Book Review: Influence & Ambition: first persons of Perth

Did you ever think when you were in a place where disparate people were brought together by circumstance, perhaps in a plane, never together before, never will be in the future, how our life paths intersect with so many people in such a variety of ways. If you do happen to strike up a conversation you can yourself in most unexpected company.
That's rather like the way I felt reading Ron W. Shaw's latest book on the history of the Perth Military Settlement. For each of these early settler first persons, clergyman, innkeeper, murderer, he spins the tale of their lives, sometimes their parent's lives and often their children's. There can hardly be a significant event in contemporary adjacent Eastern Ontario that somehow doesn't get mentioned, and further afield too as many of these men (almost all men) had seem military service with the British Army in places like India, Iberia and the Caribbean.
As with Shaw's previous two books reviewed on the blog this lacks a name index, not a good marketing move. Some might criticize the layout with postage stamp size images and some awkward hyphenation. They can't take away from the scope of the research and knowledge of the local history evident throughout the book.

Influence and Ambition: First Persons of Perth   (Lanark County, Ontario), By Ron W. Shaw
is a 2016 publication by Global Heritage Press.

Contents include:

Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1 First Persons
Chapter 2 William Bell
Chapter 3 William Holderness
Chapter 4 William Morris
Chapter 5 Abbé Pierre-Jacques de La Mothe
Chapter 6 John Stewart
Chapter 7 John Adamson
Chapter 8 Joseph Légaré
Chapter 9 Josias William Tayler
Chapter 10 Michael O’Connor
Chapter 11 George Hume Reade
Chapter 12 William Matheson
Chapter 13 James Hamilton Powell
Chapter 14 James Boulton
Chapter 15 Henry Graham
Chapter 16 William Richards
Chapter 17 John Holliday
Chapter 18 Roderick Matheson
Chapter 19 Alexander Thom
Selected sources
Illustration credits

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