HEATH/MORRISON/FORD:  In 1927, the Ford family of Aldborough Township, Elgin County, held a family reunion on the original homestead.  Among the many attendees was Norman W. Ford, the old gentleman pictured above, who had his photograph taken while holding a baby cousin who grew up to be Dr. James Archibald MacPherson of Highgate, Ontario.  Dr. MacPherson died in 1990.  Norman W. Ford was a former teacher, insurance broker, and newspaper editor who died in 1933.  A few months before his death, he sent a long letter to the editor of the Toronto Globe in which he presented some interesting stories about the Ford family.  Below is what he wrote about his grandfather, Thomas Ford (1774-1844).

“My grandfather went back to Little Falls, N.Y., the next spring, 1816, and brought his wife and children to York (now Toronto) and lived [there] till the spring of 1818, when he and [his friend Gregor] MacGregor decided to accept Canada’s offer of a free grant of 200 acres of land.  Talbot Street had been chopped through, so they went to the most westerly part of Elgin County and selected their land, MacGregor taking Lot A on the north side of Talbot Street and about one mile from the shore of Lake Erie, and my grandfather selected Lot B alongside.  They built a little shack on each farm and returned to Toronto to get their families and [take] them back and started clearing, as not a stick of timber had been cut on either farm.  My grandmother [Altha Sheppard Ford’s] people kept writing her pleading with her to do her best to persuade grandfather to forgive the Americans [for his treatment as an enemy alien during the War of 1812] and return from the life in the woods she was enduring.  Grandfather did his best to clear his land from 1818 to 1822, and began to tire of it, [and] in 1823 they received a very urgent request to come back with the offer of a good farm near them [Altha’s family].  Grandfather said:  ‘Altha, for your sake I will go.”  He said:  “We will clean up our crop this summer and go.’ But that was not to be, as their little girl 13 years old died and was buried on the farm – the first burial in the now large, well-known Ford Cemetery – and that finally made them all Canadians, as grandmother would not leave her dead one in Canada.”  Globe, 13 Feb. 1933, p. 4, c. 5.