One of the fun things about being able to study a fairly decent run of family history, in comparison to most middle-class families, is being able to pick out patterns.  One of the odder ones is where else in the country (and world) family members have lived.  While there are significant outliers: Vermont, New Mexico, the UK, Washington DC, Minnesota;* four places have been consistent either as places family members live or routinely visit in multiple generations: Montreal, New York City, Florida, and California.  While NYC, Florida, and California were all well known connections, Montreal was a bit of a surprise.  Today, three family members are based out of there, and I had assumed that it was only a single generation** connection.  However, on doing more research into the travels of the early nineteenth century, I found that the family had friends there and visited multiple times, furthermore that this activity predated Elizabeth Creevey’s marriage to Frederick Goucher, a Canadian.  One particularly interesting strand was the family’s relationship with Malcolm Fraser, a Canadian artist of some note.  Several portraits were done by him and there are two landscape oils done by him which appear to have been of Esperanza.  This raises a raft of questions, not the least being that Malcolm Fraser is not well known in the US, so why….?

*and elsewhere, there are relatives all over the country.  I was also not counting places where people who married into the family grew up, unless they became places people lived/visited after marriage into the family.

**technically two now!