The Founding Fathers and Founding Families of Ontario

This study seeks to unearth the neglected period in the lives of the founding fathers of the Province of Ontario and their families. The myth, related in countless versions, tells that after the revolution ended, thousands of the King's friends in the former Thirteen Colonies left their homes to settle in the wilds of Canada. Such a statement has some validity for loyalists who gathered at New York City and were transported to the Maritime provinces, but it will not suffice for Ontario. While the migration of loyalists into British territory continued until the end of the century, many of Ontario's founding families were in Canada all through the war.

--Mary Beacock Fryer, preface to King's Men: The Soldier Founders of Ontario (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1980), 9.