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In the Strachan Avenue Military Cemetery at Fort York a weathered gravestone recalls Harriet Isabella Ormsby who died in 1870, aged almost seven years old. As recently as 1953 another stone that can’t be identified today marked the grave of her infant sister, Minnie Jane, whose death occurred in 1866. The inscriptions on the stones said they were daughters of Superior Barrack Sergeant Thomas Ormsby, late of the 91st Regiment. Two months ago we received an e-mail from Ian and Carolyn McConnell, Brits currently working and living in the Netherlands, who had come across the inscriptions on our website <www.fortyork.ca>. They provided us with much information about Thomas and Eliza Ormsby, Ian’s greatgrandparents. The Ormsbys emigrated from Liverpool in April, 1863, arriving in New York aboard the Ellwood Walter. Thomas, born about 1823 in Donegal, Ireland, had retired in 1862 with a pension after serving in the army for twenty-one years, 3½ of them in the East Indies and 13½ at the Cape of Good Hope where he was decorated for his part in the seventh Kaffir War. His wife Eliza Vaughan, his junior by seventeen years, was the daughter of a butcher in Bethnal Green, London. Married in June, 1858, in Pembroke Dock, Wales, they were accompanied on the voyage to America by their daughter Eliza Clara, aged four. Harriet Isabella’s birth coincided with their arrival in America. Not long afterwards the family made its way from New York to Toronto where Thomas was employed at Fort York as the barrack sergeant. This appointment often went to a veteran soldier. His duties, as directed by the barrack master, were like those of a modern-day property manager but also to provide bedding, candles, and firewood. The incumbent was not required to live in the garrison. The Ormsbys are shown in the 1866 Toronto directory in a house on Adelaide St. West between Spadina and Brant streets and in 1867-8 on Nassau Street between Spadina and Augusta. By 1868-9 they had moved to Lumley Street [Euclid Avenue] above Robinson, where they remained until leaving Canada in 1870. Their departure coincided with the withdrawal of the British military from Canada in 1870, when the defence of Canada was turned over to the government of the new Dominion. Thomas Ormsby was the last British-appointed barrack sergeant at Fort York; his successors were Canadian soldiers. On returning home to England, he was appointed Superior Barrack Sergeant in the Chatham Barracks in Gillingham, Kent. Later he held the same post at the garrison in Sheerness, Kent. He died in the latter place in February, 1896, survived by his wife and ten of their fifteen children.
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