Hi June

You probably know most of what I’ve written below, but there may be a few bits which are new to you.

How confident are you of the exact birthday (ie day/month 8th April ) of John ? Is the year of 1866 based on an actual document or from an artefact handed down through the family (letter, bible etc), or does the 1866 come from the “age 15 in 1871, age 44 in 1910, age 53 in 1920, age 63 in 1930 and age 69 at death in June 1935” ?

Since John’s residence in July 1901 was given as “Candilaria, Esmeralda County, Nevada” when he married Margaret Edna Chapman in San Bernardino, California, I started looking for him in the 1900 census (his whereabouts doesn’t seem to have yet been discovered in the online trees I’ve seen) using “8th April 1866, born England or Isle of Man, in Nevada or neighbouring states” but with no success. I’ve widened the search criteria considerably but to no avail. Finding him in the 1900 census would be a key factor in identifying the correct baptism on the IOM because the 1900 census is the only one which gives a birth month and year.

Google tells me that Candilaria had been a bustling mining town in the 1870s/80s but was well past its heyday by 1900. Do you know what John’s occupation was during the years between his entry into the US in 1882 and his marriage to a lawyer’s daughter in 1901 ? I imagine that he must have been “doing pretty well in life” before he met and married Margaret Edna.

Have you looked at the possibility that John’s birth surname may not have been Christian ---- perhaps Christian was his mother’s maiden name, given to him as a middle name --- although the fact that he gave his firstborn child the middle name of Christian does suggest that it was likely to have been his own pre-adoption surname.

The names which John and Margaret Edna gave to their children have some interesting combinations. Do you think that firstborn Thomas Christian was probably named after Margaret Edna’s father, Thomas Corwin Chapman ? It’s also possible that Thomas may have been John’s father’s name too.

Second born James Chapman may have got the James from John’s adoptive father or from his own father. Third-born Robert Gordon ---could this child have been given a name relating to John’s father’s line ? Other middle names of interest, Bruce, Dale, Herbert, Alexander----are there any others which could be a potentially handed-down ancestor’s surname ? I wondered whether Douglas could have been named to remind John of his own place of birth. If he did happen to have spent many of his early years in the IOM, then Douglas might have been the actual place he lived in and remembered fondly, rather than just the main town of the island. On the other hand, his family could have left the island when he was too young to have memories of it, and he could have chosen Douglas as his child’s name because it was the most well known place name connected with the IOM.

Does your collective family memory of passed-down stories give any idea of just how young John was when James McMillan adopted him and whether he was happy with his adoptive family ? Does the fact that he left his Canadian family age 16 to start a new life in the USA mean that he may have found the life very tough (hard work in a challenging climate, but perhaps domestically challenging, too). Is it known whether he travelled from Canada to the USA alone (and by which route ?) and whether he kept in touch with his McMillan step siblings ?

In 1930 Los Angeles, two of JCMcM’s adoptive sisters ( Mary A Goodwin nee McMillan b 1853, widow of John Goodwin b 1853, butcher, married Feb 1881 Waterloo, Ontario--- and Cassandra Adair nee McMillan b 1850, widow of John McNeil Adair, farmer, married 1887 Waterloo, Ontario ) were living not far away from JCMcM. I found the 1881 marriage details of John Goodwin and Mary A McMillan which give a clue as to the “how and why and where” of JCMcM’s decision to leave Canada for the USA in 1882. John Goodwin gave his residence as Columbus, Nevada, profession butcher. Columbus is the area where Candilaria is situated, the place where JCMcM was living in 1901 when he married Mgt Edna Chapman. Perhaps JCMcM followed John Goodwin’s example and went down to Nevada to try and make his fortune. Mary was a widow in 1891, living in Ontario with her sister and her widowed mother.

Jean C