The Cortes Island Museum has a genealogical database. It was compiled by Bernice McGowan, whose interest in genealogy was sparked by her mother’s research of their family roots. Coming to Cortes Island some 50 odd years ago, she was intrigued by the fact that so many of the island’s older European families seemed to be related. She has also dug up some census records for Klahoose, Japanese and Chinese residents.  

Bernice McGowan: “I was always  interested in questions like,  ‘how are you related to so and so.” When I started putting my family into a database, I thought  it would be interesting to do that for Cortes if nobody has done that before for the museum. So,  I just started doing it and when I retired, I went, ‘okay, now I have some time to do that.'” 

“I started with June Cameron’s book, ‘Destination Cortez island: A Sailor’s Life Along The BC Coast’. She talks about going around Cortes  by water,  talks about the various places  and  has lots of stories of the different families that she knows. So I just took names out of there.” 

Bernice went on to incorporate the data from census returns, birth, marriage and death records, newspaper articles, interviews and all the other sources normally used by genealogists.  

Bernice McGowan: “I tend to limit myself to people who’ve actually lived here.  So say with one family, I might have gone like  ‘so and so lived here and these were his siblings’ if I happened to find it, and they were born in such and such a place and their parents were such and such, but I wouldn’t go any further back than that. I’m really interested in the people who lived here, the interconnections between the families that are here and then maybe where they dispersed to.”  

“One of the early ones I did was the Tiber family.  August Tiber originally came  from Germany. T-E-U-B-E-R is how he spelled his name.  Originally he was married to Mary Peach, that was the English translation of  P-I-S-C-H.” 

The German pronunciation would be something like August Tuber  and Mary Pish.

Bernice found records of the Teubers in North Dakota. Mary appears to have died in the United States. August was a widower when he moved to Cortes and accompanied by two of his children: Henry and Mary.

Bernice McGowan: “I’m not sure how  August knew about Cortes, but  he came here and  got a preemption homesteaded up near Blue Jay Lake. He then decided to live in what is now Siri and Jay’s place, the Ellingson farm, where the road bends beside Hague Lake. He moved his whole homestead there and lived there for a very long time. I think he died there.”  

His son Henry changed the family’s surname to TIBER. He was living in Tiber Bay when June Cameron described him:

“The next place we saw was Henry Tiber’s which was in the second last little bay before you reach Turn Point. Henry, son of Augustus Tiber of Hague Lake, built himself a regular blacksmith shop and did a lot of work for both the hand loggers that populated the various inlands  and for the oxen and horse-powered log shows nearby.  Besides being a master blacksmith, Henry also built boats. He would choose a little tree and ring the bark right down through the Cambrian layer and leave it standing for five years to season before he felled to make a boat. Pioneers claim he was so inventive that he carved himself a usable set of false teeth from Whalebone.”

Bernice McGowan: “I had a question here, was Mary Point named after Henry’s mother Mary?”

Back to Cameron’s narrative: “Henry married Rose. They had a daughter Myrtle Margaretha and then at some point they divorced.  Rose went off and married somebody else and then lo and behold, Henry and Rose got married again about 20 years later.  I was finding dates for their marriage and I’m going, ‘why did they marry in 1923, but their kid was born in 1910?’ Then I found a second marriage record for 1901.” 

Bernice McGowan: “Their daughter Myrtle decided at some point to change her name to Veronica.”  

Cameron wrote: “Veronica turned out to be a bit of a party girl.  While still in her mid-teens she married Charlie, the youngest of the Byers brothers who lived near the Tiber home at Turn point. Charlie was an outstanding boxer who could have fought professionally. He used to spar with his brothers after working all day in the woods. He also carried some of the emotional baggage that comes from experiences in the awful war in Europe.  The couple soon had a little girl called Kathleen, but Veronica became disenchanted with the marriage and longed for the bright lights of a metropolis.  Onto the scene came a city slicker Darragh who also happened to be a bit of a petty crook.  Myrtle Veronica accepted his offer to take her to Vancouver and left with her daughter.  When Charlie found out where they were, he set off to reclaim his wife. The resourceful Darragh called for police protection from a dangerous man who was out to kill him. When the police grabbed Charlie without explanation, he struck out with his fists only to be beaten senseless with billy clubs. He returned to Cortes, but never  recovered from his injuries and later died in his orchard from a brain hemorrhage with blood oozing from his ears and nose. My father claims he died of a broken heart, which is as good a way of putting it as any. Darragh eventually ended up in jail. So Veronica went onto Harrison, where she found work cooking at young HR McMillan’s logging camp. In time she returned to Tiber Bay and thumbed her nose at convention by living her life as she pleased.”

