Plummer Dewar was my maternal great-great grandfather. He was born on Montego Bay, Jamaica in 1815. His father Robert Dewar had come to Jamaica from Scotland around the turn of the 18th-19th century. His mother Elizabeth Barrett’s family had been in Jamaica since the 1660s. They returned to Scotland when Plummer was still a child.
After Robert died in 1829, Plummer went back to Jamaica. There he married Elizabeth Kemp Pew from a family that had also come to Jamaica from Scotland in the late 1700s.
Plummer and Elizabeth together had thirteen children in Jamaica. They lived in a large house called Richmond Hill overlooking Montego Bay. Plummer ran a trading company which he had taken over from his father.
Elizabeth died in 1862, when my great grandfather Hamilton Dewar was five years old. Plummer remarried Emily Scoble and they had seven more children after moving to Hamilton, Ontario in Canada.
In Hamilton, Plummer built a grand home which still stands today. During the Canadian summers the Dewar family spent time at a home on Georgian Bay on Lake Huron
Georgian Bay is where Hamilton Dewar met my great grandmother Mary Kinney, who also travelled all the way to Georgian Bay in the summers with her father Henry Kinney of Austin, Texas.
