Louis Edward Richardson

Canada Census 1871
Middlesex North, Ontario, Canada
Lewis Richardson Male 1836 England
Catherine Richardson Female 1826 Ireland
Ann Richardson Female 1857 Ontario
Emily Richardson Female 1858 Ontario
Henerey Richardson Male 1862 Ontario
Catherine Richardson Female 1864 Ontario
Lewis Richardson Male 1867 Ontario

Louis Edward is living in Bosanquet, Ontario on the Great Lakes, when he marries Alice a young widow from nearby Thedford.

Louis Edward is also a cheese manufacturer.

Another cheese maker Richardson in Canada. Where Australian Richardsons became farmers and their sons diversified, several Canadian Richardsons have kept up cheese making.

I think we can track the cheese making in these branches of the Canadian Richardson family back to Henry Proctor Richardson and his roles as game keeper in great houses. They might also have joined a local cheese-making tradition.

In these houses, dairying and cheese making was women's work, and there is a high probability that the Richardson wives and daughters were employed in the cheese rooms and dairies of possibly the Kentish household, and almost certainly the Norfolk one. They would have produced cheese for the household as a mainstay of feeding agricultural workers and their families. It is not hard to imagine either mothers or sisters showing sons and brothers how to make cheese, nor that it should become a trade over time in the different Canadian setting where aristocratic and gentry estates with dependent labour forces were unusual. The demand for cheese from people used to it forming a significant part of their protein intake is also easy to imagine. In Australia, cows feed outdoors all year round, and are milked all year round, so the need to preserve dairy products is less pressing. Canada, like Europe, is much colder, with short grazing seasons, and therefore more need to capture dairy proteins for use during Winter.

Henry Proctor's descendants are cheese makers over generations in Prince Edward Island and three localities in Ontario.