The Doggart Family Genealogy

Grandfather Robertson was, by all accounts, an adventurer and entrepreneur. He travelled coast to coast across Canada setting up lumber mills, being a mayor, and then eventually running banana boats down to the Caribbean. Eventually he ended up back in New York City running salvage boats out of the Battery, and toward the end of his life, he tried (and failed) to raise an 18th Century Dutch ship from off the coast of Delaware.

I think about a couple stories my father told me. One was that his father Allan brought him back a monkey from Central American when he was running ships down there during the 1920s. Grandmother Marian was apparently shocked, and said, "Put that thing out in the garage", where it promptly succumbed to the Canadian cold. A second story is that Dad, aged about 13, drove with his father in the new family car down to New Orleans in the late 1920s. Grandfather Robertson crashed the car but managed to buy an identical one so that his wife wouldn't know.

Naomi Robertson