Through its various spellings of Woolward, Woolard, Wollard and Woollard the name has been in British usage at least since the Domesday Book of 1086. It may be of Anglo-Saxon origin or might be derived from the Danish Wulfward, (wolf-guardian). The OED defines woolward as wearing wool next to the skin, with no linen, as a penance. In fact nobody really knows, but it is still a rare enough name to be interesting.
"It appears that the Woollard name originated in the Bury St. Edmunds area and then gradually spread, mainly eastwards though, even now, the majority (in telephone directories) are in the Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire area. There has been a cluster around Mildenhall, one
around Newmarket and...around Barking, Suffolk. There are smaller clusters in Essex and Kent and some further afield."
-Margaret Platt
William Barnard Woollard was born in 1851, probably at home in a cottage on Lord Ashburnham's estate near Barking, Suffolk where his father Edward was employed as a wheelwright and carpenter, as his father Robert had been. He was the oldest of a family of six. His mother, Eliza SCOTT, died when he was 15 and his father apparently married a younger woman and had another family.
It is not known when Barnard emigrated to Canada or where he landed, rumour has him aged sixteen, which would make it 1867 (about the time of Edward's second marriage). He worked as a fisherman on Lake Ontario for John MORLEY. In 1872 he married MORLEY's step-daughter Julia Ann TURNBULL (aged 17), daughter of Robert and Jeanette Turnbull.
They proceeded to move around Ontario, following the fishing (Meaford, Penetanguishine, Owen Sound and Collingwood on Georgian Bay. Port Credit and Brighton on Lake Ontario) and reproducing rapidly. By 1902 they were living in Nipigon at the west end of Lake Superior, with five of their eight children, when Barnard decided to head west to make his fortune fishing the inland lakes of what was then the North West Territories. The three older children were married by then and remained in Ontario.
They took the Canadian Pacific Railway to Calgary, then north 200 miles to the end of steel at Strathcona. By March Barnard had filed on a homestead 40 miles west, (NE18-53-3-W5) between two of the best whitefishing lakes along the Lac. Ste. Anne/White Whale Trail and they headed off into the sunset. Stan walked and drove the livestock while Barnard and Edwin(16) took turns driving the wagon and the flat rack which carried a rowboat made to Barnard's specifications at a mill in Strathcona.
What with being delayed by snowstorms and a broken wagon wheel it took them three weeks to make the journey, but they finally arrived in April and set up tents while the house was being built. They moved into the house in July of 1902. That fall and winter they fished and freighted fish to the railhead for shipment. Prices were good and Barnard looked set to make his fortune until fate, in the form of his unexpected death, put an end to his earthly ambitions in June of 1903. The family stayed in the west and proved up and got title to the homestead(1907), Edwin and his brothers set up a freighting business, which ended when the railway came through Wabamun in 1911. Stan and Vic went to France with the Canadian Expeditionary Force as did George Laight, Ethel's husband.
In 1904 Ethel married George Laight who had a homestead not far from Woollards, they had five children. In 1911 Jessie married William Bill, they had ten children. Edwin married Freida Lent, daughter of a local teacher, in 1918, they had five children. After returning from France Stan married Eva Bailey and they moved to BC, Vic married Frances Dixon of Wabamun and they moved north to Faust, on Lesser Slave Lake, they had two sons.
This page will be updated as new information is discovered. All input, family histories or stories, family trees or photographs, is welcome.
email: g_bufflehead@yahoo.com
Grant Woollard
Box 36
Wabamun, AB
T0E 2K0