I have found no records of George Later’s travels in the far west, but there is a gap in his timeline between his last residence in Broughton at age 17 in 1871 and his first residence in Chicago at 29 in 1883, so that would seem to be consistent with the newspaper account.

From his later census records, we see that her husband Hollis Thompson’s occupation is given as “engineer,” by which I first took to mean mechanical or civil. But then I saw that Rochester was a railroad town on a branch line of the Boston and Maine Railroad. Portland, Me. was also the U.S. terminus of the Grand Trunk Railway, precursor of the Canadian National Railway.

Now I was on the right track. It turns out that East Broughton, where the Later family lived, was also a railroad stop, but not on the Grand Trunk.

My understanding of the Later family’s movements between Quebec and the United States began with an odd newspaper clipping about George King Later and his sister Agnes Thompson reuniting in Rochester, N.H., in 1927 after 50 years of separation. I had already seen some anomalies in the records of family members, including two other brothers as well as Agnes, regarding their Canadian births and parents’ nationality. I think this was done to cover their undocumented status as U.S. immigrants, which I will discuss further below.

Most of what we know about the Later family in Quebec comes from church records of the Anglican parish in St. Gilles, Quebec, where their children’s births were recorded. Nathaniel married Elizabeth Armstrong, the daughter of Scottish immigrants who had arrived in Canada a generation earlier.

According to a note from a family record book kept by her daughter Ann Later Cameron, which was posted to Ancestry by Darcy Later Brieck in 2022, Elizabeth’s parents had eloped to Canada in 1819 because “their love was frowned upon” for class differences by her maternal grandparents.

The Later brothers arrived in the British colony of Lower Canada at a time of great political unrest. In 1837-38, French Canadian militants joined with political reformers in a rebellion against British rule. The rebellion, and a similar revolt the next year in Upper Canada (Ontario), were put down by authorities, but they led to the unification of the two Canadas in 1840 and eventually to the creation of the modern Canadian federation in 1867.

Almost 450,000 Irish migrated to the British North American colonies in the decades prior to the Famine of 1847-52. Both Catholic and Protestant and from every county of Ireland, they made the voyage via Liverpool, landing in the port of Quebec on Grosse Isle, sometimes called the Canadian Ellis Island, in the river near Quebec City.

The three Rehm children were born while the family lived on Harrison Ave in Hasbrouck Heights. The first born in 1909 was Edna L. Rehm, given her mother’s first name but with a different middle name. Edward Lawrence Rehm Jr., his father’s namesake, was born May 20, 1914. Then a second daughter, Ruth Marion Rehm, was born in 1916.