The scan of the photo of School Section No. 9, Houghton Township, 1903, was emailed to us 25 Jan 2009 by Kate Ford of Aylmer, Elgin County, Ontario.

Houghton, Norfolk's southwestern township, borders Elgin County to the west. Houghton is the furthest township from Norfolk's County seat, Simcoe, geographically closer to Tillsonburg in Oxford County, and several communities in Elgin County. Consequently, many Houghton residents had more social interaction with residents of Elgin and even Oxford than with their fellow Norfolk residents.

Can you help us gather more information about this school? The 9th elementary school in Houghton Township, it is believed to have been located at or near the community of Fairground, where Kate Ford's ancestral family lived in 1903.  This school does not appear on a 1914 list of Norfolk elementary schools. Please email webmaster John Cardiff any bits of information about this school you may have to share. We will modify these remarks to reflect such contributions.

According to chalkboards held by two boys in the front row, the photo was taken 6 Jun 1903. Kate says there is nothing on the print to identify the photographer. A few students did not hold still and their faces are consequently blurred in both the print and our scan of it. (The photographer may have been less than "kid friendly," as we noticed a distinct shortage of smiles in this photo.)

Kate's print has faded over the century since it was taken. Several age spots are evident in the  scan of the photo. There are two red smudges on the photo, and an "x" over one little girl. 

Kate also provided scans of three related students, cropped out of the group photo, and a Smith-Davis family overview. 

Students in the photo were presumably in grades 1 to 8. The youngest is presumably five/six years old. Consequently, the bulk of the students photographed were presumably born between circa 1890 and circa 1898, and probably lived within a mile of the schoolhouse.

Allowing for the loss of few of these students to the First and Second World Wars, assuming a few more did not reproduce, if these students averaged the same number of children as the population at large, by 2009 statistically these students had 360 or more grandchildren approaching retirement age, and hundreds more great-grandchildren actively growing young careers and families. If one in 10 of us is interested in genealogy, there is probably, on average, one genealogist looking for this photo for every student in it.