Every family tree has a keeper. Ours was Carl Reginald Mason — grandfather, Knight of the Order of St. John, and for decades the family's patient historian. Working through Ancestry.ca, parish records, and the memories of relatives, he assembled the record this site is built on: 679 people, 232 families, and 175 surnames, reaching back to William Fead, born about 1690.
The Mason line itself begins with John Mason, born in England about 1828. A skilled brick maker, he came to Canada in the 1850s to seek work in the new world, leaving a wife and three children in England whom he intended to send for when he became established. He found work at a brickyard in the Keele–Eglinton area of Toronto — owned, as it happened, by another Mason, a Charles Mason of Lincolnshire, no proven relation. Before John could send for his family, word came that his wife had died.
John married twice more in Canada. His third wife, Susan Tribble of Oakwell Farm, Umberleigh, Devon, outlived him and raised their six children. Their son Richard Tribble Mason (1868–1947) was a farmer, mail carrier, and storekeeper — and superintendent of the Sunday school at Honeywood for twenty-five years.
"On guard of honour for the occasion of King Albert's visit to Mons, November 27, 1918."— from Carl Mason's research notes on his father's war service
Richard's son William Wilfred Mason (1897–1991) was inducted into the army in May 1918 at age twenty, crossed to England in a cattle boat in convoy, and served in France as a private on a machine-gun crew with the 2nd Canadian Mounted Rifles — reaching the front lines in the final weeks of the war and standing guard of honour at Mons when King Albert of Belgium entered the liberated city. Home by March 1919, he bought his father's farm on the second concession of Mulmur Township in 1930, sold it in 1946, and moved the family to Codrington Street in Barrie.
William's son Carl was born in Honeywood in 1934. In 1959 he married Grace Margaret Lowry, whose own family line runs back through Iroquois Falls and the farms of Inverness, Megantic County, Quebec, to a Thomas Lowry who left Ireland for Canada in 1830. Grace set her father's remarkable life — homesteading in the north, prospecting beside the men who struck the McIntyre and Wright–Hargreaves mines, and surviving the great fire of 1916 — down on paper in The Samuel John Lowry Story. Carl and Grace were married fifty-eight years; their story — bank teller, Ontario Hydro, and half a century of St. John Ambulance service that ended in a knighthood and a grant of arms — has a page of its own.
The generations since are here too — children, grandchildren, cousins across 175 surnames — though for the living, this site records names only. The rest of their stories are still being written.