McCoy family

Joshua McCoy and his wife, Mary Elizabeth McCoy, are both listed in the 1881 census in Wollaston Township in Hastings County. The Hastings County assessment roll for 1881 shows that the couple owned lots 39, 40 and 41 on the west side of the Hastings Road, just south of Ormsby. By 1881, 20 of the 100 acres had been cleared.

From the abstracts of title for the property, we can see that these lots were originally awarded to Anthony McCoy as a free grant in 1864. The code associated with the grant was A.A., which meant that the settler had either been judged destitute by a Government Board and/or had their administrative fees waived.

The image below is a satellite view of the area of the McCoy property on the Hastings Road as it appears today, taken from Bing Maps.

Joshua and Mary were married in Toronto on 8 January 1874. The registration of their marriage tells us that Anthony McCoy was Joshua's father and that Mary was a widow. Her parents' names were William and Delia Anderson and, like Mary, they were born in the United States. Mary had married her first husband, James Baker, on 25 December 1867. The Brown's Toronto General Directory of 1861 lists both William Anderson and James Baker as whitewashers by trade on page 343.

James Baker died in 1869 and Mary was back living with her parents in East York at the time of the 1871 census.

Three years later, Mary married Joshua McCoy and the couple had moved to her father-in-law's lands in Wollaston by 1881.

The couple did return to Toronto on occasion: in September 1911, the North Hastings Review reported that Joshua had "returned home after spending a few days at Toronto Exhibition."

Joshua registered the death of Mary's widowed 92-year-old mother, Delia Anderson, in Wollaston on 14 April 1914. She was listed as living with the couple at the time of the 1911 census. Joshua himself died in Wollaston on 13 May 1918 at the age of 76. We have not been able to find a date of death for Mary.