Tracing the Harper family tree

[CHIMO]

We know everything there is to know about the lifelines that flow through Michael Ignatieff, but not a thing about the blood – ice water, the cruel will say – that flows through the veins of Stephen Harper.

The original Canadian Harper – born in a small village in Yorkshire in 1730 – emigrated to Nova Scotia in 1774 and moved into a house near Fort Cumberland, only to have the home burned to the ground two years later by rebels. He spent years taking revenge in the courts and slowly rising through the political system.

Harper had risen to the post of justice-of-the-peace by the time a judicial enquiry found him guilty of, as one historian put it, “violent and oppressive measures” – vindictive to a point beyond all reason.

“An inherited condition?” our genealogy expert wonders, tongue only partly in cheek.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/blogs/this-country/