During the 18th and 19th centuries in Scotland, most farmers rented their land from wealthy landowners. Beginning in 1762, started by Admiral John Ross of Balnagowan Castle in Scotland, landowners began making “improvements” to their land to make room for more profitable sheep grazing in place of farming. Families were driven off the land they had farmed, sometimes for generations, with little or no warning. In some areas, as many as 2,000 families per day were driven from the land and sent to coastal areas where farmland was poor and scarce. The process went on intermittently for decades and caused impoverishment and starvation.
The lack of empathy felt by the English was typified in a letter written in the early 1800s by an upper-class woman, Elizabeth Leveson-Gower, Duchess of Sutherland. After observing the starving tenants on her husband’s land, she wrote to a friend in England,
“Scotch people are of happier constitution and do not fatten like the larger breed of animals.”
James Bonner And Jane Convery
Our earliest documented Bonner ancestors, James Bonner (1807-1893) and Jane Convery (1809-1890), were born in Scotland. By the time they married in 1829, they lived in Kirkcolm, a small town on the western coast of the Scottish Lowlands, just across the Irish Sea from Belfast.
Kirkcolm was a typical coastal town that became home for hundreds of such dispossessed families. The Bonners left Scotland soon after their marriage in 1829 to settle in Quebec. The next in our Bonner line was their first son, John Bonner (1832-1908). In 1856, John married Nancy Turnbull (1837-1925). Their second child, Robert John Bonner (1868-1946) married Annie Willson in Kent, Ontario in 1894. R.J. Bonner spent most of his professional life as Chairman of the Classics Department at the University of Chicago.
R.J. and Annie Bonner passed on this story of the Bonner family and the Scottish Clearances. Their son, Gordon Willson Bonner (1900-1951) married Agnes Russell (1899-1986) in 1926 in Chicago.
© 2013 W. Mullins