Digging Up the Other Stories… the Rest of the Story

Today I was looking for information on a Pakenham family on ancestry.ca, and somehow this top story was there in the collections. The whole article about having the largest family in Ottawa intrigued me and I decided to take it one step further and get some other interesting tidbits about the family. You know me, I was not looking for common information. I was looking for the ‘interesting things’ that someone might not know.

Clipped from

The Ottawa Citizen,
31 May 1919, Sat,
Page 3

Clipped from

The Ottawa Citizen,
13 Aug 1919, Wed,
Page 9

The biggest family in Canada is Hey Duggars, Meet The Lonces in 2015 with 18 biological children and the Potters who had 17.

The news article said most of the Schingh Children Dying from Unpasteurized Milk

The War of 1812 with England resulted in the permanent cutting off of the whiskey supply America procured from the British West Indies. As a result, the domestic liquor industry was born, and by 1814, grain distilleries began to spring up in the cities as well as the country. Distillery owners then began housing cows next to the distilleries and feeding hot slop, the waste product of whiskey making, directly to the animals as it poured off the stills. Thus was born the slop or swill milk system.

Slop is of little value in fattening cattle; it is unnatural food for them, and makes them diseased and emaciated. But when slop was plentifully supplied, cows yielded an abundance of milk. Diseased cows were milked in an unsanitary manner. The individuals doing the milking were often dirty, sick or both. Milk pails and other equipment were usually dirty. Such milk sometimes led to disease. By the last decade of the nineteenth century, a growing number of influential people throughout the country believed that American cities had a milk problem.

Pasteurization, begun around 1900, was a solution of sorts. The other was the certified raw milk movement, which insisted on clean, fresh milk from healthy, grassfed animals. Henry Coit, a medical doctor, was the founder of the first Medical Milk Commission and the certified milk movement. Physicians in cities throughout the country considered raw milk essential in the treatment of their patients; they worked together to certify dairies for the production of clean raw milk. This resulted in the availability of safe raw milk from regulated dairies. Initially, from around 1890 to 1910, the movements for certified raw milk and pasteurization coexisted and in many ways even complemented one another. From about 1910 until the 1940s, an uneasy truce existed. Certified raw milk was available for those who wanted it, while the influence of the pasteurization lobby saw to it that most states and municipalities adopted regulations that required all milk other than certified milk be pasteurized. The end of this truce (detailed below)has led to the subsequent outlawing of all retail sales of raw milk in most states and even of on-farm sales in many.

Clipped from

Edmonton Journal,
21 Nov 1913, Fri,
Page 21

Then in August of 1911 a fierce storm of wind and rain blew across the Ottawa region and killed some of the family vacationing in a tent near Templeton, Quebec

Youn Rene Schingh shot himself on Church Street in Ottawa and reports said he had not been drinking and no one knew why he would do it. I dug a little deeper and found out he had been in love with a Lowertown gal and her mother had shunned him. Out of grief he had shot himself and finally he died of his injuries.