 10, 1898.
By the time of her second Easter, on April 16, 1899, she was a precocious child of fifteen months.
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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.
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He Would Have Been Ninety-Five on Remembrance Day This Year
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Great Moments in Price Family History: October 11, 2021
Price family member Terra Zoutman recently made an important announcement on her Facebook page.
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Great Moments in Price Family History: August 14, 2021
Joseph Leslie Edmond “Ted” Price, son of Joseph Leslie Price and Ida Blanche Edmonds, will celebrate his 105th birthday in Gravenhurst, Ontario next Saturday, August 14th.
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Great Moments in Price Family History: May 2021
Ali Finstad, a great great granddaughter of Joe and Lizzie Price and an MD candidate at the University of Ottawa, was recently part of a team of medical students who “advocated for more skin colour representation in their dermatology studies and created an official new module for the MD curriculum that addresses skin colour diversity in diagnosing and treating dermatoses.”
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And We’re Hoping You Can Help Make the Site Even Better
I’ve recently added a lot of information to the Price family tree, and I think you might find it worth taking a look, and maybe even getting involved.
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Great Moments in Price Family History: November 5, 1930
There’s a group on Facebook that provides a space for residents and former residents of Toronto’s Beach district to share stories and recollections. It’s called “The Beacher History Kaboodle” and someone recently posted a 1930 photo of Isabel Price that they had found in the Toronto City Archives.
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At the request of the The Beach & East Toronto Historical Society (TBETHS), I recently did a repeat, updated performance of the presentation I had done in October 2019, about the role of the Price family in the early development of Toronto’s Beach district.
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An Attempt to Give Credit Where It’s Due
I’ve now had the privilege of giving two talks, for the Beach & East Toronto Historical Society, about the Price Brothers and their impact on the development of the Beach. One of the things that most struck me, in preparing for those talks, was the important but virtually forgotten role of Harry Stevens.
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As a lead up to the upcoming June 1 Zoom talk sponsored by the Beach & East Toronto Historical Society, Beach Metro News published a short article on the Price family in their May 18, 2021 edition.
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A Zoom Talk on June 1
The Beach & East Toronto Historical Society has asked me to give another talk about the Price family’s contribution to the development of the Beach. It will cover the much of the same ground as the first talk, in October of 2019, but will include some new material that I didn’t have then.
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Saturday, September 22, 1923
Helen Price and Harley Warner, my paternal grandparents, were married, on Saturday, September 22, 1923, at her home on Glen Manor Drive in Toronto.
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The Prices
This site is about the family and descendants of Joe Price (1860-1934) and his wife Lizzie Leslie (1862-1917).
Its mission is to research, preserve, and share the Price family’s history, stories, documents and pictures, and to bring Joe and Lizzie’s living descendants together.
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Hi, Price cousins,
Here’s the question I’ve been grappling with lately: how does a family history website like this one guarantee that it respects the privacy of living family members like you?
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That car that Joe, Lizzie, Leslie, Earl and Hazel are riding in, in the header photo at the top of every page, is (as some of you may remember if you’ve been reading all of these posts) a Canadian-built Russell.
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Probably the best source for tracing Lizzie Leslie‘s family, both her ancestors and her descendants, is a book by Margaret Leslie Lindner called Campbell of Hastings County, Ontario.
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Long before I started doing serious research about the Price family, I was aware of two stories about my great grandmother Lizzie Price (Helen Elizabeth Leslie) and her musical career as a cornetist.
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On July 2, 1928, the Toronto Globe published a two-and-a-half-page spread about the hundreds of handsome new houses that the Price Brothers were building in the Beach. Fawning articles were accompanied by ad after ad placed by the company’s suppliers.
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In October of 2019, I had the privilege of giving a talk about the Prices at a monthly meeting of the Beach and East Toronto Historical Society (TBETHS).
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