Historical Biographies

Thomas William Renton (1832/4 -1920): An Early Hamiltonian from Scotland

Thomas William’s Family History Thomas Renton has a story. And, like everyone else, his story has meaning. We speak today of being “upwardly mobile”, but Thomas was the personification of this concept more than a century ago. As we will read, Thomas came from very humble origins. He was

Sophia Holness: An Intrepid Woman, from a British Workhouse to Canada (1850–1922)

Born on June 2, 1850, in Blean, a village in Canterbury, Kent, England, Sophia Holness lived a long, eventful life. The civil parish of Blean was heavily wooded, filled with ancient trees. The name of the village derives from the old English word “blea”, meaning rough ground and given the