Identity area
Type of entity
Person
Authorized form of name
Coulter, Robert
Parallel form(s) of name
Standardized form(s) of name according to other rules
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Description area
Dates of existence
unknown
History
The records in the Davis, Hodgson and Coulter fonds were found together in the mid 1960s, in an abandoned log house which had once belonged to Robert and Ruby Coulter.
Research revealed that the documents and photographs were from the descendants of three English men who had arrived in what was then Rupert’s land to work for the Hudson’s Bay Company around the turn of the nineteenth century. All three of these men took “country wives” (i.e. first nations women) as partners. This was a common practice in the fur trade because it gave the trader negotiating power and protection as well as a partner who was skilled in surviving the wilds of Canada. In the next two generations, the three families became strongly inter-related.
Robert Coulter arrived in the Peace Country with his wife, Ruby Hamilton Coulter, four children, and the rest of the Hamilton family in 1927. In 1929 he took a homestead in the Bridgeview area and four more children were born between 1929 and 1938. The Great Depression was difficult for someone just starting to farm, as is evident from the documents showing Robert had to mortgage two horses and two cows in 1930. It is not clear how the documents came to be in the Coulter home. There is some evidence that Ruby Hamilton was a descendent of Robert Goodwin, another HBC employee, but the direct relationship to the Davis and Hodgson families is not known.
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South Peace Regional Archives