(c. 1758-29 June 1828), surveyor. (Jeremiah McCarthy, Sr) Born perhaps in Ireland, and certainly of Irish parents. From the early 1780s he followed the career of a surveyor. His surveying work was largely in Lower Canada, but in the period 1806 to 1814, following difficulties with his superiors in Lower Canada, he lived in Upper Canada. During these Upper Canada years, he conducted a re-survey of the Indian Lands strip in GC in 1809. His map of Indian Lands, dated 1809 and available in the Archives of Ontario, Toronto, is an important early document of GC history. Also in these Upper Canada years, in 1813, he surveyed the village of Williamstown for Sir John Johnson. McCarthy died at St-Hyacinthe, in Lower Canada. His career had been, on the balance, troubled and unsuccessful, alcoholism being one of his problems. He was married in 1780 to Marie-Magdelaine Dubèrges. Thieir children included a son who shared his father’s name of Jeremiah, and who was also a surveyor.

     On 9 Dec. 1843, an act (7 Vict. Cap. 42) of the legislature of the Province of Canada, passed at the request of a number of local property owners, declared that “the line run by Jeremiah M’Carthy” dividing the 3rd Concession of Cornwall Township from Indian Lands was to be “the Eastern and governing line” of the 3rd Concession, to which all “side lines” (such as farm boundaries) within the concession were to conform. Residents had feared that if a rival line was used, by re-survey they might find their houses, barns, etc., were now on a neighbour’s land. In a newspaper a few weeks earlier, S. Y. Chesley, Esq., had advertised for “A MAP of the Indian Reservation made by Jeramiah [sic] M’Carthy in 1809,” recently lost in Cornwall between T. O’Callaghan’s and the Canal dock. (Cornwall Observer, 16 Nov. 1843) This of course was the map of Indian Lands, or a copy of the original, perhaps called into use at this time in connection with the concerns that provoked the legislation.

     See also Duncan Macdonell (d. 1864) surveyor.

Life by Gilles Langelier, Dictionary of Canadian Biography, VI, 426-429 * MacGillivray & Ross 26, 298 * Shirley Campbell, “St. Regis Indian Lands,” Families, 28:1 (Feb. 1989) 27-36 (transcribes material from McCarthy’s Indian Lands map of 1809) * “property owners”: Debates of the Legislative Assemby of United Canada, Vol. III: 1843, ed. E. Nish, pp. 113, 234