Ida May Woodley & William Henry Butteris
Ida May Woodley, my great grandmother, was born on Jan. 10, 1872 in Darlington Township, Ontario, the third child of Charlotte Regina Francis and William James Woodley. In the photo above from 1881, she is standing with her parents, her older brother, Frank (Henry Francis), and a young brother, William.
The Woodley homestead lies northeast of Oshawa and is marked in red on the map. If you search for ‘Woodley Sawmill‘ in Google, you will find the area. Several properties in the vicinity were owned by Woodley family members, and the house where Ida May was born is on the property next to the sawmill.
In case you were wondering, the sawmill is still in operation today, run by one of the Woodley descendants.
William Henry Butteris
At some point, Ida May met William Henry Butteris, who had arrived in Canada in 1880. William Henry was 13 years older than Ida May, born in September 1859, in Alverstoke, a division of Gosport in the south of England. This is a photo of his family taken about 1870. William Henry is in the back row, third from the left standing beside his father. By 1881 he is working as a labourer somewhere in Darlington Township, Ontario.
The next information we have about Ida May and William Henry is a birth certificate for a daughter, Eva May Butteris, born Nov. 13, 1887, in Cartwright Township. Ida May and her family had moved to Cartwright Township around 1875, and it is likely William Henry had found work in that area as well.
This photo was probably taken on their wedding day which was sometime in 1888. Ida May was only 15 when her daughter, Eva May, was born, and she would have been too young to get married, even with her parents’ permission.
I found a marriage certificate for them, but there is no marriage date, no location for the wedding, no names of parents, and no signatures for witnesses. The register is dated Port Perry, Dec. 31, 1888 as if it was just registered by the minister at the end of the year.
Ida May said her age for the marriage record was 24, but she would have been only 16 at the time.
The date at the bottom of this photo says 1889, but Ida May was pregnant again by then; so the date is more likely 1888.
It appears that their union was not approved by the family and they had to elope to get married. This would fit with the information passed down through my family. The name William Henry Butteris always had a black cloud over it when it was mentioned. It is only through my genealogical research that I have finally discovered the many reasons why.
On May 2, 1889 a second child was born to Ida May and William Henry – Charles Franklin Butteris, my grandfather. Unfortunately, Ida May became ill and died on May 20, 1889, two and a half weeks after Charles Franklin was born. The death certificate says she died of an abscess of the liver that she had for three weeks, possibly a complication of childbirth.
This is her gravestone in Bethesda Cemetery which is not far from the original Woodley homestead. Many of the Woodley family are buried there including her parents.
On the left side of the photo, you can see part of the gravestone for her grandmother, Ann Brimacombe.
William Henry was now left to care for two young children. The comment below is from a family member who recalled what happened next.
Grandmother Charlotte Regina Woodley had taken Eva May to care for while Charles was born, and after Ida May’s death, she went to see how he was being tended. Conditions were deplorable; so Grandma Woodley scooped Charles up in her arms and announced, “I shall raise this child”. From then on, she raised both Eva May and Charles.
In 1891 we find there are 13 people living in the household of Charlotte Francis and William Woodley – their oldest son, Henry Francis with his wife and young baby, their own children James, Lottie, Edith Mabel, William and Eva Grace, as well as William Henry Butteris and his two children, Eva May and Charles.
The Butteris surname disappears
However, by the following year William Henry had disappeared and gone to Bowmanville where he married 23-year-old Dorothy Ann Westlake in Oct. 1892. It seems that he left his two children in the care of their grandparents and set out to make a new life for himself. The family didn’t know where he had gone.
Unfortunately, things didn’t go well for him. The first child of Dorothy and William Henry died when she was three and a half months old, and Dorothy died after the birth of their second child of complications from childbirth. William Henry then moved to Oshawa and married again in May 1900, this time to widow Mary Elizabeth Manes.
Apparently, William Henry at some point decided to come back to the Woodley family and reclaim his children. This is the family recollection of what occurred.
William Butteris disappeared for a number of years and after another marriage and some business success, came to claim Eva May and Charles, then 13 and 11 years of age. According to family lore, mother (Eva May) said, pointing to William and Charlotte Regina, “That’s my Pa and that’s my Ma and you are neither.” Both Eva May and Charles took the Woodley name and were raised as such.
William Henry died in Aug. 1949 and is buried in Union Cemetery in Oshawa. I have not yet discovered if there is a headstone on his grave.
