Series 6 - Wilson Benson memoir

215pp

Citation for a published source: Houston, C.J. and W.J. Smyth (2015). From Ulster to Canada: The Life and Times of Wilson Benson 1821-1911. Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation.

Materials pertaining to the memoir of Wilson Benson. Benson was born in 1821 in Belfast, although his Protestant family was from north Armagh. Benson emigrated to Upper Canada, later Ontario, in 1841 and wrote his memoir in the mid-1870s, publishing it in 1876. Per Kerby A. Miller: '[Benson's] father was a solid linen manufacturer but remarried a widow with a farm, lost the lease, and became too poor to help his children [...] I suspect that Benson was quite representative of Protestants who emigrated from Ulster to British North America before the Famine. Like so many of our memoirists, Benson and his family moved back and forth between working- and middle-class occupations, between skilled and unskilled labor, and between urban and rural settings and occupations. That fluid "proto-capitalist" situation was especially prevalent in Ulster, particularly for Protestants, because the linen industry-in which they were so deeply and broadly involved-both transcended rural-urban societies and was in the process of rapid transformation.' Benson died in 1911 and his memoir was re-discovered by Canadian historians in the 1970s, ultimately becoming, according to Kerby A. Miller, 'a "classic" of Canadian (Ontario) social history.' The series contains: a copy of Benson's published memoir, From Ulster to Canada: The Life and Times of Wilson Benson 1821-1911.; Miller's typed transcriptions of the original 1876 memoir with his notes and annotations; and Miller's research notes.