Here is our link to British Columbia via England. His earliest ancestor is John J.
Collison -- as you will see in his email
William Henry Collison who came to Canada as an Anglican (Episcopalian) missionary in
1873. My grandfather, Max always said that our Collisons had come from co. Armagh, but a
correspondent once told me that he had found a birth record for a male of the same name
(William Henry C.) having the same birth date, and being born in Dublin. Other records,
which I found in the Society of Genealogists in London in 1971, contained entries for the
burials of two Collison brothers: James Maxwell Collison, d. 7 Jan 1870 aged 24, and John
Wesley Collison, d. 27 July 1880, aged 27. One of WHCollison's letters to his
sponsoring missionary society Church Missionary Society (CMS) of London, told of the death
of his brother JWCollison, asking for a small payment be sent to his widow. Then when I
was in Dublin in 2009 I went looking for any memorial to these two brother's, and in
Clontarf, a suburb of Dublin, found, in the churchyard of a deserted hulk (no roof) of a
church, a stone inscribed with the information given above, together with inscriptions for
their parents: John Collison, d. 28 Feb 1885, age 76, and Mary Collison, d. 9 Dec 1881,
age 68. I assume that WHC was born and lived in the Dublin area. That his birth year,
1847, coincided with the period of the Great Famine, may be relevant, or it may be just
coincidental. I know that on his marriage record, his father was shown as John J
Collison, occupation a farmer. But it doesn't seem that he would have been doing much
farming in Clontarf!