A number of Swenys settled in Canada and the U.S. Albert Edward, the son of Fredk.Wm. the chemist, of 1 Lincoln Place, Dublin, settled in New York. He arrived on 6.2.1911, aged 22. His passage was paid by his father. It seems that it was necessary for him to leave Ireland.
A present day relative in Ireland remembers hearing that ‘a sandy-haired young man had to leave
for the US because he was in some trouble at home.’
The ship’s list describes his hair as brown. We do not know whether he stayed in the U.S.
Fredk.Wm’s brother, Herbert Sidney, b.1859, paid the passages for his four sons between 1910 and 1920, and in 1930, a widower, he went to New York and stayed with his son Frederick. He then went on to visit Walter and family in Pennsylvania. He returned to Ireland and died in 1933. Both Frederick and Walter were later drafted and served in W.W.2.
Walter’s son, Walter jnr. settled in Texas. His other son, another Herbert Sidney, born in 1920, graduated from high school in Erie, Pennsylvania in 1939, and was drafted into the navy during the war. In 1946 he started his own engineering business in Erie, and today it is still a family business, with his five sons in positions of management, and employing about 575 people.
Lieutenant Colonel George Augustus, son of John Paget, the Waterloo veteran, emigrated with
his wife Alice to Vancouver, Canada. He donated an antique silk screen from the Abyssinian Campaign to the University of British Columbia.
He was very active in his retirement, being involved in many different organisations. He was a founding member of the Canadian Red Cross in 1909, and the same year was president of the Royal Canadian Golf Association. In 1915 the king appointed Sweny a Knight of Grace of the Order of St John of Jerusalem. He died in April 1918. Most of his ‘souvenirs’ from Abyssinia (now called Ethiopia) had been donated to the Royal Ontario Museum, where they remain today.
George’s two sons, Roy and William Frederick, also settled in Canada, as well as his sister Marie Louise, (Mrs. George Humphreys). Roy went to study at Christ’s College Cambridge from 1890 to 1894, then returned to Canada where he married in 1899. Roy’s elder son George William, b.1900, a company general manager, and his wife were among 37 killed in a plane crash at Moose Jaw, as they were flying from Montreal to Vancouver in 1954.
William Fredk became a Brigadier General and was wounded in the First World War, while
serving as GOC of the 61st Infantry Brigade. He received the DSO and CMG medals. He later settled in Scotland with his second wife, Kathleen Blackett, née Bagenal. They took the name Blackett-Swiny. He had two sons by his first wife, George Frederick and Charles. The elder son, 21 years old, was killed in India in a riding accident.
George's brother was Mark Arthur, whose youngest son, Clarence Stowell, b.1882, also went to Ontario, Canada, where he married in 1921. His descendants still live there. His son Alan served with the RAF during WW2 as a tail gunner, and returned to Canada after the war.