That was what June Cameron wrote; Bernice searched for written records.

“Myrtle Veronica married Roy Darragh, they divorced at some point and she married somebody named John Austin Pippitt.  They weren’t here at this point. They were, I think, living in the Lower Mainland .  He had children, so she had stepchildren.  Something happened to him. I don’t know whether she divorced him, or whether he died and then she married Danny Dowling. So she became  Mrs. Dowling, but she preferred to be called Miss Dowling. Somehow along the line she became known as Billy.  She returned to Cortes and lived on the Tiber Bay property, where she was known as Billy Dowling. She was a plane spotter, like during the war. She would report any planes or mysterious looking boats  to the military. There’s an article about her in the Vancouver Sun. Veronica sold the Tiber Bay property to Bud Jarvis and was residing in Powell River when she died in 1991.”

Cortes Currents: Was that the beginning of the Tiber Bay co-op?

Bernice McGowan: “Bud Jarvis sold off pieces. I’m not sure how the Tiber Bay Co-op happened, but that’s the story of the Tiber family.”

“Cap Smith’s family is  another very interesting family because they’re connected to many of the other families on the island, like the Robertsons and a lot of Thompsons and Nellie Jeffrey (I think). His name was Marion Enos Smith, but he was known as Cap and he was the first person that settled in Seaford. He was a postmaster. He ran a freight boat for the Thulin brothers. He married Flossy Bell, also known as Florence, and then they had five daughters and one son. Mildred was Doreen Guthrie’s mother.  Francis was the son. Kate and Wilena married two Thompsons, who were brothers. There’s a lot of Thompsons on Quadra Island who are related to that family, but I haven’t tackled the Thompson family in any great  detail yet.”

“Once I finish with a family and I’ve finalized the family tree in a descendant summary and any notes that go along with that family, I will then send that information to Jill Milton, the museum’s archivist. She prints it off and there’s a binder at the museum that has the family trees.”

Bernice has files for a number of Cortes families in her database

• Aldrich
• Allen
• Barrett
• Byers
• Cafferata
• Hawkins
• Hayes
• Heay
• Manson
• Tom Marflett
• Marquette
• Middleton
• Nichols
• Ogren
• Percival
• Petznick
• Saunders
• Captain Smith
• Carr Smith
• Tiber
• Tooker
• Joseph and Louisa Valley

Bernice’s information about non-European families appears to largely consist of census returns. 

Cortes Currents: I noticed you have a Klahoose file.  

Bernice McGowan: “I’ve done a little bit of delving into the First Nations census records, which are hard to find because they’re not with the Cortes records. They’re lumped in with all the coastal Indian reserves. So 1931, these would  be Klahoose community names. “Chief Julian, and  his wife  Mary Julian.” 

It was easy to search for ‘Chief Julian’ through the Census search tool on the government of Canada website. He appeared in the 1911, 1921 and 1931 censuses. Chief Julian heads a list of Klahoose entries from 1911. Here are a few facts gleaned from the first entries:

• Chief Julian and his wife Mary were 50 years old and the sole occupants of their home.
• Old Louie was only 29, and lived with his wife Josephine and their five sons Alex, Johnny, John, Issac and Jimmy. 
• Joe and Alice Louie were only 18 and 17, but had been married for more than 3 years and had two sons. 
• Francis and Louisa were both 17 and had a baby.
• There were four generations living in the Hill household. The head was 40 year old Annie Hill. Her mother, daughter and four grandchildren were living with her. 

There is a page and a half of Klahoose entries, with surnames like Hill, Louie, McGee, Peter, Dominic and Peal. They were all listed as ‘Catholics’ and the male heads of families were loggers. 

We probably won’t see a definitive Kahoose genealogy until they publish their family histories. 

Bernice also mentioned Japanese and Chinese records. 

Bernice McGowan: “When the museum was doing that exhibit about Japanese Canadians a year or two ago, I went down the rabbit hole of looking at the Japanese people on the Cortes censuses, because there were logging companies that had large Japanese crews. Melanie Boyle, Managing Director of the Cortes Island Museum, was able to find information about the person who was head of the Japanese crew through the Japanese Cultural Museum in Vancouver. There was also a Chinese crew that were around Whaletown.”

Links of Interest:

• Search Cortes Island Museum online records
• Search page for Canadian Census records
• Results of a search for ‘Chief Julian’ in Census records
• Articles about Cortes Island history on Cortes Currents

Top image credit: Bernice McGowan searching her Cortes Island genealogical database – Roy L Hales photo

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