Toronto On, The Ben Wicks 424 Parliament Street (just south of Carlton Street)

December 5, 2009

3pm - 6pm

Polly Noble Fleming Verner was born in 1837 on a farm near the old coach road from Dromore to Enniskillen. Dromore was then a tiny village of two streets nestled among the ancient drumlin hills of County Tyrone in Ulster, Northern Ireland. At age ten, Polly and her family left their homeland in the midst of the Great Famine to cross the Atlantic Ocean to Canada. In 1850, the surviving members of the family settled in Toronto. At seventeen, Polly married a young tailor, John Verner. Soon they opened a small grocery store in Cabbagetown at 283 Parliament Street. One after another a dozen children who had lost their mothers landed on their doorstep. This is the unknown Irish part of her story that none of those children knew. About the Author In 2002, Catharine Fleming McKenty set out from Canada to find the Fleming family farm in Northern Ireland, where the Corey family welcomed her and shared their knowledge of the old Irish ways. Catharine did much of her research in the Omagh Public Library (Tyrone Constitution 1844-47, and 100th and 150th anniversary editions); The Ulster American Folk Park; the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum; and Linen Hall Library, Belfast. Catharine McKenty grew up on her grandparents farm, Donlands, just outside the Toronto city limits. She attended Bishop Strachan School, where she won scholarships in French and German. Following her degree in English at Victoria College, University of Toronto, she spent four winters as a volunteer in the mining area of post-war Germany with an international group of young people involved in reconstruction. Later she was Research Editor for Pace, a magazine for young people, based in Los Angeles and New York, and linked with the international musical group Up With People. Afterwards she was a speechwriter for the Ontario Minister of Education in Toronto. At that time she met her future husband, author-broadcaster Neil McKenty, on the dance floor. They now live in Montreal. Catharine worked at Readers Digest; and she and her husband co-authored a best-seller on the early days of Laurentian skiing: Skiing Legends and the Laurentian Lodge Club.