IDEAR, WILLIAM HENRY BOYER (1800-1856)

IDEAR, WILLIAM HENRY BOYER, medical practitioner; b. c1800; m. 1825, Leah Golder, of Douglas parish, York Co., N.B.; d. Blackville, 26 Oct 1856.

When William H. B. Idear and Leah Golder were married in Fredericton in December 1825 his name was recorded as "Mr William Henry Boyer Adair," and his place of origin was given as London, England. In the census of 1851 he was enumerated as William "Idea," a Prince Edward Island-born "physician" of Irish ancestry who entered New Brunswick in 1826. It has been traditionally alleged that he was a 'quack'.

Idear was a school trustee in Blackville parish as early as 1829, and if he was not practicing medicine there from the start, he was undoubtedly doing so in 1833, when he engaged the Newcastle lawyer Charles A. Harding to collect his outstanding accounts. He was listed as a surgeon in 1835 when he and his wife had two children baptized in the Anglican church, and he was paid a professional service fee in respect to an inquest conducted in 1837.

A humorous letter published in The Gleaner in May 1841 bemoaned the fact that the people of the Miramichi had "but one Idea amongst them," and that it was "closely confined in the New Castle." At the time, Idear was in jail, charged with wounding one John Cahill by firing a pistol. He was free on his own recognizance in July, when he petitioned to have John Ambrose Street plead his case before the Supreme Court of New Brunswick. In the petition, he gave his place of residence as Bartholomews Island in Blackville parish. This was probably the island in the river which was later known as Doctors Island and has since been officially designated as such.

When "Dr William Idair" died in 1856, at age fifty-five, The Gleaner stated that he had been, "in a natural state, one of our heaviest men, his actual weight being 480 pounds avoirdupois." A widower, he was survived by a son, who had been baptized in 1836 as "John Alexander Hay Cunard, etc. Idear," and by two daughters, both of whom were working as domestic servants in 1861. The elder, Isabella Hope May Idea, who did not marry, died in the almshouse in Chatham in 1914, a month before her eighty-second birthday. The younger, Margaret Ellen Idear, was married in 1879, at age forty-five, to Alexander Allison (or Ellison) of Doaktown.