Albert Robert Eesley

Albert Robert Eesley was born 25 December 1837 — Christmas Day — in Stratford-on-Avon, the eighth of John Eesley the journeyman miller and Susannah Bubb’s eleven children. He went to Canada, not Scotland, to work in the milling operation of the Scottish-Canadian Goldie family. The older brief framing — “Albert came to Scotland to work in the Goldie flour mill” — was wrong on the geography; the Goldies had themselves emigrated from Ayrshire to Ontario in 1841, sixteen years before he reached them.

The Shakespeare’s-birthplace teaching years

The most striking detail in his biography surfaces in the 1910s obituary of his son William Eesley, a miller at College Corner, Ohio. Of his father, the obituary records:

A. R. Eesley came of a long line of millers, but in young manhood adopted the vocation of school teaching which he followed for several years in his native place and for a time taught school in the house in which the famous Bard of Avon, William Shakespeare, was born.

The house is Shakespeare’s Birthplace on Henley Street, Stratford-upon-Avon — today the most visited literary shrine in England, opened to the public as a museum from the mid-19th century. In the years before its full institutional museum status, parts of the building were leased and used for varied purposes, including, evidently, as the school where young Albert Robert taught. He stood at a teacher’s desk inside the birthplace of William Shakespeare. “School teaching, however, was not to his liking,” the obituary adds. “He had the family predilection for milling, and, finding that circumstances were not such as to encourage him in his inclinations in his native land, he emigrated to the United States.”

The route — Newark, Ayr, Detroit, Toronto

The same obituary lays out the path:

• First to Newark, New Jersey, briefly.
• Then on to Ayr, Canada (Ontario), where he found work as a miller and met Jennie Goldie, whose family owned the Ayr mill.
• They married in Ayr in 1861. Their first two children — John R. (J. R.) and Anna (later Mrs. J. B. Scoon of Toronto) — were born in Canada.
• After those children’s birth, Albert started traveling place to place building mills in various parts of Michigan and operating them, including a period at Detroit.
• He finally settled permanently at Toronto, Canada, where he operated a mill until his death; Jennie also passed away there.

The ten children — six millers, one doctor, three married daughters in Toronto

From the William Eesley obituary, expanded with what the GEDCOM and other sources record:

The millers:

• John R. Eesley — miller; born in Ayr / Hamilton, Ontario.
• William Eesley (the obituary’s subject) — miller at College Corner, Ohio (Ohio-Indiana border); part owner of the Oxford mills; born Detroit, MI.
• Robert Eesley — miller.
• A. R. Eesley Jr. (Albert Robert II) — miller.
• Charles Leonard Eesley (1879–1972) — the one whose line reaches Chuck through Will and Charlie.
• Garfield Eesley — miller. (Likely named for President Garfield, b. after 1881.)

The doctor:

• Dr. George Eesley — physician of Toronto.

The daughters in Toronto:

• Anna Eesley — m. J. B. Scoon of Toronto.
• Mrs. Jennie Baxter — of Toronto.
• Mrs. George Sinclair — of Toronto.

That six of ten Eesley brothers became millers in their generation, on the strength of their father’s “family predilection for milling,” gives the Eesley line of this archive its single strongest occupational identity in the 19th-century American/Canadian generation: this was a milling family across an Atlantic move and a half-continent migration. John Franklin Eesley (b. 11 Dec 1859 Hamilton, Ontario; d. 1929 Plainwell, MI), the founder of the Sunshine Flour Mill in Plainwell, Michigan that is on the National Register of Historic Places, is the most-documented of those millers; William at College Corner is the second.

The cover of Bean’s 1985 family history, drawn by Will Eesley, shows the Goldie mill — the architectural witness of where Albert’s working life was made, on the Canadian rather than the Scottish side of the Atlantic.

He died 5 April 1902, age sixty-four.

See also — family threads

Albert Robert is an anchor for Thread #9 (Crossing for what’s next) and Thread #10 (Building things — entrepreneurship) in the Family threads synthesis essay — the England → Canada crossing into the Scottish-Canadian Goldie milling family’s operation in Ontario, the parallel-and-different crossing from his brother John F. Eesley’s England → America crossing into the Plainwell flour mill. Two brothers, two North American crossings, both centered on milling work.

Sources: William Eesley obituary, c. 1916 (College Corner, Ohio) — the most detailed surviving biographical sketch of A. R., contributed to RootsWeb by Dale Eesley. Structured record: Dale Eesley / FamilySearch — Albert Robert Eesley (L2J9-LB9).