GUMMER CONNECTIONS

Gummer Connections

Preserving Our Family Stories, One Connection at a Time

Every photo, memory, and piece of history helps us better understand where we come from and how we are connected.

Rather than untangling exact relationships—such as determining how many times removed a distant cousin might be—a person would simply say, “he’s a connection of mine” or “I’m connected with that family.”

I first came across this description of “connection” many years ago, and it has stayed with me ever since. From that point on, Gummer Connections became the way I thought about my ongoing effort to document and preserve our family’s history, no matter how close or distant those ties may be.

For nearly 40 years, I have been deeply engaged in exploring our family’s past—a passion (some might say an obsession) that was first sparked by my grandmother, Margaret Gummer. She kept a drawer in her hutch filled with notes, photographs, and genealogies. One of these traced the Massey family. The William John Gummer branch of our family is connected to the Masseys through his marriage to Chloe Massey. A notable member of that family, Vincent Massey, was Canada’s first Canadian-born Governor General. I was astonished to learn that we are related—albeit distantly—as third cousins, three times removed.

My interest in genealogy continued to grow through various school projects, especially during the Grade 3 Pioneer Life unit in Social Studies. Our teacher, Jacqueline Beamish—who was also a cousin of my grandmother—organized a class trip to the Old Britannia Schoolhouse in Peel Region. There, her brother Jim Potter served as the headmaster. Years later, I inherited from Jim one of two wooden trunks used by Mary and John Ross when they emigrated from Scotland to Canada in 1832—a tangible link to the lives of those who came before us.

It is my hope that this website will serve as a place for all of us to remember, preserve, and share the stories, photographs, and histories of our many family connections.

Please register to explore and contribute. If you have any questions, or if you would like to share stories, information, or photographs, your contributions are always welcome and deeply appreciated.

---Scott Gummer---