Deaths Reported to the Grand Orange Lodge of Ontario West, 1911

The Grand Orange Lodge of Ontario West required each of its primary lodges to return its deaths, and the returns were printed in the annual Report of Proceedings. The 1911 report therefore carries a roll of members who died during 1910, arranged by county, giving for each man his lodge number and the month of his death. That combination of name, number and county is exactly what an Orange genealogy search needs and almost never gets. This page reproduces the 1911 roll in full: 264 men across 36 county and district headings, recovered from the Internet Archive on 2 August 2026 after the original page went offline with the rest of the old site.

What this record is, and what it is not

Ontario West was one of the provincial jurisdictions created in 1859 and renamed at Confederation. It covered everything in Ontario west of the western boundary of Victoria County, which is to say Toronto, Peel, York, Halton, Wentworth, Simcoe, Wellington, Waterloo, Grey, Bruce, Huron, Perth, Middlesex, Oxford, Brant, Elgin, Norfolk, Lambton, Kent and Essex, along with the northern districts. Lodges east of that line reported to Ontario East and do not appear here. The 1871 directory of Ontario West lodges explains the boundary and the reporting structure in more detail.

The roll is a return, not a register. It records the deaths a lodge chose to report in a given year, which means a man who died in 1910 but whose lodge made no return is simply absent. Several entries carry no date at all, recorded here as the original recorded them. The dates that are given are months rather than days in almost every case, because that is the granularity the lodge secretary supplied.

The text reproduced below is a transcription made by the original site from the printed volume. It is not a scan. Where a reading looks doubtful, the Report of Proceedings itself remains the authority, and the surviving sets are held in institutional collections rather than online.

Reading a lodge number from this roll

A number here is a strong lead and a weak identifier on its own. Numbers were reused: when a lodge closed its number fell vacant and another lodge could take it, so the same number can attach to unrelated bodies in different places at different dates. Always carry the county heading along with the number. Lodge 22 under Dufferin County and lodge 22 in the 1871 directory are not automatically the same body, and the county is what tells them apart.

Note also that the same lodge number appears repeatedly within a county in this roll, which is a sign of a large urban lodge rather than an error. Toronto lodge 404 returned six deaths in the year and lodge 275 returned six, while most rural lodges returned one.

The roll

Counties appear in the order the original printed them, which is broadly alphabetical but places Norfolk before Nipissing and groups the Simcoe and York divisions separately. Names and spellings are reproduced as printed.

Where the transcription is doubtful

Five points in the roll should be treated with care, and they are left as printed above rather than silently corrected.

The East York entry for George Armstrong of lodge 215 reads “December, 2010” in the archived transcription. A death reported to a 1911 Grand Lodge session cannot have occurred in 2010, so this is a typing slip for 1910, but the correction is an inference and the table records what the page actually says.

Charles Pierce of Essex lodge 1106 and Samuel Batton of Toronto lodge 342 have a dash or nothing at all where a date should be, distinct from the many entries that say “No date given” explicitly. The distinction may or may not exist in the printed volume.

William Sewell of Perth lodge 370 is separated from his lodge number by a stray backtick rather than the dash used everywhere else, and Jer. Rowe of Wentworth is printed under “L.O.L 779” without the final period. Both are typing artefacts of the transcription rather than anything in the record.

Several surnames are unusual enough to be worth a second look against a census: Robert While of Grey 176, Jno. McClitock of Oxford 648, Philip Kizoshk of Kent 1077, William Maclinger of Grey 1745, and A. De La Rocheaguelin of Toronto 875. Each is reproduced above exactly as the transcription gives it, because a corrected spelling that turned out to be wrong would be worse than an odd one that is faithful.

What to do with a name from this roll

A hit here gives a lodge number, a county and a year, which is enough to go looking for the lodge’s own minute book and membership register. Those records survive unevenly and are held mainly in provincial and university archives rather than centrally.

If the name also appears in a newspaper notice, the two records together usually give a birthplace, a family and an exact date, none of which this roll carries. The recovered index of Orange newspaper obituaries is the companion record for that, and several men appear in both. Biographical compilations covering lodge officers and public men are recovered at Canadian Orange biographies.

For the shape of the organisation these returns fed into, see the Orange Order in Canada.