Mary Holmes

1820s–1840s

Born about 1821 in Ireland (Kilkenny or Ballynastick, Tipperary), to Edward Holmes and Isabella. Came to Canada, perhaps with her brother Thomas in 1842. Married a Mr. White in Whitby and worked with him in service to an Episcopal minister in Toronto.

1850s

Widowed, she kept house for her brother John on the Maitland Concession near Goderich. Married his neighbor George Lobb on 18 June 1854; son Thomas was born in 1857.

1860s–1870s

Raised her family in the log house on the Lobb farm in Goderich Township and belonged to the Methodist church.

1880s

Widowed in 1884. Died at her daughter Keziah's home in Colborne on 3 June 1886.

An Irish Widow in Ontario

Mary Holmes was born about 1821 in Ireland, either in Kilkenny or at Ballynastick in County Tipperary, where her brothers and sisters were born; her parents were Edward Holmes and Isabella. Her sister Margaret went to New York and her brother Robert stayed in Kilkenny, but Mary, her brothers Thomas and John, and her sister Jane all came to Canada. Mary may have come over with Thomas in 1842 and lived with him for a time in Trafalgar, Halton County.

In Whitby she married a Mr. White, and the couple moved to Toronto, where they worked in service to an Episcopal minister. After her husband died she went to the Maitland Concession in Goderich Township to keep house for her brother, and about 1853 she was living with John Holmes on Lot 70, near George Lobb, a Cornish farmer on Lot 76. She married George on June 18, 1854. Her children were Thomas (born in 1857, Meghan's 2x-great-grandfather), Joseph, William, Keziah, and Hannah, and George's will also remembered a stepdaughter, Mary Wait. The family lived in a one-story log house that George built in 1861. Mary, who had worshiped at an Episcopal church in Toronto, belonged to the Methodist church from about 1850 and later to the Holmesville church.

The Holmes, Lobb, and Snell families (her sister Jane had married George Snell) usually gathered together at Christmas. Her niece Elizabeth Beaton remembered Mary as "a forceful type of person" who spoke with a bit of an Irish brogue. George died in January 1884, and a month later Mary was hurt in a fall. In June 1886, while staying with her daughter Keziah Baer in Colborne, she fell ill with an inflammation of the lungs and died four days later, on June 3. Keziah's husband, David Baer, was thrown from his rig and injured on the dark road home after buying her coffin in Clinton. Mary's funeral was held at the Holmesville church, and she was buried at Holmesville Cemetery; when the cemetery was destroyed in 1964, a descendant, Alison Lobb, saved the footstone from her grave.