The Missing Grassie Twin: A 19th-Century Photo Mystery
- 15 hours ago
- 3 min read
Some stories begin with a single photograph.
I first opened the album on an ordinary afternoon. It came in a box of family mementoes loaned by my cousin Sonya. The book is heavy—brown leather, its spine now gone, embossed with pink and red ribboned roses. The top metal clasp is missing.[1] Even so, it has weight beyond its size. It feels like something meant to be kept close.
Inside the front cover is a merchant’s stamp giving a clue to its origins:
Frank E. Walker, Dealer in ALBUMS, BIBLES, PICTURES, etc.180 King Street, East Hamilton, Ont. (Copp’s Block).
The pages are thick and browned, freckled with foxing. Tintypes and sepia photographs - cabinet cards and cartes de visite—rest in slotted sleeves. Only a couple are labeled. Family faces peer out from the nineteenth century, clear and unspeaking.
For a family historian, it is both treasure and torment.
Most of these faces must be relations, though a few are likely friends or neighbours. All of them, at one time, mattered enough to be placed here. I suspect I may even have a photograph of the album itself, resting in pride of place in the Grassie home of my great-great grandparents more than a century ago. Even then, some of its contents would already have been forty years old—a portable archive of a life left behind in Ontario after the family’s move west from Wentworth County, Ontario to Vancouver Island.
It was likely Robert and Margaret Grassie who first turned these pages. Robert was born in Milltown of Kildrummy, in Aberdeenshire, not far from Balmoral Castle. Margaret Simpson came from the Old Town of Edinburgh, where her father worked as a coach driver. Both crossed the Atlantic as children, their families settling near Hamilton along the shores of Lake Ontario. They were lifelong Presbyterians. He apprenticed as a blacksmith under his older brother - steady and quiet, a good man in an emergency. She, by all accounts, was a wonderful cook, quick to laugh.
They lived long lives. But long lives do not mean untroubled ones.
The photograph that stopped me shows two babies seated on a fur rug.
The boy sits on the left. His hair is fair and sparse, his cheeks full, his lips bow-shaped. He wears a small Highland outfit—a kilt, a white blouse tied with wide ribbons, and over it a velvet cape trimmed in pale piping and fastened at the neck with a bow. On his feet are tiny, buttoned boots. A little Scotsman.
Beside him sits a girl of the same age. Her fair hair is parted and drawn back into a soft ridge from forehead to crown. She is looking slightly off-camera, as though someone—perhaps her mother—has just called her name. Her dress mirrors his formality: long sleeves, ribbon bands circling the hem and cuffs. Around her neck is a wide white collar, lace or finely pieced cotton, framing her small, steady face.
Two children. The same size. The same apparent age. The same distinctive ears, marked by a large whorl - his slightly more prominent.
Twins?
I returned to the family tree. Census records. Birth registrations. Church entries. Who had twins?
It is a strange thing, to search for children who have already lived and died, knowing you are looking for evidence of something that did not last.
Finally, a breakthrough.
Robert and Margaret registered the birth of a son, Robert, on March 20, 1877.[2] Their daughter, Alice, has no surviving Ontario birth registration, but census records and her British Columbia death certificate give her date of birth as March 20, 1877.[3]
Twins.
But Robbie does not appear on the 1881 census. He didn’t come west with the family. Somewhere between his birth and that federal census, he disappears.
I searched page after page of Wentworth County death registrations: measles, mumps, scarlet fever. One family lost five children to that disease alone. But I can’t find his name among them.
Is this little Robbie staring back at me?
Some stories begin with a single photograph. Some stories end with one.
Sources:
[1] Robert Grassie Family Album in possession of Karen Inkster Vance, February 2026.
[2] Canada, Ontario, Births and Baptisms, 1779-1899, database, Family Search, (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:F2JW-V2N : 13 January 2024), Robert Grassie, 1877.
[3] Canada, British Columbia, Death Registrations, 1872-1986; 1992-1993, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:FLRH-DY2 : Wed Jan 22 04:51:33 UTC 2025), Entry for Alice Pitt, 15 Apr 1952.
WOW, if remember correctly, our 2nd great grand dad Robert Grassich, was the youngest of 10 children.