Author: DICKEY, John
Biography:
DICKEY, John (c. 1795-1851: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born in Antrim, Ireland, probably in about 1795 but no records of his birth have been located and the names of his parents are not known. The proceeds from his book of verse, of which just one copy is known to survive, were used to fund his education before he emigrated to Yonge Township in what is now Ontario, Canada, in 1820. In about 1825 he married Jane Purvis, the daughter of Peter Purvis, United Empire Loyalist, and his wife Catherine Gardiner. They had five children. Dickey was a teacher but he also studied for the Presbyterian ministry. He was ordained by the Brockville presbytery on 1 Mar. 1836 and became the pastor of a congregation in the townships of Williamsburg and Matilda (now the Township of South Dundas). Dickey contributed poems to the Brockville Recorder and Times. He died on 24 May 1851 at the age of 56. There is a monument to him in the Williamsburg Union Cemetery. His wife, Jane, died in 1886 and she is buried in the same cemetery. (ancestry.co.uk 16 July 2024; E. A. McIntosh, Two Centuries of Witness, 1784-1984 [1984]; findagrave.com 16 July 2024) SR