Grandma Minnie

"Minnie" Marion (Sergeant) Kennedy, 1877-1970

This seems premature as I am currently desperate to get all of my research up onto the site for other family lines (currently I’ve been working on the Donahue and Boomer lines), but an email that I opened up this morning has inspired me. Jim, a distant relation from the Harrower family in the Leavoy-Kennedy-McDonnell strain of my family has contacted me with first hand knowledge of an interesting character.

My great-great grandfather, Robert Kennedy, had a second marriage long after his children were born.  His first wife and the mother of my great-grandmother, Bea, was a woman called Sophia McDonnell. She died of cancer at age 62, and part of me wonders how much of this illness had to do with her life growing up in the mining communities up in Northern Ontario.

Robert, Sophia and family

Robert must have married Minnie Sergeant after Sophia’s death and before 1930. I haven’t found any marriage certificate for the two as of yet. They likely knew one another early on, as Minnie and Sophia were cousins, and their families lived in the same region.

I have a postcard from 1934 (see below) that I’d found in my grandmother’s possessions. It gives a record of Robert and Minnie living together, and this is what the aforementioned email was about. There are many photographs in my collection of my grandmother Helen and siblings at the Kennedy cottage and farm in Elphin, but I wanted to know the exact location. Jim, my distant relative and fellow family researcher actually knew Minnie and was able to give some insight into the postcard.

The postcard is written by 19 year old Cynthia Bea Leavoy to her younger sister Helen (age 13 at the time). Robert Kennedy and Minnie (his second wife) would have owned the farm. They were the grandparents of Cynthia Bea and Helen.

Photograph of a cottage on Lake Dalhousie near Elphin, Ontario.

Jim gave me a link to where the cottage pictured on the postcard was located.The cottage may be the exact one which Robert and Minnie occupied when the Leavoy girls visited, but could also just be representative of the area.

He said that he remembered Minnie running her own shop in Balderson, Ontario, before retiring back to her house in Elphin. This must have been after Robert had passed away. Robert died not long after he began living with Minnie, in 1939.  Jim sent me a link to Minnie’s house in Google street view which has just come to Elphin. He says that she was living there in 1941.

Minnie Sergant's house in Elphin

He says: “The closed in part on the front was an addition after Mike & Mary Kirkham bought the house about 35 years ago.When I was growing up in Elphin, the house had a veranda with a railing on the front where the additions is now.“

My mother and I took a drive out to Elphin a few years ago. At the time we had no knowledge of this information, and now I am itching to get back out that way the next time I am in Ontario. when we were in Elphin, my mother and I made a trip to Crawford cemetery and we found the site where our Kennedy-Sergeant-McDonnell family was buried. Robert and Minnie are buried beside one another in the Crawford cemetery outside of Elphin, Ontario. They are buried next to Robert’s original in-laws, John McDonnel and Alice Sergeant. Their gravestone inscription reads:

“K/FLT/ Robert Kennedy/ 1863-1939/ His wife/ Minnie J. Sargeant/ 1877-1970/ Kennedy”