Thomas Prentice Shiels (1845-1892) & Margaret Avery
Thomas Prentice Shiels was born on February 20, 1845 in Liberton, Scotland, the third child of Thomas Shiels and Elizabeth Prentice.
His life began in Scotland, but by the time he was fifteen he had already crossed the Atlantic and lived in both the United States and Canada. With Margaret Avery, he would eventually continue the family’s westward journey once again — this time to the open prairie of Dakota Territory.
Margaret Avery
After arriving in Grey Township, Ontario, with his parents in 1860, Thomas Prentice Shiels found that another family with Scottish roots was living just across the road. Among their neighbours were the Avery family — and their daughter, Margaret.
Margaret Avery was born in Canada, the daughter of George Avery and Margaret Brown. As Thomas and Margaret grew to know one another, the relationship between the young neighbours eventually led to marriage.
Thomas and Margaret were married on November 3, 1865. As a wedding present, Thomas’s father gave the young couple half of the family farm in Grey Township, providing them with a place to begin their own life together.
For the next sixteen years, Ontario was their home. Their family grew there, but eventually an opportunity much farther west would once again put the Shiels family on the move.
The Call of the West
During the 1870s, Thomas Prentice Shiels and his brother-in-law, George Avery, travelled west to Dakota Territory, where they were employed to help Scandinavian settlers learn farming methods suited to their new surroundings.
The experience introduced the two men to the country around Fort Ransom and the Sheyenne Valley. When land in the area later became available for homesteading, they already knew the region and recognized the opportunity it offered.
In 1881, Thomas and Margaret made their decision. After sixteen years on their Ontario farm, they packed their belongings and, with their growing family, left Canada for Dakota Territory.
They settled near Fort Ransom, where Thomas took up a homestead on the west side of the Sheyenne Valley. Once again, another generation of the Shiels family had exchanged an established home for the promise of something new farther west.
Life at Fort Ransom
Thomas and Margaret established their new home on the prairie near Fort Ransom, where they continued raising their large family. Their homestead stood on the west rim of the Sheyenne Valley, overlooking the little town nestled below.
Life on the Dakota prairie was demanding, but it also gave the Shiels children a remarkable place to grow up. The Sheyenne River and the open countryside became their playground, while the family worked together to establish the farm and make a home in their new surroundings.
Among the children born at Fort Ransom was George Robert Shiels, who arrived on March 5, 1886. Family memories describe him opening his bright blue eyes in the family’s sod house, with a good crop of curly red hair. He would become the next person we follow in this branch of the Shiels family.
But the family’s years at Fort Ransom would also bring tragedy. While George was still very young, Thomas was involved in a serious farm accident. The effects of that accident would ultimately cut his life short.
A Family Changed by Tragedy
Four years after the birth of their youngest child, Clara May, Thomas Prentice was involved in a serious farming accident. The accident was not immediately fatal, but its effects remained with him and eventually took his life.
Thomas Prentice Shiels died on May 30, 1892, at only 47 years of age. He was buried in Standing Rock Cemetery near Fort Ransom. Margaret was left to carry on with their family of nine children, the youngest still very young. Their oldest son, Albert Thomas “Bert” Shiels, was only fourteen.
Margaret somehow kept the farm going, with Bert taking on much of the responsibility for its operation. She also had a house built in Fort Ransom so that the younger children could attend school more easily.
For more than a decade after Thomas’s death, Margaret and her children continued their lives around Fort Ransom. But another opportunity was developing north of the border — free homestead land in western Canada — and once again the Shiels family would be drawn west and north.
North to Saskatchewan — 1905
By the early 1900s, the opportunity for free homestead land in western Canada was becoming difficult to ignore. Bert travelled north to the Long Lake district of Saskatchewan and selected land for himself and for his mother.
In 1905, Margaret made another major move. With her sons Art and George and her daughter Clara, she left Fort Ransom and joined Bert in Saskatchewan. Margaret, Bert and George each took up a quarter section near Craven.
It was another remarkable move for a family that had already travelled from Scotland to Illinois, Ontario and Dakota Territory. For Margaret, now a widow, it meant beginning again in a new country while still trying to secure a future for her younger children.
Margaret’s health began to fail not long afterward. Following a lengthy illness, she died on September 6, 1908, at the family homestead near Craven. Her body was taken back by train to Fort Ransom, where she was buried beside Thomas Prentice in Standing Rock Cemetery.
A North Dakota newspaper later remembered Margaret as a woman who had earned the respect and admiration of those who knew her. After a life of repeated moves, hard work and family responsibility, she had helped carry this branch of the Shiels family from Ontario to the American prairie and then back into western Canada.
Their Family
Thomas Prentice and Margaret raised a family of nine children, six born in Ontario and three after the family’s move to Dakota Territory.
Their children were Lucy Jane (1869), Elizabeth (1872), Janet (1874), Anna Barbara (1876), Albert Thomas “Bert” (1878), Charlotte (1880), Athol Garfield “Art” (1883), George Robert (1886), and Clara May (1888). All nine survived to adulthood.
Their children would eventually carry the family into still more places across Canada and the United States. Each had a story of their own, but for our journey we will follow George Robert Shiels, the curly-haired, blue-eyed boy born in the family’s sod house overlooking the Sheyenne Valley.
Through George, this branch of the family would continue in Saskatchewan and Manitoba — eventually leading us to Sigurlaug “Ruby” Shiels, whose memories and contributions helped preserve much of this family’s history.
The Story Continues
Among Thomas Prentice and Margaret’s nine children was George Robert Shiels, born in the family’s sod house near Fort Ransom, Dakota Territory, on March 5, 1886.
George was only five when his father died, and much of his childhood was shaped by Margaret’s determination to keep the family together and the farm operating. In 1905, he travelled north with his mother and siblings to Saskatchewan, where another new chapter of the Shiels story began.
It is through George Robert that we will continue this branch — following his journey from the Dakota prairie to Saskatchewan and Manitoba, and eventually to his daughter Sigurlaug “Ruby” Shiels, who helped ensure that so much of this family’s history was preserved.