From Ireland to Newfoundland

Working on both my husband's family tree as well as my own has reminded me that some people make a bigger historic imprint than others. My family for instance were primarily farmers who lived in rural communities. As a result, my information on them has come mainly from census records, local information and family connections. On the other hand, many of my husband's ancestors became business owners and politicians. Because of their higher status, they have tended to turn up in other sources such as newspapers, books, etc.


My husband is descended from Andrew McCoubrey and Elizabeth Rixon who emigrated to St. John's Newfoundland from Ireland in 1819. His line is from their daughter Phoebe who married George Allen Corbin. As the McCoubrey family prospered, their descendants became well known in St. John's society.


Thanks to the work of Amanda MacCoubrey, a portion of the McCoubrey/Rixon family tree can be found at http://www.islandregister.com/maccoubrey1.html.  Andrew and Elizabeth's son, John Williams McCoubrey, is noted in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online as follows:

McCOUBREY, JOHN WILLIAMS, newspaper proprietor; b. of middle-class Protestant parents in Waterford, Ireland, in 1806; d. at St John’s, Nfld., on 10 Oct. 1879.

      In 1819 John Williams McCoubrey’s family emigrated to St John’s, Newfoundland, where he was apprenticed to a well-known printer, Robert Lee Jr. After his seven years as an apprentice he went to work for John Shea’s newspaper, the Newfoundlander, apparently both as printer and as journalist, until 1832, when he founded his own newspaper, the Times and General Commercial Gazette.

      McCoubrey had no trouble with the colonial authorities, despite the tight control of the Newfoundland press at the time. Throughout his career he avoided the political and sectarian controversies usual in the journalism of St John’s, and achieved a reputation for impartiality and personal integrity. A rival newspaper, the Public Ledger, records his support for Conservative candidates in the 1842 election. The incident in his life most celebrated by the obituarist in his own newspaper was his refusal to compound with his creditors, at great personal expense, after the fire of 1846, when his business was almost wiped out. Perhaps the most fitting last words on his career come from an anonymous correspondent to the Times, who wrote on 17 Oct. 1879 that he had never known McCoubrey “either through the press or otherwise utter one word to wound the feelings of any man, no matter to what creed or party he belonged.”

E. J. Devereux

Public Ledger (St John’s), 4 Oct. 1842. Times and General Commercial Gazette (St John’s), 1832–94. “Chronological list of Newfoundland newspapers in the public collections at the Gosling Memorial Library and Provincial Archives,” 18-page typescript compiled by Ian McDonald (copy at the Reference Library, Arts and Culture Centre, St John’s). E. J. Devereux, “Early printing in Newfoundland,” Dal. Rev., XLIII (1963), 57–66.

More on this family in another post.